Are the SageTV MPEG Decoder/Audio Decoders included with purchase of SageTV?

[GoldenTiger]

If I buy SageTV 4.1, does it come with the decoders included in the trial version labelled "SageTV MPEG Decoder", etc.? In other words, do I have to the codecs seperately, or are they a bundled part of SageTV and not 3rd-party trial versions? Thanks!

[blade]

Yes, Sage comes with those decoders; however, they're not very good. Some people use them, but there are better choices out there.

[joe123]

Originally Posted by blade

Yes, Sage comes with those decoders; however, they're not very good. Some people use them, but there are better choices out there.

Ok, here is where I get confused. I have a WinTV-PVR 150. Does it have a encoder/decorder? Or does it only have an encoder for encoding/capturing movies to mpeg2 and then you have to have a decorder for sending pictures out?

[GoldenTiger]

Is it really worth it to shell out for an nVidia PureVideo decoder pack? Does it use a lot of CPU when it increases the visual quality, or does it offload it to the videocard (I have an eVGA nVidia 7800GT 256mb card)?

joe123: Encoders create the files, and often are in hardware that offloads the processing required for this to your TV tuner, if it supports hardware encoding. Otherwise your computer's CPU does it, resulting in more load on the computer itself. Your PVR150 *does* have a hardware-based encoder. Decoders are in charge of actually decompressing the files in real-time to a format that your video card can display on the screen. They're kind of like drivers, but for video files . Very few TV tuner cards have hardware decoders. Your PVR150 does not have one as far as I know.

[joe123]

Originally Posted by GoldenTiger

joe123: Encoders create the files, and often are in hardware that offloads the processing required for this to your TV tuner, if it supports hardware encoding. Otherwise your computer's CPU does it, resulting in more load on the computer itself. Your PVR150 *does* have a hardware-based encoder. Decoders are in charge of actually decompressing the files in real-time to a format that your video card can display on the screen. They're kind of like drivers, but for video files . Very few TV tuner cards have hardware decoders. Your PVR150 does not have one as far as I know.

Thank you - that was very helpful. Do you happen to know if when I am using a MediaMVP, if my PC has to "decode" via software the images before it sends them to the MVP?

Are there better hopefully Free software decoders out there? Or some not too expensive hardware decoders?

EDIT: Ok, I now see that WinTV-PVR-350 has both - No wonder they cost more

[blade]

Originally Posted by GoldenTiger

Is it really worth it to shell out for an nVidia PureVideo decoder pack? Does it use a lot of CPU when it increases the visual quality, or does it offload it to the videocard (I have an eVGA nVidia 7800GT 256mb card)?

IMO they are well worth it. It's only like $15-20 I think. I have a 6600GT running on an old xp-3200 and I think cpu usage is typically around 20-30% though it may be lower I can't recall the exact cpu usage. My suggestion is to try the Nvidia free trial and see for yourself. Some people claim they can't see any difference, but for me it's like night and day. I've tried the Sage decoder, Dscaler, Cyberlink, Intervideo and the Nvidia ones are by far my favorite.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by GoldenTiger

Is it really worth it to shell out for an nVidia PureVideo decoder pack? Does it use a lot of CPU when it increases the visual quality, or does it offload it to the videocard (I have an eVGA nVidia 7800GT 256mb card)?

Yes it is, I've found nothing that can come close (other than the hardware capabilities of an ATI card) to the deinterlacing capabilities of the latest nVidia cards. And you need the nVidia decoders to fully take advantage of nVidia's hardware capabilities.

Originally Posted by joe123

Thank you - that was very helpful. Do you happen to know if when I am using a MediaMVP, if my PC has to "decode" via software the images before it sends them to the MVP?

For MPEG-2 (recordings) no, all decoding is done on the MVP.

For other files (DivX, etc), and if you have the experimental transcoding enabled, the the server will both decode the original (eg DivX) file and encode to MPEG-2 for the MVP.

[blade]

Originally Posted by joe123

Do you happen to know if when I am using a MediaMVP, if my PC has to "decode" via software the images before it sends them to the MVP?

Are there better hopefully Free software decoders out there? Or some not too expensive hardware decoders?

The MVP is a hardware decoder, no decoding is being done in software.

If you want to use a free decoder selecting the SageTV decoder and using Dscaler with Greedy2Frame and enabling double refresh rate looks better than just using the SageTV decoder, but still nowhere near as good as the Nvidia decoder IMO.

[joe123]

Originally Posted by blade

The MVP is a hardware decoder, no decoding is being done in software. .

Ok, now the whole thing makes sense.

No wonder my CPU load on my PC is so low. All that my PC has to do is to send out (stream) the mpeg file to the MediaMVP. So all the encoding is done via my WinTV PVR-150 hardware and all de-coding is done on the MVP - Nice combo!