choppy vid

[BonBon]

I'm getting choppy videos, especially when there is alot of movement in sports etc., or when they change camera angles.


SAGE - 5.0

AIW, Haup350


Thanks

[Tiki]

What about the rest of your system? Do you have a slow CPU?

Are you using the AIW or the 350 when you get the choppy video?

When you say 350, I assume you mean the Hauppauge PVR-350. Most of the Hauppauge cards, including the 350 have hardware encoding which puts very little burden on your CPU to create the recordings. Most of the All-In-Wonder cards used software encoders which is very CPU intensive.

I used to have a lot of problems with choppy video playback when using a Pentium III 550MHz. However, if I copied the recordings to a faster computer for playback, they were fine since I was using a Hauppauge card with hardware encoder.

The 350 also has a hardware decoder. Are you using it? Decoding MPEG files is also very CPU intensive.

Does the problem happen all the time, or only when you try to watch "Live" tv with Sage? Sage doesn't really offer true live tv. There is a slight delay because it always encodes the video, stores it to disk, then reads it back, decodes it and sends it out to the display. So with live tv you are encoding and decoding at the same time which can be tough with an older computer and software encoders/decoders.

Another consideration: what video decoder are you using? Sage defaults to its own decoder which is fairly poor. If you have a DVD player on your PC, chances are it came with its own decoder. In the Detailed setup, you can specify the decoder to use - Sage will list all that it finds installed on your PC. Some video cards offer their own decoders. For instance, NVidea recommends you buy their PureVideo driver which can offload some of the decoding work to your video card and is supposed to offer superior playback quality with less strain on your CPU.

[BonBon]

I'm using a Hauppauge 350 card, and a AIW9600. I have a 1.6 P4, and 512 meg ram. I only get the choppy video when watching something (live tv) that has alot of action, baseball, rodeo etc. It's like the software cant keep up. I have tried using the Hauppage 350 s-video out and can not figure out how to get it to work. The problem is that I have tried every way I could to hook up my tv to the AIW card and the only way I can get it to show windows on my tv is through the s-video out. I have it hooked up on my tv through video # 2, I can not hook up the Hauppauge 350 s-video out to the tv unless it is on another video bank, like #3 or # 4, (since there is only one s-video hook up per bank) then it doesnt work since I'm on #2. Hope this make sense...The only thing I am using my Hauppage 350 card for is the coaxial (in) from my direct tv dish goes into it.

I can only use the default video renderer, I tried the vmr9 and I get blank spots on the tv screen when I use the menu.

[Athfar]

Do you have your drive's cluster size set to 64K? (this requires a reformat... atleast with the windows drive manager)... Take a look at your task manager while watching these videos too... Is it maxing out your CPU?

[Goodspike]

This thread includes a reference to most of the things you can try.

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=19144

BTW, I changed my drive's format to 64k without a noticable improvement.

[BonBon]

I finally got the Haupauge hooked up via s-video to my tv. In SAGE I enabled the "TV out for PVR350" and it works ok. When I enable "UI on TV out of PVR350" I can not go full screen. When I enable " Hardware decoding only" I get a blank screen.

The picture looks best when the "UI on TV out of PVR350" is enabled.

BTW I tried running the Hauppage program win2000 and the picture looked great.

I also ran the task manager and it was around 30% cpu usage, with the exception of startup, it was 100%.

Thanks for the help and any suggestions would be appreciated.

[Humanzee]

Sounds like it might be a problem with your graphics card or drivers. If it freaks out when there is lots of motion on the screen it can sometimes be related to your de-interlace settings. Your standard tv should not need a de-interlaced signal because it can't use it anyway. Check though your video card settings and see if you can force an interlaced output like 480i. It will make your desktop look kind of crumby but should save you some cpu time.

As far as the PVR 350 goes I hate to be the barer of bad news but I can almost guarantee that you will have problems when using its TV output in combination with the menu overlays. You can't go full screen when using the 350's hardware decoder on your computer monitor because your monitor is a different resolution than your TV. It gets locked in at the resolution being sent to your TV. Same thing goes when selecting use hardware encoding only. That is saying only output to the TV through the 350's cable. The software decoder (your regular video card) is disabled to save you cpu cycles, thus the blank screen.

The 350 just never has worked as advertised with Sage TV. I am suprised that you havn't already encountered the End of File bug (EOF), to which there is no fix. It basically freezes up your computer at the end of a file. If you hit the stop command before the end of the playback sometimes you can save it from locking. Anyway, I gave up on mine for playback about a year ago, if not longer. Now it just records for me.

It does have a nice picutre quality when working, but it also has its limitations other than crashing the computer. It wont let you play DVD's, It wont let you play any file format other than Mpeg2. Unfortunately, there arn't any dedicated hardware decoders that can decode all the different formats people enjoy. If your graphics card has been inadequate, I would carefully consider your graphics upgrade path.

If you are on an AGP motherboard then I would budget for a new computer and graphics card. Buying a new AGP video card may fix your problem for now but it is probably a waste of your money as it won't be transferable to any future machines you might build. The best AGP cards are only so so when compared to what you can get in PCIe

Assuming you eventually want to do HDTV and you have a PCIe motherboard, I'd recommend a 7600GT video card with the pure video decoders. It appears to be the most bang for the buck right now, and you can even get a version with silent heat pipes.

Before I got my HDTV I ran S-video from my 6600GT to my SDTV with the purevideo decoders. It looked pretty good all things considered. Now with an HDTV there is no looking back. good luck.