VistaView Saber 2020 and Recording Qualities

[pughrs]

Not sure if this issue should be raised in the beta forum or in the hardware forum, posting it here since I am currently using the beta version of SageTV. Does the recording quality settings for SageTV beta currently fully support the VistaView PCIe card (witch replaced 2 PVR-150s)?

If so, then I am having an issue with the recording qualities setting. If I set the quality to any DVD quality setting higher than "Good", and then if I attempt to record 1 show and watch another the video starts stuttering and the audio gets out of sync. This condition also causes the SageTV UI to become very sluggish. The only way to return the UI performance and the video stuttering back to normal is stop both recordings. This problem occurs using either NVIDIA PureVideo or SageTV MPEG decoders using VMR9 or Overlay.

Has anyone experienced something similar or did I pick up a bad VistaView card?

[rickgillyon]

I don't see support for that card, so you'd better ask Sage support if it should work. Perhaps Sage doesn't recognise that it has hardware encoding and is using your CPU...

[pughrs]

After reading your reply, I looked into the CPU usage. When recording 2 shows the SageTV service was using ~90%. This usage was just for doing the recordings as I wasn't viewing any recorded material at the time these recordings were taking place.

I am going to send an email to support to see if the reason for the high CPU usage is because of software encoding instead of hardware.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by pughrs

After reading your reply, I looked into the CPU usage. When recording 2 shows the SageTV service was using ~90%. This usage was just for doing the recordings as I wasn't viewing any recorded material at the time these recordings were taking place.

I am going to send an email to support to see if the reason for the high CPU usage is because of software encoding instead of hardware.

Software encoding is the reason for your 90%+ cpu usage. Always has-always will. That is why originally Sage only supported hardware encoding cards. People said they wanted to use their software encoding cards. Now you can. And now you see why you don't want a software encoding card. Hardware encoding is usually in the single digits. 5-7%

Gerry

[geogecko]

Originally Posted by gplasky

Software encoding is the reason for your 90%+ cpu usage. Always has-always will. That is why originally Sage only supported hardware encoding cards. People said they wanted to use their software encoding cards. Now you can. And now you see why you don't want a software encoding card. Hardware encoding is usually in the single digits. 5-7%

Gerry

I think his comment was taken wrong. This card is a hardware encoding card, but I think he was trying to imply that SageTV might be trying to software encode the hardware encoding, or something. I'm not sure that's possible though...but probably still need to contact SageTV support about it, as I'm sure they will want to support this card.

At least it gives you something to do with those <16x PCI-E slots...

[pughrs]

However, I am not one of those that wanted software encoding I was under the impression that the VistaView Saber 2020 used the same encoding chip as the nVidia DualTv card (which is listed as a supported hardware encoder on the system requirements page). I went with the VistaView card because it was PCIe and not PCI like the nVidia card, which has been known to interfere with other PCI devices.

So, the excessive CPU usage for recordings is not an expected behavior.

[Narflex]

Please submit a bug http://www.sagetv.com/bugs.html

[ARMYB77]

Narflex,
Your support insists that the reason for no hardware support is the drivers that the vista view Saber 2020 has. However I have been able to get the card to work using the hardware encoder chip with BTV, and GB-PVR. This would lead me to believe that in fact it is SageTV with the problem and not the Vista View Drivers.

There are a lot of users out there waiting to get full support for this card, I would encourage Sage to work with VistaView to make it work. I know that the Vista View team is willing. However it seems as though SageTV is not willing to try to figure it out, and are just blaming the drivers as an easy out.

Regards,
Armyb77