Sage TV 6 MAJOR, MAJOR issues

[pgman]

Okay, I know that this has been beat to death on the forums but I just spent the last TWO DAYS trying to get this software to work. I've re-loaded my OS TWICE - the second time because the system got so hosed I couldn't even get the GUI to aknowledge the HD tuner! For anyone who cares at all, here is what I've got.

MSI 945P motherboard with dual-channel DDR2 RAM (loaded with two 512MB sticks)

P4 LGA775 processsor @ 3.0GHz, 800MHz FSB and 1024 L2 cache
Two 80GB SATA HDDs (one for OS, the other formatted as recommended by Sage for DVR files only)

On-board audio (realtek) is for extra use only - it is not used with Sage

Creative Labs Audigy 2 ZS - for Sage and all Media playback in main room

Avermedia ACE-180 ATSC tuner (I only need OTA television - this is the card recomended ny SAGE)

Happague PVR-500MCE - for NTSC - I rarely use it at this point

MSI 7600GT video with 256MB RAM and VIVO - connected to my Samsung DLP with HD15 cabling Current driver is 92.91, and I am using the latest PureVideo decoder.

Sony DVD-RW drive

Yamaha CD-RW drive


I had neen having trouble with jerky playback ever since I switched to the nVidia card. I figured it may be because my old ATI drivers were somehow interfering with the new video hardware. I figured I would try re-loading my OS and then try Sage V6. What a mistake that was!!!

NOW, I can barely get ANYTHING to playback smoothly - even in Overlay mode. I would say Sage V6 is seriously flawed. I have been reading the other thread about stuttering playback and I don't want to add to that because I really have nothing useful to say at this point. I have tried everything I know to do and nothing works. I tried at least five different video drivers and I've re-loaded the OS twice (as I stated earlier). This is absolutely ridiculous.

I have TheaterTek for my DVD playback and it plays flawlessly on this system. Also, WMP seems to work perfectly as well. What is Sage doing that is so different? I understand that the bitrates are much higher when dealing with HDTV, but that is why I just spent the money to put the recommended hardware in my machine. There has GOT to be something in the code that is causing this because I've tried everything I can, and nothing helps - not even a little. This says to me that this is totally a software issue and I can not beleive I am the only one who thinks this is entirely unacceptable.

I even tried moving my PCI cards around - thinking maybe it was some IRQ conflict or something. NOW, when I try to initiate playback from the HD tuner card, I get this message:

-12 Error: There was a null object requested to play back.

What does that mean? If I could go back to the version I had before I sure would. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, I copied the wrong release of V5 to my backup because the version of V5 I have is just as bad in terms of jerky playback (though it at least will work with my HD tuner).

Believe me, I know this is touchy stuff - I understand that my expectations might be a little high, but I am definitely going to try BTV before I give Sage another dime, and if I have to re-load my OS again, it will be MCE. I just lost two days of my life and I am mad, so sorry about the rant. If anyone cares to comment, or if anyone has seen anything like this before, feel free to chime right in.

[robinemig]

SageTv continues to have stability issues. Sage 6 is no better! I tolerated it until now, where everytime sage 6 quits, crashes, causes 100% cpu utilization I restart and get that message saying that I have a pre v5 key and need to by a $40 upgrade.
Instead of making their product work, they implement Google Video support. WTF? In fact some of the best, actually usable functionality, addons don't even come from Sage.
I continue to hope Sage becomes a great product, but if I have to pay to get them to actually fix the product I'm out for good.
1) Fix the DVD player, aspect ratio, etc
2) Add commercial detection that works, no third party add on
3) what's the deal with the transcoder.exe popping in and out ALL the time
4) make it rock solid, build in a reporting of crashing feature or whatever, just make it more stable, do more testing
5) Have version upgrades actually be worth a version upgrade, ie instead v1->v1 v2->1.5 v3->1.6 v4->1.7 v5->1.8 v6->1.9 v7 (where they fix all the problems) -> v2 (a version I would pay for)

[Polypro]

What has Tech Support said? A ton of people have very stable Sage boxes (I'm one). How are your decoders configured? Service mode, or not?

P

[stanger89]

First things first...

pgman,

What decoders are you using? You say TheaterTek works fine. Do you have the nVidia decoders selected in Sage (in the Audio, Video, and DVD sections)? Are you using the same renderers you have selcted in TheaterTek?

Originally Posted by robinemig

1) Fix the DVD player, aspect ratio, etc

What's wrong with it? I've played countless DVDs with Sage (it's my primary DVD player) and it works very well.

2) Add commercial detection that works, no third party add on

This opens up a can of worms I don't blame them for not oppening. Besides the 3rd party addons work better than any competing product's 1st part support (ready BeyondTV)

3) what's the deal with the transcoder.exe popping in and out ALL the time

No idea, I've never seen it.

4) make it rock solid, build in a reporting of crashing feature or whatever, just make it more stable, do more testing

Have you reported your problems?

5) Have version upgrades actually be worth a version upgrade, ie instead v1->v1 v2->1.5 v3->1.6 v4->1.7 v5->1.8 v6->1.9 v7 (where they fix all the problems) -> v2 (a version I would pay for)

Well V2 was a complete architectural change (the way the UI was drawn was completely changed). Considering they've only charged for the V6 upgrade, I couldn't care less how they number their versions.

[traker1001]

Im sorry your having problems, I havent had any problems, I am running a P4D 3.4, 1GB ram, GeForce 7600GT, with 2 Raptors 75GB in a Raid 0, And the official release of sage, Since the beginning of the beta with purevideo.

In reply to "1) Fix the DVD player, aspect ratio, etc"
The only problems with the dvd I have is the menus on some stored DVD's don't work, I cant see the select, In reality this is a minor annoyance to me that I am sure there is a way to correct if I take the time.

In Reply to "2) Add commercial detection that works, no third party add on"
I think there is a reason they dont do this, I think it is the same reason Replay took it out of there DVR's after the 5000 series, I hope they never do this, because if they do the studios will have someone to go after, As long as it stays third party People can continue to develope it and theres noone to really attack with lawyers. As far as it working, Comskip works amazingly well for me, and it took me all of 5 minutes to install 2 of those being download time.

In reply to "3) what's the deal with the transcoder.exe popping in and out ALL the time"
Huh, Never heard of this problem myself.

In Reply to "4) make it rock solid, build in a reporting of crashing feature or whatever, just make it more stable, do more testing"
It seems stable to me, I havent restarted my sage system or sage itself since I installed the last release of sage6. And I hate to pop bubbles, But I have yet to see a peice of software that is rock solid, I would talk to microsoft who does years and years and years of testing, And ask them why there software crashes alot. Quite frankly I have enjoyed the frequent releases as long as they get the potentially unstable ones labeled as beta I am very happy.


5) Have version upgrades actually be worth a version upgrade, ie instead v1->v1 v2->1.5 v3->1.6 v4->1.7 v5->1.8 v6->1.9 v7 (where they fix all the problems) -> v2 (a version I would pay for)

Someone else gets this one, I have no idea what your talking about.

BTW, I might mention, I have been routinly running DVD rips and Encoding on my sage in the background, while watching multiple streams at once these are the only times I pegged at %100.

[pgman]

You raise a good point, Polypro. The thing is, MY Sage box was solid and stable before I tried V6. With V5 and the new nVidia graphics board, it was acting a little wierd. As I said earlier, I figured this was probably to do with some remnant of the old ATI drivers lingering behind. However, this is apparently not the case since I have done a clean OS install twice now.

I am learning more than I ever cared to know about computer video, but I am still far from an expert. I just know that I started using PowerDVD on an old Pentium box with a 1.3GHz processor four years ago and it still plays DVD movies just fine. I also know that TheaterTek works fantastic on my HTPC - even running VMR9 and without FSE on. That HAS to mean something. If there was a specifc hardware combination that Sage HAD to be run on, it would be nice of them to put that in the system requirements. As it is, my system is FAR exceeds the minimums and I can not believe it is having this much trouble with an HD stream - especially when the OS runs so fast and the other media players have no trouble at all producing a spectacular image.

I am not here to poo-poo on Sage. Sage is still the best MC front-end I've tried (I tried Meedio and BTV a year ago) but I can not beleieve this new version actually seems to be worse than the old one (which I ran on this very system for a year with absolutely no trouble). When I bought the 7600GT, THAT is when my troubles began. I guess I am just very reticent to put the old ATI X600 back in because I know the PQ will suffer dramarically. Besides, the the 7600GT is supposed to be a great board for HDPCs (at least that seems to be the consensus here) and there are numerous people running them on this board. What else can it be? RAM? Chipset? There is something in my system (and apparently at least a few others here) that just doesn't play nice with whatever code is in Sage. It is exasperating, to say the least.

By the way, I opened up my computer case and shuffled the PCI cards again - now the A180 works with V6 again, but the playback still isn't smooth - even in Overlay. This seems to have as much to do with the audio settings as the video.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by traker1001

In reply to "1) Fix the DVD player, aspect ratio, etc"
The only problems with the dvd I have is the menus on some stored DVD's don't work, I cant see the select, In reality this is a minor annoyance to me that I am sure there is a way to correct if I take the time.

Have you tried the YUVMixing change? That fixes the menu issues, but can cause/reveal field inversion issues.

[olyar15]

pgman, are you saying that you can play back a recorded HDTV show in Theatertek and it plays smoothly? Or are you comparing DVDs in TT vs. HDTV in Sage? I notice a bit of stuttering with recorded HDTV on my computer, but that occurs in Sage, WMP, and TT when using VMR9. Overlay is fine.

[traker1001]

Actually, I havent tried anything, Its such a minor problem that I have been concetrating on other things before I tried fixing it.

[pgman]

I have to be honest here, I seriously need to know more about all these filters, renderers, etc., before I can do meaningful troubleshooting. I just can't figure out why Sage seems to work okay sometimes and other times it trips and falls all over itself. I know that I had a version of V5 installed previously (with my old ATI X600 Pro video board) and the playback (in Overlay - the X600 wouldn't do VMR9 at all) was smooth. However, there was significant color-banding with the X600 and the PQ on my new HDTV was rather bad. I switched to the 7600GT and the PQ improved vastly, but I started to get choppy playback. I began to troubleshoot this, and discovered that the audio renderer I selected in Sage made things significantly better (or worse). I discovered that I couldn't use the NVIDIA (pure video) audio decoder if I wanted smooth video. Only the regular MPEG decoder (that came with Sage) would work, but that only gives me stereo sound. Thinking it was probably a good idea to re-load the OS and get rid of any and all traces of old drivers, programs, etc. (I had a lot of different software and hardware on this machine when I originally built it), so I set forth to do just that. Unfortunately, it seems I didn't have the same version of V5 on my backup disk that I had on this machine because it would barely work at all. This is what led me to go ahead and install V6 (the release version). I am obviously very frustrated but that doesn't excuse my rants earlier in this thread. I apologize for this, but I am no less disappointed in this experience - especially since I am going to have to pay for it again in fifteen days.

The long and short of it is that I just wish there was more information out there about this. I asked on this board before but no one responded - is there a primer here (or somewhere) that explains what is happening inside the computer to cause video to play back? That, or a good book or magazine article would go a long way to helping me understand the potential causes for this. As of this point, I am running V6 in VMR9 mode and the AC3 filter. Football (the acid test, it would seem) is still not smooth and neither are text crawls (they look awful). I am wondering if I am saturating the PCI buss. When I first installed my 7600GT, my system wouldn't boot sometimes - it would hang at the POST. I flashed a BIOS update from MSI into the motherboard, and that seemed to cure this issue. I am beginning to wonder if there is a problem with the chipset driver for WinXP on this motherboard. I noticed last night that the version on the MSI website is a lower rev than the one that came with the motherboard (CD-ROM). I wonder if they put the older one up on their website because they found something wrong with the later one.

I think this is going to be a long road, but I remain hopeful that I can get this working right. I am going to try some more things when I get time. I will post the results of these tests here. Thank you for your time.

[brewston]

Have you tried with default audio renderer ? I was playing with ac3filter the other day and found it hammering my CPU usage. restarted sage and before attempting to play videos etc. set the audio rendered back to default.

I need to find time to investigate the issue further and see if its worth reporting to support

Tim

[Goodspike]

Originally Posted by brewston

Have you tried with default audio renderer ? I was playing with ac3filter the other day and found it hammering my CPU usage. restarted sage and before attempting to play videos etc. set the audio rendered back to default.

I need to find time to investigate the issue further and see if its worth reporting to support

Tim

I think "default" is just the last one installed on your system. Probably better to pick named renderers, so you know what works and what doesn't.

[brewston]

Thanks - I didn't know that.

So my reply would be "try a different audio renderer" :-)

Tim

[Polypro]

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...46&postcount=6

See if any of these help you. If they do, and you install a lot of software, setting Sage to specifically pick your decoders is a good idea. I never install anything on the HTPC, so "Default" works for me.

P

[dblaine2]

Since you stated that your problems began with the 7600GT before the Sage 6 upgrade, I think it wise to go back to the original config as best you can. It sounds like there are many problems and Sage is only the last in a chain. I would definitely call tech support on your mobo. (BTW, I have had several friends use MSI mobo's and have very mixed results. I personally think they are made cheaply (read: crap)).

Also, I have found in my ASUS it makes a world of difference which PCI card is in which slot. I was getting conflicts with my 350 in one slot but on recommendation from ASUS moved it to another and voila! all is fine.

[pgman]

Well, here is the deal. I have thought about this WAY too long at this point. I believe I MUST have a hardware issue and so now I am open to any suggestions as to what may cause something like this to happen. Having said this, it might make sense to move this to the hardware forums. The one variable I can think of is the playback device. Specifically, TheaterTek works great, but Sage is choppy. One of the most significant differences between the two is that TT plays back from my Sony optical drive - not the DVR HDD. I am going to record the next football game that is available in HD and then try to play it back with TheaterTek. THAT may shed some light on this. If it is not the HDD, then my next thought is system RAM. When I built this system, I seem to recall I had to use mis-matched memory sticks (I was on a budget and didn't have any choice). Assuming the data passes across the buss (it may not) in such a way as to be affected (if not actually buffered) by system RAM, does any one here know if a memory timing hiccup (with the Intel 945P chipset) might cause the PCIe buss to jitter excessively? I am sorry, I just know enough about this stuff to be very dangerous. If all you experts find this tiresome and irritating that an amatuer is asking stupid questions, it is okay - you do not have to respond. Eventually, I will figure this out.

By the way, someone commented that MSI motherboards are not that great. I am not going to argue opinions - you may not like MSI or Intel or DFI, Biostar, ASUS, etc., etc., but I have used them all. I can't tell you that I've ever found that much difference between the brands - ONLY the chipset (personally, I prefer to stick with the Intel chipsets, but I have had acceptable results with VIA and SiS as well). On the other hand, I would like to try an AMD system sometime...

[falltime]

I too had nothing but trouble with v6 - I have been an avid v3-5 user wth minimal issues, but v6 threw everything off- studders, crashes, pixelization etc, etc.

Unfortunately I bought the upgrade (I hate nag screens and hey - who figured v6 would be worse then v5) and when after 2 weeks I gave up and went back to v5 Sage refused a refund.

I am very disappointed in Sage and their customer support. It seems like they spend an inordinate amount of time rushing new versions out and not really dealing with the stability of the existing versions.

[Crashless]

FWIW, transcoder.exe popping up sporatically is probably just creating the thumbnails from the files to show you.

[mickp]

Some things to try...

A friend had horrible problems with his SAGE install until he removed his Creative Audigy card and uninstalled the driver etc. I've also had problems with their stuff in the past so it may be worth trying the motherboard's built in audio to see if this helps.

I initially had huge problems with cpu usage when I moved to V6 and this eventually turned out to be an issue with running SAGE as a service. Changing the account that the service uses to be the local admin user rather than system account fixed this problem for me. If you haven't already then try running sage with service mode disabled.

A system that I installed at work had terrible video performance. Everything appeared to be working okay but reception was patchy and playback jerky. An upgrade to the current release of java fixed this box.

Good luck

Mick.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by pgman

Well, here is the deal. I have thought about this WAY too long at this point. I believe I MUST have a hardware issue and so now I am open to any suggestions as to what may cause something like this to happen. Having said this, it might make sense to move this to the hardware forums. The one variable I can think of is the playback device. Specifically, TheaterTek works great, but Sage is choppy. What One of the most significant differences between the two is that TT plays back from my Sony optical drive - not the DVR HDD.

OK, sounds like DVDs work fine, what happens if you play a DVD in Sage?

You should try duplicating your TT settings in Sage and seeing how it works then. Both applications function in a significantly similar way under the hood (as far as media playback goes).

I am going to record the next football game that is available in HD and then try to play it back with TheaterTek. THAT may shed some light on this.

Yes that will be a good test, but are you comparing DVD playback in TT to HD playback in Sage? That won't really tell you anything usefull.

If it is not the HDD, then my next thought is system RAM. When I built this system, I seem to recall I had to use mis-matched memory sticks (I was on a budget and didn't have any choice). Assuming the data passes across the buss (it may not) in such a way as to be affected (if not actually buffered) by system RAM, does any one here know if a memory timing hiccup (with the Intel 945P chipset) might cause the PCIe buss to jitter excessively? I am sorry, I just know enough about this stuff to be very dangerous. If all you experts find this tiresome and irritating that an amatuer is asking stupid questions, it is okay - you do not have to respond. Eventually, I will figure this out.

I think you need to back up a little bit, first compare the same file/disc/media in both TT and SageTV and see if they work the same.

Next try and duplicate the working setup in the other application.

From what I'm reading, it sounds plausible that your system is fine for SD, but having trouble with HD. You should have enough power, but if you're running 720p or especially 1080i/p you will probably need to use FSE VMR9 to get smooth playback on the 7600.