Video is working, now for sound

[otakucode]

I must say, I went with Sage over MythTV because I didn't want to fiddle and futz and tweak, I wanted it to just work. Sage has disappointed me at every single step in this regard. But, I paid for it, so I'm determined to get it to work.

I got my video working, now I want to get my sound working right. Specifically, I want to be able to get surround sound on Xvid imported videos with AC3 soundtracks. I can get the sound... or I can get the video... but never both at the same time. I'm not sure if Sage is downright lying about what audio decoders it is using in its Detailed Setup screen or what, but every audio decoder on my system gives me very similar results. If I select the Cyberlink audio decoder, I get great surround on my xvid files, but I don't get any sound at all on live TV or sage recordings (I am assuming the cyberlink stuff doesn't contain MP3 decoding). The other audio decoders (nVidia, Sage, ac3filter) all act exactly the same. I get fine audio in LiveTV and sage recordings, and fine audio from xvid files with mp3 sound. When I play a file with an ac3 soundtrack, my receiver switches to Dolby Digital like it should and audio plays is great surround, the way its meant to be... and one frame of the video is displayed. Still. And it doesn't move. If I stop the video, Sage pops up its little spinning logo and stays that way. Going to task manager shows Sage and explorer.exe taking turns hogging the CPU for no good reason at all. I have to end up killing the Sage process.

I make sure to close Sage and reopen it every time I change the audio renderer setting, because Sage doesn't seem to accept the change otherwise.

I'd really like to be able to use ac3filter, it works very very well in outputting stereo to all channels and passing through ac3 content, but Sage just will not cooperate and kills the video any time I play something with ac3. I have tried every possible combination of video and audio renderers I think. Sage, nVidia, Cyberlink for video, Sage, nVidia, Cyberlink, and ac3filter for audio. Yeah, that's a LOT of combinations. Perhaps you begin to understand my frustration and desire I had just went with Linux instead. If I'm going to put this much work into getting the stuff that worked straight away with 0 effort on Xbox Media Center going, I feel kinda stupid having paid for the privelege.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Oh, and for anyone that read my jerky video problem before, it appears it was a video driver issue. I had been using the latest Catalyst drivers, switching to Omega drivers (based off of a much earlier Catalyst release) fixed it.

[morfinx]

I've had the same thing happen with Cyberlink's audio decoder, no audio on regular SD channels, but I get audio on HD channels with AC3 audio. I now use Nvidia's audio decoder for TV, AC3Filter for DVD, and Cyberlink video decoder for both.

What are your computer's specs? Have you updated all of your drivers?

[otakucode]

I haven't even started into fighting with Sage to get DVDs playing correctly (only tried playing one once to see if it exhibited the same jerky video as everything else in Sage when I was having that problem). I'm sure that'll be another couple days of wrestling to get it to behave.

When using Cyberlink for Video and nVidia for audio, I do get AC3 passing correctly to my receiver, but video displays the issue I explained before, one frame of video displays and that is it. Audio continues to play just fine, processor is not loaded more than 5%, even the Sage menus will all come up and work without problem until I stop the playback, at which point Sage essentially locks up.

My PC specs are as follows (going to have to put them in my sig, I keep forgetting...):
AMD Athlon64 3200+ socket 939 processor (not sure what core/stepping)
MSI Neo2 Platinum mobo (nForce2 chipset I believe, might be nForce3)
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB AGP video
Realtek AC'97 onboard sound outputting 5.1 via its optical output (no analog outputs being used at all, and I intend to keep it that way)
Clean install of Windows XP Pro SP2 with all updates up to december 06 installed
No additions or addons added to Sage
Cyberlink PowerDVD installed
nVidia Purevideo installed
ac3 filter installed
Xvid codec installed
No other filters/codecs installed
Sage and Windows run on a 7200RPM Hitachi Deskstar drive
Sage records to a 300GB Seagate 7200 RPM Barracuda drive with 16MB cache, formatted NTFS with 64k cluster size
Networking is done via onboard gigabit NIC (Realtek I believe, not the nVidia one)
TV tuner card is a Hauppage WinTV PVR-150 (the non-MCE one)
No other cards in the PC other than the video and PVR-150

Driver-wise, the latest Catalyst drivers cause Sage to make all video played back in Sage very jerky (other applications are just fine, though I was able to get WMP to do jerky video with a certain combination of decoders, I think its a problem with VMR9 on the 9800 Pro under that version of the Catalysts). I am now using the Omega drivers, which are based on Catalyst 6.9 and they play back all video smooth, even 1080i TS files.

My Hauppage card has been updated to the latest Hauppage drivers as of 1/1

Updated all drivers for my motherboard, onboard sound, onboard networking on 1/1 as well from MSIs website.