Having trouble with HD playback on system that should be enough...

[GeraldMonroe]

I have an AMD 3400+ 64bit CPU and 512 megs of ram. The video card is a Geforce 6200 LE. I can't get HD recordings to playback smoothly.

The oddest thing is : CPU usage is NOT at 100%. In fact, it rarely goes above 40%. I've tried both the nvidia purevideo codec with SageTV and SageTV's included codec.

I have noticed that there is something funny about the .mpg files produced by sage TV : VLC media player will not play them correctly, and Zoom player will only play them if the nvidia purevideo codec is NOT installed.

Is there a way to make SageTV spit out .ts files? I have gotten those to play fine using VLC media player. It's a shame, too, because SageTV has a very nice interface for scheduling recordings. I've been fighting this problem all day.

[GeraldMonroe]

I think the culprit is actually my cruddy "Air2PC" tuner card. I bought a VBOX 150 Cat's Eye to replace it with. The Air2PC does standard definition digital TV just fine, but chokes on the high bit-rate HD content.

Out of the programs I tested, including Beyond TV, Sage, and a couple others, high def content seems the smoothest, though still annoyingly jerky, on Sage.