Please talk me in off the ledge

[WellThen]

Tempted by the features of the HDHomeRun, I bought one last week, and finally upgraded from Sage v4 to v6.3.5. I run the server as a service, and it seems to be working great. It's the clients that are killing me.

My family room client is a Dell 5150 Notebook (3.06 Ghz Pentium 4 w/512MB Memory and Ati Rage 9000 Mobility video with 64Mb memory). With Sage 4, I was able to use this client rock-solid for SD playback, and (as long as I got a decent firewire recording) pretty reliable HD playback. It's been running reliably at 1080i resolution with the Omega ATI Radeon driver.

Since I upgraded to Sage 6, this client has had several problems

• Sage UI
  • Slow, stuttery animations
  • 5-10 seconds to respond to a command, such as pause, during even SD playback
  • Smeared, overlayed menu text (sometimes going to a new menu, the new menu just displays on top of the old)
• Playback
  • Stuttery SD playback
  • Frequent "spinner" appearances
  • Much worse stutter/spinner on HD (almost like a slide show)

Some things I've tried, based on searches and reading here on the forum:

1. Full reload of the machine (XP SP2)
2. Latest Omega Radeon Driver (for this video card)
3. Upgraded Java to 1.6

Can anyone offer any suggestions? Is the hardware requirement for a client on Sage 6 really that much higher than Sage 4? I really want the HDHomeRun functionality, and would hate to have to go back to Sage 4.

Thanks!

[GKusnick]

Your issues probably arise from the new menu animation system, which is enabled by default in 6.3. Displaying these animations takes significant graphics horsepower, and your machine may not be up to it. (I'm not an expert on ATI graphics, but notebook graphics chips are generally underpowered compared to their desktop equivalents.)

Your best bet is to disable the animations in Detailed Setup > Customize. If the menus are too garbled for that, you can do it by setting the following propety:

ui/animation/core_enabled=false

Also make sure that 3D acceleration is enabled in Sage.

[lparkin]

I experienced some of those issues with the hdhomerun if running full screen exclusive. Running with VMR9 3d accelerated without exclusive full screen fixed all those issues on my set up.

[davephan]

You only have 512 megs memory. How much memory are you consuming? I found that my performance increased significantly when I increased my old SageTV XP Pro Althlon XP 2800+ from 512 megs to 1024 megs (using a MVP). My new E6850 SageTV computer draws about 1 gig memory whenever I am transcoding video from MPEG2 into Xvid AVI and doing other things at the same time. More memory will probably help.

Could you post your CPU and memory loading parameters?

Dave

[WellThen]

Thanks to everybody responding. I've made a little progress...

GKusnik, thanks for the suggestion on turning off the menu animations! That took care of all of my UI issues except the long delay before some commands are recognized. (Which I guess is really a playback issue)

lparkin, since this is a client, I don't understand why the HDHomeRun would affect playback, unless perhaps I was watching live. Is there something I don't understand?

davephan, during playback of SD content, my CPU usage hovers between 50 and 55%, and my commit charge is 325/1249M. Does that help?


So now, SD playback is improved, but still stuttery. While SD is playing, if I press pause, it's 10-15 seconds before the video pauses.

When I go through the Config Wizard to configure Video Playback, I can't get any higher than Basic. I'm pretty sure that I was able to get higher before.

If I get get this working before I go back to work next week, I'll be happy. I'm trying to keep the emotion/frustration out of these notes - that never seems to help. Thanks again for everyone's help...

[briands]

Double check that the video decoder is as you set it... sage's decoder seems to be taking over some with the latest release.

[WellThen]

Briands, if Sage took over the decoder, I would be able to see that in settings, right?

------

Last night, I had everything working perfectly on this client for about 30 minutes. I could play SD and HD without fail. I came back an hour later, and nothing would play. I don't know why it's so inconsistent.

[briands]

No, It will still show as you select in settings, but it won't use those.

See this thread

[GTwannabe]

I see 2 problems with your laptop; inadequate graphics chipset and too little RAM. Upping your RAM to 1GB or more should fix your laggy UI issues. Sage is a bit of a RAM hog and will definitely cause a 512mb system to hit the page file frequently.

Your video chipset is going to be a problem though. It just doesn't have the processing power to hardware accelerate HD material. Fortunately you have a reasonably fast CPU. Try disabling hardware acceleration in your MPEG2 decoder settings or use a an all-software decoder (FFDSHOW, nVidia Post-Processor, etc)