My Sage TV 6.3 Problems and Fixes (Long)

[tcsubwoofer]

I'm about 2 months into the HTPC hobby and have had many headaches along the way. But I have to say that I'm happy and Rocking on my new system and best of all it has totally passed the wife acceptance factor.

I am indebted to many posters on the internet and here at the Sage TV forum and thought I would post my headaches and their fixes and hope others benefit from my work. To some this will be quite basic, to others the fix they need.

I'm currently runing both Vista Media Center and Sage TV 6.3 on the same PC. I do not have a server and currently run a dedicated HTPC that will push media through my house via wired extenders. My setup was chosen for value over performance and my hardware is as follows:

Windows Vista Home Premium 32 Bit
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4000+ 2.1 GHz
2 GB Ram
Gigabyte Motherboard GA-MA69G-S3H With ATI Radeon x1200 Series Integrated Graphics
3.8 terrabytes of WD and Seagate Sata drives
ASUS DRW-2014L1T Sata DVD/CD Drive
2 x Hauppauge Win TV HVR-1600 cards
Sage TV STX-HD100 and Sage 6.3


I run Vista MCE on my primary 58" DLP via HDMI at 1080P because it's interface and ease of use are superior to Sage TV - plus I can use the excellent Gyration MCE remote to control either program (limited functionality with Sage TV, but enought to work) and the excellent Adesso Rf Mini Multimedia USB Kyb with optical Trackball 2.4GHZ. I bought these two input devices for around $130 together and by far they exceed the functionality of more expensive Logitech Dinovo keyboards, etc.. I highly recommend this combination as each input devise provides for mouse control on the computer. However, Sage TV with the HD100 extender works well for the most part as a media extender.

HEADACHES AND SOLUTIONS:

TROUBLE LOADING VISTA: The headaches began after I built my HTPC and tried to load Vista Home Premium to eventually load Sage TV. Vista wouldn't load and I would get on of several errors which included:

"Windows cannot install required files. Make sure al files required for installation are available and restart the installation. Error Code 0x8007048F"; or,
"Windows cannot open the required file D:\sources\install.wim. Make sure all files required for installation are available and restart the installation. Error code 0x8007000D"; or
"Verify that the installation sources are assessable and restart the instalation. Error code 0xE0000100";

After visiting many forums and literally not being able to load Vista on my new HTPC for 2 days my friend helped me determine that Vista was having trouble recognizing my new Sata DVD/CD drive. He thought this was odd because Vista was supposed to have worked through these issues. However, in the BIOS menu he changed by drive type from Sata to "IDE" and this allowed the operating system to load. Go figure. I have not changed this setting back to Sata.

SAGE TV DOESN'T RECOGNIZE HD OVER-THE-AIR BROADCAST WITH HAUPPAUGE CARDS: After loading the cards and having the drivers updated I couldn't get the cards to show TV via digital signal, though Analogue would work. I called Hauppage tech support and they said this was an error with the WinTV setup software for scanning channels and that I have to scan analogue channels first, then rescan the digital channels. I am using OTA and not feeding from a cable box. Once I scanned for Analogue first and then digital, this fixed the problem and both WinTV and Sage TV play live TV. Weird.

SAGE TV PLAYBACK IS VERY STUTTERY AND UNACCEPTABLE: Wow, after messing with this awhile I had to reformat my recording drive using a 64k NTFS setting (don't remember how excactly to explain this). I read about this trick on this site and it worked. Now my Sage TV 6.3 plays TV to an acceptable level with an occasional stutter.

While watching TV my processors are both at around 50% capacity. As a note, my processors are at less than 20% capacity with Vista MCE watching TV with the same Hauppauge cards and the picture looks better than what Sage TV 6.3 produces.

SAGE TV WILL NOT PLAY DVD IMAGES PROPERLY, THOUGH AUDIO COMES THROUGH: So once I got the Hauppauge cards working on the HTPC and normal TV working, I couldn't get my backed up Video_TS or physical disk DVD's to play right. The image was shifted to the right and truncated and looked bad. This is where I learned that Sage TV doesn't have its own codec to playback MPEG-2 video. I was quite perplexed about this issue since it seemed to be common knowlege to others (so I learned). Well, after days of working on this issue I finally bougth Cyberlink Power DVD 7 for around $70 and now direct Sage TV 6.3 to use the Cyberlink Video decoder as the MPEG 2 Video Decoder for Video/Audio and DVD. That solved the problem and DVD's either in the DVD drive or as Video_TS files work great. My settings in Sage TV are as follows:

Video/Audio setup:
Video Renderer Default
MPEG 2 Video Decoder Cyberlink Video...
MPEG 4 Playback Direct Show
Decoder Deinterlacing filter Disabled
Audio Renderer Digital Output Device (SPDIF)

DVD Setup:
DVD Video Renderer VMR9
DVD Video Decoder filter Cyberlink Video...
DVD Audio Digital output Device (SPDIF)
DVD Audio Decoder AC3 Filter

SAGE TV WILL NOT PLAY DOLBY DIGITAL, BUT PLAYS 2 CHANNEL WITH DOLBY DIGITAL DISKS - Finally figured out I needed to update my AC3 Filter to the latest AC3_1.46 filter. If you do a search on the internet you will find the file.

WOW! The above problems took nearly two weeks of headache and stress. Can't believe how time consuming and difficult it was. But once I got through this I actually started to get excited and use the system.

Now that everything is working it was time to manage my files and load my +150 DVDs, +380 CDs, +60 miniDV tapes, +5000 photos. So far I have found that backing up DVDs to my harddrive using DVDFab HD Decrypter 4 to be great (and free) and I only backup DVDs I own. To get cover art, I actually use Vista MCE and My Movies 2 which pair together in Vista MCE to download coverart and information from the web and to allow you to modify or change those titles as need be. A file is created in the individual movie folder with image and movie info (only the image is seen by Sage TV). These same pictures show up in Sage TV 6.3, but look way better in Vista MCE.

No sure if anybody has found a killer app for cover art in Sage TV 6.3. I did have to do a regedit hack to get Vista MCE to recognize Video_TS files and cover art, but never had a problem with Sage TV. I used DB Poweramp CD ripper to backup CDs.

Regarding the extender, I really like the HD100 because it plays uncompressed Video TS files and TV plays effortlessly to my other TV. Although the graphical interface is subpar compared to Vista MCE I know that an XBOX 360 (which I own) or the LinkSys extenders (I beleive) will not stream Video_TS files and the Sage TV system does and is the cheapest of the whole bunch and works very well. Therefore I currently content with the sage extender.

Well enough for now. I hope that this was a helpful post and that using search on this site or google will help people find this information. I do have one problem in that the Sage TV HD100 extender won't play CD's. I just get screeching and popping sounds. That's the next issue to resolve.

Best of Luck!

[jerryt]

I have not been able to get VMC and Sage to play nice together. Keep getting "Media center receiver service has stopped working" and "No tuner" in Media Center, this is after Sage install.

Works fine on two separate partitions.

[gplasky]

You can only run one or the other (VMC or SageTV server) on the box that holds the tuners. Both apps need exclusive access to the tuners. So if you run Sage yo need to turn off all the VMC services and if you run VMC turn them back on and turn off the SageTV service (or the app if you only run that.) It's the same for any two media apps that can record TV. You can't share the tuners between apps. There are no issues running the Sage CLIENT on a VMC box because the client doesn't access the tuner hardware.

Gerry

[jerryt]

Originally Posted by gplasky

You can only run one or the other (VMC or SageTV server) on the box that holds the tuners. Both apps need exclusive access to the tuners. So if you run Sage yo need to turn off all the VMC services and if you run VMC turn them back on and turn off the SageTV service (or the app if you only run that.) It's the same for any two media apps that can record TV. You can't share the tuners between apps. There are no issues running the Sage CLIENT on a VMC box because the client doesn't access the tuner hardware.

Gerry

Great information, it is a lot clearer now, Thanks!

Could you run them both on the same box if they accessed different tuners???

[gplasky]

Accessing different physical tuners with each program should NOT be a problem.

Gerry

[SciFer]

hello,

new to this, working with 6.3 trial on VMC

I have the 'media center has stopped working' issue and read how the the 2 softwares can't share the same tuner. How does one disable SageTV services without uninstalling so that MC will wok. I couldn't find any sage applications running in the background in the Task Manager. Thanks in advance.

[gplasky]

Go into the MMC and into Services and disable it there or use the SageTVControl application and stop and disable it. Remember to turn it back on when you want to use Sage.

Gerry

[jerryt]

Originally Posted by gplasky

Accessing different physical tuners with each program should NOT be a problem.

Gerry

Well it was a good theory, but "Media receiver service has stopped" is still coming up with Sage and VMC each having their own tuners. It appears to be triggered after a reboot with the SageTV install. If someone can confirm that VMC works with SageTV client, then I may try that setup and move SageTV server to it's own computer.

[gplasky]

I have SageTV client working on a VMC PC. Are you actually disabling the services thru the Management Console? You may also have to edit a policy if they keep coming back on. Once disabled they shouldn't come on again.

Gerry

[jerryt]

Originally Posted by gplasky

I have SageTV client working on a VMC PC. Are you actually disabling the services thru the Management Console? You may also have to edit a policy if they keep coming back on. Once disabled they shouldn't come on again.

Gerry

I only added some tuners to a fresh install. Made sure that MC and Sage did not share any tuner. To get rig of the "Media center receiver" error I have to disable that service, which also disable any MC access to tuners.

I am willing to be a test bed for any ideas on how to get both accessing tuners.

[gplasky]

You may have to start the services for them manually. If they start up automatically you'll probably have issues if one starts before the other. This is why no one runs these programs like this. It's not designed to run this way. I would move SageTV server to its own machine.

Gerry

[Slipshod]

Originally Posted by tcsubwoofer

No sure if anybody has found a killer app for cover art in Sage TV 6.3. I did have to do a regedit hack to get Vista MCE to recognize Video_TS files and cover art, but never had a problem with Sage TV. I used DB Poweramp CD ripper to backup CDs.

I really like the IMDB integration in SageMC. Doesn't have everything, but for the items in IMDB the Point-click interface can't be beat.

[jerryt]

Originally Posted by gplasky

I have SageTV client working on a VMC PC. Are you actually disabling the services thru the Management Console? You may also have to edit a policy if they keep coming back on. Once disabled they shouldn't come on again.

Gerry

Can't get VMC to work with Sageclient either. Did a fresh vista install, installed Sageclient, and as soon as I enable tuners in VMC the "Windows media center receiver stops working" error starts popping up.

Appears to be something which changes after rebooting from a sage install, because if I install sageTV or Clent, VMC works (TV) until reboot.

EDIT; some success with these coexisting; http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...570#post281570