Deinterlacing of HD-PVR recordings

[davin]

I just received my HD-PVR! Good: installed in <15 minutes and captures like a charm. Good: Sage immediately recognized it. Bad: Not surprisingly, I'm having playback issues.

I have a 1.8Gz core 2 duo with a 8500GT running vista. After installing the HD-PVR (and ArcSoft TMX) and trying a test capture, I added these lines to Sage.properties (my client and server are the same machine, hence Sage, not SageClient):

videoframe/aac_audio_decoder_filter=ArcSoft Audio Decoder
videoframe/h264_video_decoder_filter=ArcSoft Video Decoder

I set up the device in sage and was able to capture and playback without issue.

The trouble is... deinterlacing. My gold standard is ESPN with the crawl at the bottom. The crawl was blurry and jerky, and during pans the picture looked blurry. Other than that, playback was very smooth with CPU at about 60%. I see the same effect in sage and in TMX when playing back a recorded file. However, when I play the file in Windows Media Player, the crawl and pans are smooth as butter! So I fire up GraphEdit, and notice that it is using my Cyberlink PDVD 7 decoders. Aha! But, when I play this graph back in Graphedit, I get the crappy deinterlacing again! What?!

So, to summarize:

SageTv: Crappy deinterlacing
TMX: Crappy deinterlacing
Graphedit (default graph): Crappy deinterlacing
Windows Media Player: Looks Great!

I did try messing with the (limited) options for the decoder in TMX, but to no avail. Let me say, I am frustrated at the gimpy playback implementation in Sage... I've been using it since 2.x, and it seems like every time I change something in my machine I spend weeks trying to get playback to work well and look good. I still have never got VMR9 to work, I've been stuck in overlay land since the beginning.

Did anyone else deal with this with the HD-PVR and if so do you have any suggestions? Thanks.

[cychou]

Sounds like you are having problems rendering your interlaced H264 content.
You might want to try DXVA Checker to experiment with the different combinations of renders and decoders. This utility will let you see all the DXVA functions on your driver and decoders, then you can play back using the combination with your choice of render. I suspect PowerDVD 8 decoder together with EVR will give you the best result, but Sage does not support EVR in Vista yet. Hopefully you will find a combination that work for you and implement it in Sage.

IMO, Sage is really bad at playing back of various media types with high quality. I don't think Sage even shipped with a DiretShow decoder for H.264 (it uses MPlayer for that). Most people have to play with various DirectShow setting to get the quality they want, or buy a hardware extender.

Vince