Newbee's Status after 1 week of SageTV

[bmac.to]

An update ...

I have played around with the settings a bit and understand a bit more.

I was using the ATI MPEG decoders for playback with some issues - channel changes took up to 10 seconds, the only video renderer I could use without stuttering was overlay, and rarely, the video freezes and audio continues (changing channels fixes this problem).

I switched everything over to the PowerDVD MPEG decoders (with proper Graphedit settings, as per Gollyjer) to figure out if I was experiencing a MPEG decoder issue. I tried to get the VMR9 renderer running but experienced stuttering (I messed with the FSE settings, the playback delay settings, etc with no improvement). However, channel changes were very fast - 2-4 seconds. I then tried the Default renderer with similar results as the VMR9 renderer. I then switched to the Overlay renderer and this got rid of all the stuttering (yeah!) but I then realized that channel changes took a long time again.

So in summary ...
.the only way I can get stutter free playback is to go to the Overlay renderer
.the only way I can get fast channel changes is to use anything but the Overlay renderer
.the MPEG decoder/settings have no impact on any of my problems
.the video freeze while audio continues still exists with the new MPEG decoder - a bug somewhere else (it feels like a Sage issue - havent seen it anywhere else).

At this point I have pretty much exhausted settings to try - unless anyone has further suggestions.

A half hour ago I downloaded BeyondTV to give it a shot - default overlay resulted in fast channel changes and no stutter. Switching to the DX9 overlay (the see through ones) resulted in stuttering similar to SageTV. However, it looks pretty tough to setup the channel lineups - not nearly as configurable as Sage and the interface doesnt look quite as nice.

What the BeyondTV experiment did show was that the see-though overlay stuttering is not a SageTV issue but probably a graphics driver issue. However, the Overlay setting for the renderer results in really slow channel changes - any ideas how to fix this?

Thanks.
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Xxx Amateur