Hauppauge WinTv 950Q - Stuttering Video

[superdisk]

I just upgraded to the Hauppauge WinTv 950Q. At first I noticed that the recording quality was set very low by default and that there were no HD quality settings available. A quick search led me to the configuration settings necessary to add other qualities to my sage.properties file. I tried both:

(1) mmc/python2_encoding/HDPVRMax=videobitrate\=13500000|vbr\= |outputstreamtype\=1

(2) mmc/python2_encoding/Highest\ Quality\ -\ 720p=videobitrate\=13500000|w

After adding these, video playback and recording is functional, but the video skips and stutters to the point of being unwatchable. I have played with all kinds of combinations of MPEG and audio decoders, but I have had no luck. I have a feeling that Sage is re-encoding the video, instead of just writing it straight to disk and therefore hogging my processor as the picture quality isn't perfect. How do I tell Sage to write the transport stream from my tuner straight to disk?

Granted the machine connected to my TV is not the most powerful (Intel P4 2.53Ghz with 1GB of RAM) so at first I blamed the processor and that is probably still part of my problem. However, as a follow-up test I installed the trial version of BeyondTV and video playback was as smooth as can be with great picture quality right out of the box.

I much prefer SageTV (I already have a license and have been using it for years) over BeyondTV so I would really like to get this to work.

Thanks!