HD PVR / SageTV playback issues

[bastian74]

So I reinstalled windows to try and figure out why the quality of the video was so poor (and I got periodic BSOD on certian codecs)

I've determined the poor quality was in fact due to DXVA 1 acceleration on the HD 3879 ATI video card. Using graph edit, adjusting the properties of the Arcsoft video playback filter real-time, dissabling hardware acceleration causes my quad core 2.4ghz cpu to increase from 2% to 25% usage, but picture quality improves dramatically.

Now my BSOD problem is gone but playback is worse.

I've tried combinations of the follwoing:

TME/Arcsoft Video / Arcsoft Audio HD.
K-Lite Full Codec Pack
Cyberlink PowerDVD 8 Ultra
CoreAVC

When I had Arcsoft installed and dissabled hardware acceleration the quality of the video was good but I could not get DolbyD sound out the spdif.

AC3Filter is installed, but even with AC3Filter selected in sage it didn't seem to use it, or at least not with the settings I configured (spdif output)

If I uninstall Arcsoft and try to use Cyberlink I get extremely choppy playback in sage (but fine through media player)

If I change the renderer from WMR9 to Overlay it renders like 3 frames and freezes.

I can't get sage to recognize the coreavc codec at all.

Basically everything works fine in WMP10 and MPlayer Classic using pretty much any codec combination I want; video and dolby digital. Hardly anything works in SageTV except Arcsoft which I can't get dolby digital to work, and I can't get AC3Filter to work in sage either.

With Arcsoft installed, using graphedit and RedlightFilterManager_1.6, I cannot make AC3Filter preferred over Arcsoft Audio HD no mater what the merit setting is.

If I uninstall Arcsoft and PowerDVD then I can get sage to use CoreAVC (as its the only H.264 player left) but video playback in sage is choppy (overlay) but audio is in dolby digital (ac3filter+spdif)

A big question I have is how do you configure the codec options that sage uses???????

When I had Arcsoft installed sage kept using the stero audio mode. If I opened the arcsoft audio HD codec and set it to SPDIF in another program the setting was lost as soon as I closed the other app and had no effect on sagetv.

I'm so confused.

I need at least divx/xvid/powerdvd to be installed so I can watch downloaded content as well as blu-ray.

Anyone have any tips / suggestions?

FYI: CoreTwo Quad 2.4ghz / Gigabyte EP45-DS3R Realtek SPDIF to Receiver / 2GB OCZ Ram / 260GB ATA133 System / 1TB SATA3 Sage NTFS 64k / Diamond ATI HD 3870 Catalyst 8.9+AVIVO+HDMI HD Audio / LG Blu Ray+DVDRW / Hauppauge HD PVR rev D1 / DirecTV H21+USB-Serial Remote.

No mater what the video quality, I've never use more than 25% cpu. Windows Media Player work perfet. With DXVA enabled on the codec I never use more than 2% but quality is terrible, faces are "waxy" as if noise reduction was overprocessed. All textures are lost, so I prefer to run on the CPU with better quality.

[Chriscic]

Not sure I can be of enormous help, but I believe folks have consistently gotten the best playback results with TME decoder. That definitely works best for me, although I have never been able to get really smooth PC video on either my core 2 duo 2.4ghz machine (no video accel) or my old P4 3.0ghz (with 2600pro vid accel...video is unplayable without the DXVA on that system).

[bastian74]

So I got it playing back smooth using the Arcsoft video decoder and ac3filter so long as I skip backwards a few seconds, however if I install PowerDVD8 it breaks SageTV (when I play back media it shows one frame and freezes the playback. If I check graphedit cyberpower becomes the preferred video decoder, even if I demote the merrit to "unlikely" and promote Arcsoft to preferred+1

Any idea why it ignores the merit setting? or why even though sagetv has items hard-coded in the media setup it seems to ignore them?