What hardware is needed to playback 1080p in SageTV?

I am trialing SageTV with the intention to buy the HD200 package with 2 SageTV client licenses. However, I ran into a deal breaker.

I have 1080p movies in mkv wrappers. They are H264 with a couple VC-1. When I try and play them in SageTV, they stutter badly. Here is the specs of my testing HTPC:

SageTV 6.5
Windows Vista
AMD64 4400+
1GB RAM
Nvidia 8600 video card
SATA hard drives

I read a couple threads on this:
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=37605
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=31692
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=33406
....

I have edited my properties file as specified in this forum and tried CoreAVC 1.9, Cyberlink 9 and Arcsoft Total Media theater 2.0. All produce the same result, with CoreAVC producing the least amount of stuttering.

Some issues for me:

A) I am not playing these files from a network, they are on the local hard drive.

B) On this same HTPC, I can play these files in MCE, Zoomplayer, KMPlayer, WMP, Mediportal and MPlayer with no issues

C) I read somethings about MPlayer not supporting certain H264 profiles. I am not an expert but I can play these files in Mplayer with no stuttering. So I think this is a falsehood.

I can accept that the features of SageTV come at the cost of overhead, this is not a dealbreaker for me. Maybe there is code that needs to be optimized in SageTV in the future. Anyway, my questions are:

1) What hardware do I need to be able to play 1080p h264 and VC1 mkvs in SageTV? Or is SageTV just incapable of playing these files smoothly?

2) Will I have this same problem with the HD200?

Thank you very much!

[Lucas]

Originally Posted by wellago

I am trialing SageTV with the intention to buy the HD200 package with 2 SageTV client licenses. However, I ran into a deal breaker.

I have 1080p movies in mkv wrappers. They are H264 with a couple VC-1. When I try and play them in SageTV, they stutter badly. Here is the specs of my testing HTPC:

SageTV 6.5
Windows Vista
AMD64 4400+
1GB RAM
Nvidia 8600 video card
SATA hard drives

I read a couple threads on this:
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=37605
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=31692
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=33406
....

I have edited my properties file as specified in this forum and tried CoreAVC 1.9, Cyberlink 9 and Arcsoft Total Media theater 2.0. All produce the same result, with CoreAVC producing the least amount of stuttering.

Some issues for me:

A) I am not playing these files from a network, they are on the local hard drive.

B) On this same HTPC, I can play these files in MCE, Zoomplayer, KMPlayer, WMP, Mediportal and MPlayer with no issues

C) I read somethings about MPlayer not supporting certain H264 profiles. I am not an expert but I can play these files in Mplayer with no stuttering. So I think this is a falsehood.

I can accept that the features of SageTV come at the cost of overhead, this is not a dealbreaker for me. Maybe there is code that needs to be optimized in SageTV in the future. Anyway, my questions are:

1) What hardware do I need to be able to play 1080p h264 and VC1 mkvs in SageTV? Or is SageTV just incapable of playing these files smoothly?

2) Will I have this same problem with the HD200?

Thank you very much!

It's not clear what setup you are aiming for.

Are you going to use your PC for connecting to a TV or just as a server?
If your PC will end up as a server then you don't need to worry about the video.

If you plan to use just the 2 HD200s at your TVs then you will not have any issues with your mkv files.

The issues you have now running from your PC can be ironed out if you really want to use that as well for connecting to a TV, although I am not sure about your AMD4400 CPU. It seems that hardware accelaration may not be enabled or you have some decoder/filter prioritisation issues.

[SWKerr]

The hardware would be fine for playback with the extender but you are on the fringe for PC playback. The cpu alone will not be alb to handle it and you need to make sure it passes the the load off to the Video card. The nVidia 8600 should be able to play it. When you are playing it, what is the cpu usage.

Also: use tsMuxer to convert it to a m2ts file and play that back in Total Media directly and see if it plays and what the cpu usage is. If it can play in TME then you can configure Sage to play it as well. Just a matter of figuring where your config is wrong.

I would like to know how you got MCE to recognize a mkv file.

[wellago]

Lol seems an admin deleted my account by mistake so, just FYI, this is the same guy who started this thread . (No problem Opus4 )

Thanks for the replies! I had a bit of a typo in my first post. The CPU on this box is an AMD64 X2 4400+ (dual core). I left out the X2 part, sorry!

The hardware would be fine for playback with the extender but you are on the fringe for PC playback. The cpu alone will not be alb to handle it and you need to make sure it passes the the load off to the Video card. The nVidia 8600 should be able to play it.

Ok, so then what is the minimum hardware I need to playback 1080p smoothly on this machine? Not the bare minimum but, you know, a baseline hardware setup? I have lots of hardware laying around but this box was already put together and unused so its what I am testing with (I also have more of this exact same hardware, so it would be nice to standardize on this).

How do I offload the processing to my GPU in Sage?

It's not clear what setup you are aiming for.

Are you going to use your PC for connecting to a TV or just as a server?
If your PC will end up as a server then you don't need to worry about the video.

I am not really sure what exact setup I am aiming for right now. I am going to figure that out once I've settled on a package I want to use. I've played with HTPC software over the years but I never found one I really liked. Instead I've been using a pretty complex system based around tablets to control various computers to playback media to different output devices around my house. However, with the bad economy, my sister and her family have moved into my house and they are all having a hard time trying to watch TV. So I signed up for DTV (I didn't have any kind of TV provider before) and have to look into traditional HTPC setups that are easy to use. I've been playing with different packages but seeing the HD200 was really compelling, especially with all the kids around now and SageTV supports a wider variety of HD capture hardware than most. Basically, I am going to have to get back to you on that.

Also: use tsMuxer to convert it to a m2ts file and play that back in Total Media directly and see if it plays and what the cpu usage is. If it can play in TME then you can configure Sage to play it as well. Just a matter of figuring where your config is wrong.

CPU usage is not spiked. Playback hovers at around 90% in task manager. I really have no interest in converting media to get playback. If that is required, which it doesn't seem so but please tell me if that is the case, then SageTV would not work for me. I started the conversion process, I'll get back to you when its complete.

I would like to know how you got MCE to recognize a mkv file.

MKV on MCE? I just did a google search and found a couple useful forums called the green button and AVS. I think this is a useful link if you are interested: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=842306. I would suggest you visit those forums for a more complete solution, as I only was checking it out and am not too familiar with MCE. Is MCE better than SageTV? Are you using MCE as well as SageTV or are you also evaluating different HTPC options?

The issues you have now running from your PC can be ironed out if you really want to use that as well for connecting to a TV, although I am not sure about your AMD4400 CPU. It seems that hardware accelaration may not be enabled or you have some decoder/filter prioritisation issues.

I am not really sure what decoder/filter priority is , but this is a clean Vista install used expressly for testing HTPC software. I installed Vista and some basic media programs I am familiar with. Zoomplayer I like on Windows because it will install the codecs I need for me, without loading me up with stuff I don't need. Then I took an image of the OS. Every time I test a new software I kill the drive and restore the clean image. This kind of eliminates software issues when testing.

For SageTV, I ran into this problem and ended up installing a bunch of different H264 decoders discussed in this forum to see if anything would fix the problem. I did select to enable hardware acceleration in the detailed setup menu. Any suggestions on how to set it up better? I can kill the disk and put the image back on again and follow your suggestions.

Thanks!

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by wellago

Lol seems an admin deleted my account by mistake so, just FYI, this is the same guy who started this thread . (No problem Opus4 )

I can't help with PC playback, but I thought I would say what happened... there were 7 or more Russian spammer accounts created yesterday (and more today). I clicked on 'Delete User' one too many times & took out your new account too. Then, while manually re-adding your account, I accidentally gave it limited posting ability.

I think everything is set correctly now, except for the inability to assign the first post of this topic to your account. All I can say is: Sorry for the mistake.

- Andy

[w84no1]

I would add another Gig of memory to that machine also. Vista is a resource hog and 1gb is at the bare minimum.

Also, did you change HKey_L_M\SOFTWARE\Frey Technologies\Common\DSFilters\MpegDeMux in the registry?

I changed mine from 40 (hex) to 100 (hex) and the stuttering I had stopped.

[SWKerr]

The hardware should be fine.

As a reference I usually run at 10-15% cpu when I am just watching a recording. So 90% would be very high.

Getting hardware playback to use the video card hardware for decoding is really dependent on the video card and the codec used. I was never able to get CoreAVC to work with hardware decoding with any of my video cards. I would just uninstall it for now to make sure that it is not being used by accident.

I have always had good luck getting the Cyberlink codec to use the video card so I would start with that.

Go into the Detailed Setup and select "Video\Audio"
Video Renderer = Overlay
MPEG2 Video Decoder Filter = Cyberlink ??? (will not be use in h.264 files)
MPEG4 Playback = Directshow
MPEG2 Audio Decoder = Cyberlink Audio Decoder

Next Edit the Sage.properties
I think in vista64 it will be in C:\Users\%user id%\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\SageTV\SageTV\Sage.properties
It will be something similar for Vista 32

Find the line with "videoframe/h264_video_decoder_filter"
replace it with:
videoframe/h264_video_decoder_filter=CyberLink H.264/AVC Decoder (PDVD9)
(this is version specific with Cyberlink so this is based on your post)

Give this a try and post back your results. CPU usage as well even if it is skipping.