SageTV and Video Card with Hardware-Level HD-decoding?

[NewGuy]

Hello, first post! I have a couple of beginner-level general questions please.

Due to the upcoming Comcast digital switchover, I must upgrade/rebuild my next HTPC which is directly connected to my 1080p TV. SageTV looks like a very exciting front-end product. I have purchased (and just received today) an HDHomeRun, to receive/record clear QAM over Comcast cable.

My understanding is that CPU speed and video-card choice make very little difference for recording - but do matter a great deal for HD playback. I greatly wish to offload all possible HD video playback processing onto the video card, in order to use an older CPU. I have a variety of video cards available, and will purchase another one if it will accomplish what I want it to do.

So for lowest-possible CPU usage during HD playback when using SageTV: Should I use a video card that does hardware HD-decoding on the card? (For example, video cards with NVidia PureVideo HD Technology, or ATI Avivo HD Technology). Or is this even relevant to the user of SageTV, and why/why not please?

Also, if the above is correct: Does SageTV directly access the HD-playback hardware and features on such a video card, through the video card's driver? On the SageTV site it recommends "For HDTV Playback: 3Ghz processor or higher or a "slower processor" in combination with a video card utilizing DXVA support and using a decoder which supports DXVA."

Sp please advise and help me to understand how I can use SageTV and and an appropriate video card, for HD playback with minimal CPU usage.

I greatly appreciate all help and replies, and thanks for helping a newbie.

[Striker:WG]

You will want to get a video card that supports the HD features you mentioned in your post. I personally use an ATI 3870 and it works quite well as far as CPU usage goes when doing HD recording and playback because it supports DXVA and I have DXVA enabled through the Cyberlink codecs that I am using for HD playback.

-Striker-

[NewGuy]

Originally Posted by Striker:WG

You will want to get a video card that supports the HD features you mentioned in your post. I personally use an ATI 3870 and it works quite well as far as CPU usage goes when doing HD recording and playback because it supports DXVA and I have DXVA enabled through the Cyberlink codecs that I am using for HD playback.

-Striker-

Thanks Striker, this is reassuring news! From what I can tell, it seems the newer motherboards with AMD chipsets and integrated Radeon graphics can do DxVA / hardware-HD-decoding support as well - how interesting. By the way, how do you get the Cyberlink codecs you mentioned - do they install with SageTV? What processor are you using (for comparison) please?

[Striker:WG]

Originally Posted by NewGuy

Thanks Striker, this is reassuring news! From what I can tell, it seems the newer motherboards with AMD chipsets and integrated Radeon graphics can do DxVA / hardware-HD-decoding support as well - how interesting. By the way, how do you get the Cyberlink codecs you mentioned - do they install with SageTV? What processor are you using (for comparison) please?

You get the PowerDVD codecs by installing PowerDVD. One thing to be aware of is that configuring the PowerDVD codecs to work with Sage is a real pain because Cyberlink insists on each program indiviudally configuring and storing settings in the registry for how that particular program should utilize the codecs. If you do some searching on these forums there are several threads related to it, but the basics are you configure the codec with something like graphstudio (free utility that you can google for), then export the registry keys generated by the config, rename them to work with Sage and then import back into your registry.

I'm using an Intel C2D Q6600 (quad core cpu) @ 2.4Ghtz /w 4GB DDR2 PC8500 RAM.

-Striker-

[SWKerr]

The ATI 780G motherboards come with HDMI and will play back HD without problems. The ATI 3450 is only about $30 and will also do the trick.

I have a lot of different codecs now and except for the CoreAVC codec I got them with software that came with a piece of hardware I purchased. I have used the Cyberlink 7 that came with my BluRay drive and it works fine. I eventually settled on the ArcSoft codec form TME that came with my HD-PVR.

I have never had to do anything special to use the codecs in Sage except for h.264 files. The codecs just shows up in Sage after the install. There is a sage.properties edit that you may need to add for the h.264 files.

[Striker:WG]

You can select the Cyberlink codecs through the Sage UI, but if you want to change their config from 2 channel to 8 channel or SPDIF on the audio side or to enable the DXVA option then you need to start doing the registry stuff I was describing above. This is as I mentioned Cyberlink specific.

-Striker-

[NewGuy]

Hey Striker, thank you so much for all your helpful info and advice. I do have a retail copy of PowerDVD 8 Ultra that I just installed, and when playing an h.264 file in PDVD8 with DxVA enabled, my cpu activity is usually less than 10%. If I can get this same acceleration in SageTV, that will be fantastic. I will start my attempts with the info you mentioned above, and will try graphstudio as well. Right now, when I open graphstudio, the usual gray window appears and nothing happens at all (not sure what to do). I tried dragging an mpeg4 movie trailer file into the window, but it just says "can't open file"...

[Striker:WG]

You will want to "Render a Media File".

This should show you the graph for how your system decodes the file and plays it back, you can then right-click on the PowerDVD codec and configure properties for it. Once this is saved you will need to do some registry magic.

Check out this thread for more details:

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=38840

-Striker-