Very poor TV playback with PVR-150, works great in WinTV2K

[gregoriosb]

I am a former MythTV user trying to make the switch to SageTV (running under WinXP, not linux), and having some difficulty with TV playback.

Whenever I try to watch Live TV (haven't done any recordings yet, but don't think it would be any different) the playback is very poor, with dark video that is black and white (or very low saturation) and fuzzy.

The playback in WinTV2000 looks very clear, and the video files created by SageTV play back just as poorly in VLC. Also, an old recording created in MythTV with this same tuner plays back great inside of the SageTV media player. This leads me to believe that it is not a hardware or driver issue, nor is it a decoder issue, but that Sage is tuning the channels poorly.

I've tried every setting I can think of inside of Sage, to no avail. I've checked to make sure the source is set to Cable and not Antenna, I've tried different decoders, all with no luck.

I'd appreciate any advice or guidance on how to proceed with troubleshooting this. I'd really like SageTV to work for me, as it's a great program.

[gregoriosb]

I realized I didn't include my system info:

SageTV 6.5.9, WinXP Pro, Athlon XP-M 2800+, 512 MB RAM, nVidia fx5200, 40 GB OS drive and 320 GB recordings/media drive (partitioned with 64K block sizes), PVR-150 using IR receiver

This system is being used as a standalone pvr, it's not a client, nor is it connected to any.

I've continued trying to get Sage to tune TV correctly, with no luck. Every other piece of software I try works perfectly. I've been combing through every setting and all the entries in sage.properties, without any luck.

I'd really like SageTV to work for me, but at this point I'm worried it just won't.

[waltraud]

Hi,

you can overwrite the frequencies in the windows registry. I did it manually when I first installed Sage (v4). Once your settings are ok you can export the key and copy it to a save location so you dont have to do it all over again when you reinstall your box.....

There was a decent howto which I cant find anymore but here is some more info

http://www.prize.nl/software/freqcopy/index.html
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...09(VS.85).aspx

PS: I haven't used the tool myself.

[gregoriosb]

Thanks a lot Waltraud!

I'm going to give that a try when I get home and hopefully be on my way to being a happy Sage user!

However, it looks like the registry keys pertain to global tuning settings, rather than anything specific to SageTV. If the tuning was off in the registry, how is WinTV and other software tuning correctly? Am I wrong in my thought process here?

[waltraud]

I am not sure but I think WinTV is not using the registry but its own tuning.