H.264, no joy

[ytulpan]

Hi,

I'm a pretty heavy user of SageTV, I have a sagetv server installed in a win 2003 box, 2 hd-pvr's, some SD capture cards, a few clients, an hd extender. All is fine and dandy, (except the hundreds of hours spent to make this work, but it was almost fun).

So now, I cleaned up my living room HTPC, freshly installed MS latest and greatest Win 7 RC, all playback software I had (TMT3, PDVD 8 w/latest patch, Nero 8, VLC), plus SageTV client 6.5.15.

And nada. Problem rendering video content when trying to watch hd-pvr.

I guess there is no h.264 filter available for Sage. I have probably 5 of them installed, but Sage cannot use them.

Yes, I can uninstall TMT 3, fish the Hauppauge installation disk and trick it to install TMT 2 without the hd-pvr hardware, then remove all the crapware it comes with it, then set the filters, then reinstall TMT 3 while I manage to keep the old decoder in place, and so on. Another 3 hours if all goes well (it won't, believe me). Ah, yes, I also want DXVA for h264, heat is a problem even so.

So now, seriously, SageTV is seriously flawed if it cannot run h.264 out of the box.

Any other ideas ?

Thanks

[Razillian]

I am not sure about the others, but I know the latest patch for PDVD8 removes the DirectX h264 decoders. I think the last "good" patch was from Dec 08, anything after that and you don't get h264 support. Of course I don't know what patch is required for Win7.

As for the other decoders & running Win7, there are several posts around the forums related to what works and what doesn't. I do know the latest Sage Beta (6.5.15) has a fix that allows Sage to detect Win7 as Vista to make it run more properly. Might be worth trying out the beta just for that.

Oh, one other thing. Do you have the HDPVR's set to output audio as AC3 or AAC? AAC requires additional AAC decoders which the full version of Arcsoft does not include or at least used to not include. And if Sage can't decode the AAC, it usually will pop an error similar (identical) to the error when it can't decode h264.

[Djc208]

There was a recent thread discussing that the included Win7 h.264 decoder didn't play nicely with Sage because of the way Sage presents the file to the decoder.

I thought there was a built in Sage decoder but you'll need to make sure that Windows is actually using that decoder and not the "default" which is probably the built in Win 7 version.