SageTV, HVR-2250, and 2 Second Lag

[databoy2k]

Hey All:
I'm attempting to use a console with SageTV and an HVR-2250. I'm using both an RF-Adapter (to channel 3) as well as a composite video/audio. Both result in about a two second lag on what is displayed. As you can imagine, this makes gaming impossible. What do I need to do to speed up this software? Is this a limitation of this card? Any help will be greatly appreciated.
I'm running Vista 64 with 4gb ram on a 4300+ AMD chip.
--Databoy2k

[robogeek]

Originally Posted by databoy2k

Hey All:
I'm attempting to use a console with SageTV and an HVR-2250. I'm using both an RF-Adapter (to channel 3) as well as a composite video/audio. Both result in about a two second lag on what is displayed. As you can imagine, this makes gaming impossible. What do I need to do to speed up this software? Is this a limitation of this card? Any help will be greatly appreciated.
I'm running Vista 64 with 4gb ram on a 4300+ AMD chip.
--Databoy2k

The short answer is, there's nothing you can do. SageTV and most (if not all) other DVR's and PVR software aren't meant to be used with gaming consoles. They're meant to allow recording and timeshifting. You'd need a DVR that has some sort of pass-through connector.

The reason it's not going to work is because SageTV records everything to the hard drive and then plays back from that file. The time it takes the capture card to encode the MPEG2 stream, sending the stream to a file on the hard drive, and the software to play the stream back from that file introduces a slight delay from the actual input going into the capture card. There may be some other PVR software that allows the use of the capture card preview pin for direct playback, but SageTV doesn't make use of the preview pin. I think there are technical hurdles relating to the client/server architecture of SageTV preventing them from using the preview pin. And I doubt it would work well (if at all) running SageTV in service mode with a second instance of SageTV acting as a client and the extenders and PC clients would probably still see a slight delay introduced by network buffering.