ATI HD4890 and de-interlacing

[pgman]

I just fitted my existing system with a Radeon HD 4890, and HD playback is working great. SD interlaced programming, however, will not play. The audio plays fine but the screen gets all scrambled (including the Sage GUI) and I have to stop playback to be able to see any of the menus. I am moving from an nVidia video product (the 8600 GTS) and I am not very familiar with the Radeon driver setup.

My system is running Win7 64-bit, 4GB of RAM and all the latest drivers. Again, it is only interlaced SD programming that is affected, 720p and 1080i programming also plays fine. I haven't tried 1080p Blu-ray yet (haven't had time), but all HD OTA programming and recordings work.

My output resolution to the television is 1080i (30Hz refresh) right now, because 1080 at 60Hz isn't smooth. I am thinking my system is probably too slow for that (it's an older system). The HD 4890 is more for the system I plan to build soon, but I'd like to get it working on this system first.

[SWKerr]

Is it a Sage thing or a Windows thing?
Does the same content play in Media Player?

[Fuzzy]

My guess is your system shouldn't have ANY problem playing back with the settings at 1080p60.. Either way, I'd give that a shot to help eliminate the interlaced output as a possible culprit. With that video card, and proper codec (I'd recommend the win7 built-in decoders), you should be able to play it back well on ANY CPU that is new enough to work with a PCI-E motherboard.

[pgman]

Originally Posted by SWKerr

Is it a Sage thing or a Windows thing?
Does the same content play in Media Player?

I haven't tried WMP yet - I've been very busy this last week - but I think it is is a Windows / ATI problem. Interlaced SD content played back fine when I was using the nVidia 8600.

I will try the things you've suggested and see what happens. I think I am currently using the ATI decoders that were installed as part of the VIVO software. Also, I am going to try the driver that came with the card. The driver I have loaded at the moment is the one I got from the ATI website.

[brainbone]

I would guess that this is a SageTV issue. See my ramblings in this thread on the subject.

SageTV support has confirmed that there is an issue, and that they are working on it. What exactly causes the issue or when it will be resolved is unknown.

If you can get the same content playing well in WMP, it will verify that you have the issue.

Edit:
It does seem that slower CPUs are more likely to expose the problem. <wild guess>Possibly something to do with the deinterlacing method SageTV is forcing?</wild guess>

[Savage1701]

I can get that under EVR with both XP and Vista. Had to move back to VMR. But same as you guys - only SD interlaced content. Tried tons of decoders under Radeon 4600 series cards. HD 1080i, 720p, and H.264 are fine under EVR, but 480i H.264 breaks up the screen and the Sage menus.

[sdsean]

Yeah I can't run EVR either . . not on Vista or Win 7 (64bit), and I have the exact same video card. . .

For standard. . the screen either freaks out. . .or the OSD constantly flickers (although strangely H.264 seems to be fine).

I submitted a bug about this to sage. . .which they than asked if I tried the beta demuxer stuff. . . they claimed that windows 7 64bit is not officially supported (which i find strange since vista 64 was and there is not a whole lot of difference other than ms having its own H.264 codec).

I forgot to reply to them, but I'm not interested in installing beta stuff that may just make things worse. . . try using overlay. . .it works fine. . . you won't get transparency, but you don't need it anyway in sage. . .



EVR (when it works) does look better. . . but as far as I can tell its not worth the headache right now. . .