Convincing SageTV to use an alternative splitter

[davidk21770]

I've posted before about not being able to convince sage to use other splitters, but it never got resolved -- I'd really like to get it resolved now since I've finally figured out what's happening to my H.264 -- looks like sage is dropping key frames. I see motion from the next scene coming through a "still" of the last scene -- effectively stopping video until the next key frame. Not pretty. It only happens with 1080i. I don't have any 1080p or 720i content to test to see if it would happen there, but I've never seen it with 720p.

I've turned off deinterlace everywhere I can find it -- at least until I can get this resolved. No difference.

I can't get SageTV to NOT use its inbuilt splitter.
I've searched my registry and changed all occurrences of EnableSageTVStreamDemux to 0 -- there are many. (Why isn't this in a config or properties file where I have more visibility/control/ability to restore it from backup!?)

I've set sagetv's splitter merit to "do not use" and LAV's to preferred+2.

I can play mkv's with h.264 in sage but it does not use LAV's demux (no activity icon in the lower right -- but the activity icons for LAV video and audio codecs are there and graphspy shows the sage splitter being used).

When I build a graph with an mkv/vp9 or mkv/vp8 video, graphstudio uses LAV demux, sage just gives me a playback error. When I use graphspy to get a better look at what it's doing (what's in sage's log is limited), sage only tried it's own splitter.

If I try to force sage to use a different splitter by setting CustomDemuxGuid to LAV's splitter in the registry (again, why registry and not properties! ), sage service appears to FC (won't stay started and sagetv won't load).

Any suggestions on things to try?

I'm running windows 8.1 and the latest SageTV for windows (9.1.8.770).