Issues with playback, sound but no video.

[Remo]

For any developer working on Sage: Thank You! When i started having the issues below I looked at alternatives to sage, nothing I found was as good. So thank you for keeping this program alive and kicking.

Now, on to my current issue.

Win 7 Pro/HD200/SageTV 9 x86 (9.1.5.683) and x64 (9.2.1.826)

I started having these issues a couple weeks back. I installed the x64 version of Sage hoping it might resolve the issues, no such luck.

I've been accessing Sage two different ways trying to troubleshoot this. I run it directly on the HTPC and also through the HD200. I get different results depending on the access method. In all cases, if I play the video outside of Sage, using VLC, it plays fine.

Depending on which Sage I'm running, x86 or x64, I stop/disable the other's service and start the correct service manually before starting Sage. There doesn't seem to be any difference between the versions though, same problem.

Here's the problem I'm seeing:

- On the HTPC I'll have some videos playing audio but no video. In some cases I can play the same video through the HD200 and it plays fine, other times I get the same issue, audio, no video.

In both versions I have MPEG2/H.264/VC-1 Video Decoder Filter set to LAV and MPEG2/HD Audio Decoders set to LAV also.

Other than Windows updates nothings changed on the system for several months.

NOTE: I had a longer list of errors but I found I hadn't updated the K-lite codec package recently so I just installed the Mega package and, at least on the HTPC, Sage x64, videos that caused an error before are now just having the same issue as the others, audio, no video.

It's late and I don't have time to verify if that resolved the issues on the HD200 and or x86 also. That's for tomorrow. So for now if I can resolve the audio/no video issue I'll be a happy camper.

[Tiki]

Codecs shouldn’t matter with HD200 - it handles the decoding natively.
If it doesn’t display video, the file is probably corrupted or not 100% standards-compliant. You may be able to fix it by remuxing or transcoding with another program like ffmpeg or videoredo. VLC is good at playing back stuff that other programs can’t.

If you get video but no audio, it could be that the file has more than one audio track and Sage is trying to play the wrong one. It could also be related to whether you have your extender set for PCM or Bitstreaming.

[Remo]

What about the issue of audio, no video, when playing directly on the HTPC? I just went through, all in SageTV, and tried to play a half dozen videos, some new, some older, some TV recorded by Sage recently and live TV. None have video, only just audio.

I tested a couple of the videos outside of SageTV and was able to play them using VLC, WMP and MPC-HC.

Clearly it's an issue within Sage but I'm at a loss as to what it might be.

[Tiki]

Have you tried changing the renderer setting in Sage?
This would only be for playback directly from the HTPC.

[Remo]

It was set to "Video overlay renderer", I changed it to "default" and everything worked. Thank you for the help

This setup runs so well it's often years between having to do anything with it and when I do I kind of feel like a monkey poking things with a stick to see what happens, i.e., I have no idea what I'm doing.