Live & Recorded Quality

[Milehigh]

Hi all, I'm a new Sage TV user, and have poured over the forums... LOTS of info, but I have quality questions, and performance questions as well. The specs are AMD64 3000+, 512 megs of memory, ATI 9800 Pro, Hauppauge 250 PRV card, Comcast cable into PVR.

I'm watching via an 85" image on a new Panasonic AE700 projector, so I realize there will be some limitations when viewing full screen... but, I'd like to improve image quality for what I have.

I'm using the new Nvidia codec, and think I could tweak the image for a better picture.... questions:

1. What are the best tweaks to increase performance? (Sound tends to crackle, playback of recorded & live tv tend to stutter)

2. Color saturation seems way high, how is this adjusted?

3. What difference does VMR9 make versus Overlay?

4. I'm running SageTV as a service... I seem to have read that changes will only occur when shutting down the service and exiting SageTV. Does having the service on NOT allow changes in the menus relating to quality in a similiar fashion to modifying the more advanced options in the properties file via Notepad?

Thanks for any assistance...

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Milehigh

Hi all, I'm a new Sage TV user, and have pored over the forums... LOTS of info, but I have quality questions, and performance questions as well. The specs are AMD64 3000+, 512 megs of memory, ATI 9800 Pro, Hauppauge 250 PRV card, Comcast cable into PVR.

I'm watching via an 85" image on a new Panasonic AE700 projector, so I realize there will be some limitations when viewing full screen... but, I'd like to improve image quality for what I have.

I'm using the new Nvidia codec, and think I could tweak the image for a better picture.... questions:

1. What are the best tweaks to increase performance? (Sound tends to crackle, playback of recorded & live tv tend to stutter)

Crackling, not sure, I've never experienced that. As for studder, make sure your recording drive is formatted to 64k clusters, and also give reclock a shot.
http://ogo.nerim.net/reclockfilter/

2. Color saturation seems way high, how is this adjusted?

Well I'll try and keeps this short (sometimes I get long winded about calibration). The first thing to do is make sure your display is properly calibrated to your PC. I do this by using Digital Video Essentials. Once that's done I calibrate the capture settings in Sage to make them right. I've found a great way (IMO) to calibrate the brighness and contrast settings (see the sage-community link in my sig), but hue and sat have to be done by guessing, and making it "look right".

3. What difference does VMR9 make versus Overlay?

VMR9 uses the 3D engine of your graphics card while Overlay uses specialized hardware. The most obvious difference is that with VMR9 you get the fancy semi-transparent OSD/Menues. Personally I prefer VMR9 it seems to be set much closer to "proper" out of the box on ATI cards than Overlay.

4. I'm running SageTV as a service... I seem to have read that changes will only occur when shutting down the service and exiting SageTV. Does having the service on NOT allow changes in the menus relating to quality in a similiar fashion to modifying the more advanced options in the properties file via Notepad?

No changes made within SageTV work just fine with or without the service running. It's changes to the properties file that require you to exit SageTV. And technically, you don't necessarilly need to stop the service, depending... When using the service, SageTV (the interface part) and the service use different properties files (sageclient.properties for the interface, and sage.properties for the service) so you should only have to stop the service if you're changing the sage.properties file. The reason you have to exit is because Sage reads from the properties file on load and writes it on exit, any changes you make are overwritten when you exit Sage, so you need to close it so it doesn't overwrite your changes.

[Milehigh]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Crackling, not sure, I've never experienced that. As for studder, make sure your recording drive is formatted to 64k clusters, and also give reclock a shot.
http://ogo.nerim.net/reclockfilter/

I'm positive I formatted my drive to 64k, and specifically looked for that in setting up my 200gb hard drive where I capture recordings. I'll check into reclock... The crackling could be a by-product of the stuttering, so I'll not worry about that issue now, at least until I get the quality and playback stutter-free.

Originally Posted by stanger89

Well I'll try and keeps this short (sometimes I get long winded about calibration). The first thing to do is make sure your display is properly calibrated to your PC. I do this by using Digital Video Essentials. Once that's done I calibrate the capture settings in Sage to make them right. I've found a great way (IMO) to calibrate the brighness and contrast settings (see the sage-community link in my sig), but hue and sat have to be done by guessing, and making it "look right".

Yes, I need a calibration DVD, it is on my short list of purchases as I've never had one. I previewed your link, lots of good info there, I haven't grabbed Dscaler yet, but it sounds like an important link in the "quality" chain. Thanks for the detailed information

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Milehigh

I haven't grabbed Dscaler yet, but it sounds like an important link in the "quality" chain.

It's more of a handy tool than anything, I don't actually use it (ffdshow or dscaler filters) for anything but setup.

[Pumpkinhead]

The most obvious difference is that with VMR9 you get the fancy semi-transparent OSD/Menues.

I use overlay with my Radeon 9500 HDTV Adaptor, and I'm getting semi-transparent overlay/OSD also (using Cayers STV I can enable or disable it.) If there are other semi-transparent overlays that I'm missing with overlay, I'm not sure what they are. The quality looks great. I've tested VMR9, but preferred overlay after some minimal tweaking. VMR9 relies on desktop settings, which I rather not change. Plus I don't have to worry about all those VMR tearing issues I keep reading about.

I've had some jitter at times. Sometime it occurs badly immediately after booting, simply sleeping and reawaking has solved it. Sometimes, if it's occuring every 6 seconds or so (for unknown reasons), a simple reboot has resolved the problem. And one time I had my CC display enabled, but I couldn't see it because color key was enabled (prior to the Cayers F workaround,) and it was jittering about once every second. Simply disabling the CC display for playback resolved the problem. I tried reclock at one point, but it didnt help. I think I have it mostly under control.

[Cayars]

Pumpkinhead, yes using my STV you can have semi-transparent overlay's in the OSD even when viewing closed caption material but this isn't in the default stv. I'm playing major "tricks" to do this.

They're not "technically" overlays but to the viewer they are, hence the term "semi"-transparent overlays.

[Pumpkinhead]

But even before that CC workaround, I was able to get semi-transparent overlays using overlay instead of VMR9 for the OSD Miniguide and channel information for example (since I only need CC for comskip.) I should note that the popup menu (from yellow remote button) in LiveTV doesn't use semi-transparent overlay though, so maybe that's different with VMR9. Hadn't tested it.

[Cayars]

Yes, semi-transparent overlays have always been part of my STV. I was just saying that it even does it when using CC. This is a bit tricky to implement because semi-transparent overlays require OVERLAY COLOR KEYING ENABLED while the CC requises OVERLAY COLOR KEYING DISABLED. Obviously this is a conflict for the typical STV user but I've made work arounds to handle it.

[Pumpkinhead]

Right, but I only mentioned CC in my first post to this thread in regards to the jitter problem rather in regards to VMR9 vs Overlay. I edited my last post because I had said information screen, but it was really a popup menu that isn't using transparent overlay that I meant to say (the one which allows you to enable CC1, auto-commerical skip, etc.) Perhaps it uses transparent overlay with VMR9, but I hadn't checked that.

I did test the CC overlay feature using the new STV, but it also removed one of the other semi-transparent overlays. NO big deal for me though cause I dont really want to view CCs. I just want them recorded for compskip functionality.