Cyberlink vs NDVD Drivers and other Ramblings

[tealcomp]

Well after tweaking and trying different things for over a week, I am not exactly satisfied with SAGE. I built a new machine from the ground up for the sole purpose of replacing, TIVO but my results have been mixed. Video quality is OK but not fantastic; well OK I know that S-Vid is not going to be fantastic anyway, but I expected that I would get at least similar if not better than my current Direct Tivo setup; dual MPEG coding not withstanding.

Video Decoders

I have played with the Cyberlink v5 decoders that came with my video card, I also purchased the latest Nvidia Decoder Pack and again, my results are half-baked. I really like the VMR9 setting for quality, but I noticed while recording LOTR, the vertical and horizontal slow panning was atrocious; it was most noticeable towards the last part of the movie where they showed the panning of the map. I don't know if you would call it "tearing" or "stuttering" or "jittering", I choose to call it plainly awful. Anyway, when I switch back to Cyberlink with Overlay rendering, I get a pretty decent picture. I am running v14 of the Cayars STV and I have to say it is pretty cool. I have tried various combinations of ffdshow, VMR9 and others and I just cannot get consistent results with VMR9; which is disappointing, because I would like to take advantage of the Nvidia Video PP and hardware acceleration in the card. I am still playing with ffdshow and Dscaler so the jury is out on both of those programs; it takes awhile to get through an AVSFORUM subject post because of the amount of information.

Sage v2.1 Reliability

Now we come to another frustration; Sage's stability is questionable. One moment it works perfect, the next time I turn around, it loads with a black screen and locks up. Sometimes the UI locks up for no reason as well. I have already had to perform a complete uninstall and reinstall once. Things are better now. I am sure that with so many independent variables, this is to be expected, but really this kind of unreliable behavior I would expect to find in an Alpha or Beta release, not something I paid $80.00 for. I am not complaining, and I am willing to admit that there may be some items I do not have set up properly yet. However, from what I can tell, I am not the only person who is experiencing these types of problems. I will give it some more time before I make a final verdict, but I do find myself going back to TIVO and I really hate having to do that.

This is like I said more of a report of what I as a first time Sage user have experienced. You will note I do not yet have any questions to ask, I am still experimenting. I expect I will have some questions as time goes by; but if anyone has any suggestions or comments for me, I am all ears.

Thanks for all of the great information I have learned so far; this is truly a great community forum.



-Dan

[korben_dallas]

Dan,

FWIW, I am still a pretty new Sage user, but MPEG-2 Max Quality is about the only recording quality I use, because the others just show way to many artifacts. I did setup a custom quality in my sage.properties file that is better than "Best" but less than MPEG-2 Max, and it works ok for some lesser priority shows I watch and forget.

What is your video source? And is the coax going into your capture card directly from the wall or cable/sat box? How was the Tivo connected to your TV, and is the PC connected in the same way?

[tealcomp]

Korben:

Source is from a DTC-100 (S-vid out to the S-vid in on the PVR-350); The Tivo is of the Direct Tivo variety; so the big diff in the way they are connected is the fact that the Tivo is recording the MPEG stream directly, whereas the PVR-350 is re-encoding the signal again; this will leave a slightly blurred picture, but nothing bad. I do plan on playing around with the compression options as well. As far as video is concerned, I get acceptable quality with the Cyberlink decoder, but the Nvidia is still a work in motion

-Dan