Frustrating Sage TV out Quality..

[Big Jeff]

Quick update. I didn't have alot of time last night so I reinstalled the ati video driver only. What a nightmare since I was only using my Svideo out. Had to hook my monitor back up to finish it up. Still not 100% back to svideo only BUT on another note I also bumped the Video quality in Sage up to "DVD standard" and the picture is ALOT better. Will continue tweaking tonight.

Jeff

[Big Jeff]

Another Update and some interesting news. What A difference a night of tweaking makes. After fidling around the TV-out through svideo is absolutly great. My picture is crystal clear (For what can be expected through svideo).

On another more interesting note. I have been having problems with my computer locking up when I switch on 3d. I think I've narrowed the issue down and it may be of interest to anyone with ATI Radeon cards.. I have a ASUS A7V880 motherboard with a VIA chipset. Apparently (From searcheing through the VIA forum) that there is definetely a compatability issue between ATI and VIA that causes among other things random lockups and system hangs. Lots of Gamers have problems with the combo. There are a zillion and a half suggestions BUT there is no solid answer. The solution that was most widely recognized to solve the problem was to get a new motherboard (Albiet an expensive one) with the Nforce2 400 Ultra Chipset in it. Apparently all those issue go away once you go Nforce. I think that will be my next step to eliminiate that issue.

What actually is the purpose of the 3D setting in Sage?

THanks for all your help everyone...
Jeff

[kny3twalker]

the menus are then 3d rendered as well you canot use VMR9 without 3d acceleration enabled
it will fall back to overlay
the nforce 2 ultra mobos should be really cheap now with the nforce 4 being the new mobo currently

[msandife]

Big Jeff, what was the tweaking that finally gave you a crystal clear picture? It sounds like you were having the same s-video issues that I am regarding a "soft" picture. My picture is definitely not as sharp as a direct connection from the digital stb to my SDTV. ps - I'm using a geforce fx5700 vid card.

Also for anyone who has an answer - I read a lot about encoding and recompressing in certain resolutions. How does one go about changing the capture/recompress resolutions? Is it in the sage.properties file in the "mmc/python encoding....height=720..." line(s), i.e. is this line telling the Hauppage pvr-250 what res to encode in?

And finally, it doesn't matter what res your video card is set at right? I played around changing the screen res from 800x600 to 720x480 and there wasn't any noticable difference in PQ. Thanks in advance for any help - I too am becoming frustrated with the quality, but I'm not giving up yet!

Matt

[nielm]

the pvr cards can encode at different horizontal resolutions, but the vertical resolution is fixed to the number of lines in the TV signal -- 480 (NTSC) or 576 (PAL)

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by msandife

And finally, it doesn't matter what res your video card is set at right? I played around changing the screen res from 800x600 to 720x480 and there wasn't any noticable difference in PQ. Thanks in advance for any help - I too am becoming frustrated with the quality, but I'm not giving up yet!

Matt

To the extent that no matter what you set your resolution to your card will always output, and your TV will always see 480i via S-Video you are correct. However running different resolutions affects the path the video goes through between the recording and the S-Video cable:

480i >decoder> 480p >renderer> [whatever resolution you're running] >TV encoder (aka TV-out)> 480i

So it does have an effect.