Epia M9000 + PVR350 + Sage

[bodgadle]

Hi all,

A friend of mine has just got himself a PVR350 after i'd done all the research for him :) He got it because he wanted hardware encoding & decoding since he's only using an epia m9000 itx machine as a PVR so it's not powerfull enough to do it all in software.

I'd read here and on the hauppauge forums that using the 350 would mean very low CPU usage for him since it has hardware encoding & decoding. However, after getting it installed, he's finding this is not the case.

After just installing his PVR350 and launching WinTV2000 he's seeing his CPU usage at a constant 86% just watching TV, he's also saying the picture quality is a little grainy?

I told him to try SageTV, but the same there too, infact with sageTV he can't even get a picture out through the 350 (he is trying latest beta and has option for PVR350 output enabled).

Another thing he says is that sageTV is showing his picture in black & white and where does he go to change the PAL/NTSC etc settings (he is on PAL).

He's running windowsXP pro, with drivers for 350 which came on CD (he's only on a slow net connection so cant download all the drivers atm). and has an Via EPIA M9000 motherboard with 512MB ram.

Does anyone have any tips or anything obvious he may be missing??

Thanks in advance

[SHS]

First of all you need turn off localplay to disable the mpeg2 soft decoder each time you start wintv2000.
I not about SageTV I think jeff said you start wintv2000 first the close then start sagetv and it work.

[bodgadle]

where will he find option for "localplay???"

thanks :)

[SHS]

If had look on shspvr.com you would have find it under How to Use | Using WinTV2000-PVR scoll download to end of page you see it

[bodgadle]

ah excellent, i did a search in the forums there which explains why i couldnt find it.

Thanks a lot for your help shs :)

He disbled the local part and now cpu is down to 11%

[bodgadle]

ok winTV down to 11% when watching, but sageTV still shows local rendering and cpu uip to 100% with sage, colours are all well skewey too. Enabled 350 OUTPUT option on the sageTV advanced setup he says but colours are all "very alien" he says and cpu at 100%

thanks

[SHS]

Don't use 16bit color up to 32bit color on the video card or look really funkee looking.
As for SageTV an dHWdecoding jeff trying his best even I have crying at hauppauge to enable it under capture filter property page which gray out rigth now.

[bodgadle]

Thanks (again) SHS, i'll get him to check his colour-depth settings, so at the moment there's no way to disable local preview mode on sageTV then? so the sage preview window will alwyas be in software render mode and hence use a lot of CPU?

thanks

[SHS]

You need ask Jeff on that option not far I know there not