Bizarre behavior on VCD quality setting

[75th Trombone]

First, the specs:

2.0 GHz Pentium IV
Windows XP Pro SP2
nVidia GeForce4 Ti4200 (66.93 drivers)
1GB RAM
Hauppauge PVR-150 MCE

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My problem involves recording and Live TV on the VCD quality setting. These problems occur with no other quality setting. There are lots of different problems on the different versions of SageTV. Bear with me while I explain them all.

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SAGETV 2.1.10:

When trying to watch Live TV in VCD quality, the screen goes black and freezes indefinitely. Sometimes, after a varying time, it will finally display the video; others, I have to kill Sage altogether.

In a previous install, it worked slightly better. It would usually start showing video immediately. But after 2 or 3 seconds, it would freeze. I would have to click the progress bar back a few seconds to continue. Sometimes, that wouldn't work, and it would freeze.

Other times, it wouldn't even show the video. The progress bar would show some bizarre time like -0000064 or something, the screen would remain black, and I would have to kill the process.

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SAGETV 2.2.5 RC

1) With default STV

This behavior is much nicer, anyway; when I try to view Live TV on VCD quality, I get a dialogue that says

There was an error playing the selection of: ERROR (-20): There is no MediaPLayer that can playback the selected file while it's being recorded.

2) With Cayars17 STV

When I try to view Live TV, I get just a black screen. But I can still bring up the right-click menu. When I close the file and go back to the main menu, the "Upcoming Recordings" notifier at the bottom shows that SageTV is recording and at the same time scrolling through EVERY CHANNEL on the tuner. When it's scrolled through all the channels once, it stops recording and resumes normal behavior.

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Again, note that all these problems occur only with VCD quality.

So. There you have it. I desperately want to record in VCD quality so I can just mindlessly burn files off without transcoding them all.

Any ideas? At all?

Thanks,
SFT

[nielm]

I have had problems viewing live TV in VCD quality in the past, it is possible that timeshifting in VCD is not supported (which sounds like what that error message means)

Can you check that you can record a show (without playing it back - just CTRL-Y a show in the TV-Guide), and then play back the recording once it has finished?

[75th Trombone]

Ha, yeah, that works fine! I shoulda tried that. My computer common sense goes out the window after working on something too late/too long. :P

So this is more of a bug-fix/feature request thing, then {edit}, if it's even possible. I'm a newbie to video capture, so I may not be aware of some limitations in the convoluted MPEG world. You know offhand if there's a technical reason this can't be made to work?{/edit}

In any case, thanks.

SFT

[nerys]

you can not timeshift vcd this includes live tv which is a form of timeshifting

sometimes you can jump in and watch shifted live tv so long as you NEVER touch motion buttons (pause FF RW etc..)

but this usually gets unstable and nasty pretty quickly :-)

I never watch live tv and have turned off tv viewing in all screens so it does not effect live tv guide etc..

the only time I am in sage is when I want to add/remove a recording or favorite etc..

I use zoom player for playback or my hardware players. as long as I do not do any kind of live or shifted viewing it has been perfectly stable for me.

Chris Taylor
http://www.zodiacreview.com/