New Sage Setup - Audio/Vid glitches to fix?

[markthenewf]

Good day.

Firstly lemme say that this program is as slick as snot on an aluminum door. It is as smart (and sometimes smarter) than TiVo, plus I can upgrade it and not loose a bunch of space to ads n' stuff for which I actually paid for the privialge of opting to not seeing them! Disney and TiVo are evil empires and they suck. A lot. But I digress....

So, I've got the following setup:

-Full size tower case
-460 W fanless thermaltake PSU
-3Ghz Pentium
-1 GB RAM
-NVidia 6600GT PCI-e w/Thermaltake heatpipe cooler
-3 SATA hard drives (1 for system + music, 1 for HDTV, and 1 for SDTV)
-PVR-150
-M-Audio Revolution 5.1 sound card (SPDIF out to reciever)
-MyHD MDP-130 (loaded but not "running").
-Zalman cooling + 2x120 mm fans (1 in 1 out)
-Hookedup to a 51" Hitachi HDTV via DVI to 1280x720 resolution.
-Gyration wireless mouse/keyboard.
-USB-UIRT (love this rig!)

VGA card runs about 55 deg C under load with the internal ambient temps around 40 deg C. The CPU usually is about 45-50 deg C when in use, and rarely goes above 50% usage. I'm not running FFDSHOW, descaler, or anything running in the background., but have TheaterTek DVD with the NVidia A/V decorders.

Everything set up pretty smoothly (with the usual couple of days of screwing around with stuff that really isn't necessary!), with a pair of bugs:

1) The aspect ratio of the video is waaaay off. Everyone looks stretched too tall and barely enough of the screen (in the horizontal direction) is utilized. Additionally, my SAT reciever (Samsung SIR-T160) is outputting HD stuff in 480i through the SVideo to the PVR card but it only use the regular 4:3 region rather than the whole screen which is 16:9. What gives? I don't recall a setting for this. I set the input aspect ratio as 'source' and '16:9' but with no change. I don't recall the sat only ouputting in 4:3 through the SVideo.... I guess I should look that up! Suggestions/comments?

2) There is a horrible offset in the audio and video. This only ocurred recently (say in the last day).

From my research, I've got a pretty substantial machine, and there really shouldn't be any performance problems (ref item number 2). I couldn't really find anything in the manual or in the forums adressing these issuses as they pertain to the signal aspect or the A/V offset.

Anybody gotta clue?

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by markthenewf

1) The aspect ratio of the video is waaaay off. Everyone looks stretched too tall and barely enough of the screen (in the horizontal direction) is utilized. Additionally, my SAT reciever (Samsung SIR-T160) is outputting HD stuff in 480i through the SVideo to the PVR card but it only use the regular 4:3 region rather than the whole screen which is 16:9. What gives? I don't recall a setting for this. I set the input aspect ratio as 'source' and '16:9' but with no change. I don't recall the sat only ouputting in 4:3 through the SVideo.... I guess I should look that up! Suggestions/comments?

Sage has 4 AR modes, Source, Fill, 4x3 and 16x9. All assume square pixels. You can modify the settings for each in Detailed Setup -> Multimedia (IIRC). For the HD (16x9) recordings, you'd want to switch to Fill or 16x9 mode. Source won't work because (as far as the PC knows) it is a 4:3 recording.

2) There is a horrible offset in the audio and video. This only ocurred recently (say in the last day).

From my research, I've got a pretty substantial machine, and there really shouldn't be any performance problems (ref item number 2). I couldn't really find anything in the manual or in the forums adressing these issuses as they pertain to the signal aspect or the A/V offset.

Have you tried playing back a recording outside Sage to see if it's a problem with the recordings?

[markthenewf]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Sage has 4 AR modes, Source, Fill, 4x3 and 16x9. All assume square pixels. You can modify the settings for each in Detailed Setup -> Multimedia (IIRC). For the HD (16x9) recordings, you'd want to switch to Fill or 16x9 mode. Source won't work because (as far as the PC knows) it is a 4:3 recording.

I see that, but it's very weird. As another example, Gilmore Girls was recording in 39, so I looked at the SAT and it was set to 16:9 standard. The picture on Sage looked ok. Problem solved, right? Wrong. When I switched the SAT to 39-1 (HD feed), it squished it again. Setting 16:9/Fill/4:3 made no difference. I guess I should take a couple of pics showing what I mean.

Originally Posted by stanger89

Have you tried playing back a recording outside Sage to see if it's a problem with the recordings?

Well, I copied the file direct and attempted to open it with Windows Media Player. No go. I then loaded SAGE Client and opened it from the networked drive. The delay was present as before, though I did record Battlestar Galactica on SciFi Sunday night and there's no problems with it. I think I'll try and record the news or something at noon tomorrow and check it when I get home. Point being, I guess the file was buggered.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by markthenewf

I see that, but it's very weird. As another example, Gilmore Girls was recording in 39, so I looked at the SAT and it was set to 16:9 standard. The picture on Sage looked ok. Problem solved, right? Wrong. When I switched the SAT to 39-1 (HD feed), it squished it again. Setting 16:9/Fill/4:3 made no difference. I guess I should take a couple of pics showing what I mean.

Almost sounds like your sat box is pillarboxing HD content. You might want to look for a setting in your sat box.

[markthenewf]

Yeah, it appears that it's either:

a) SAT box
b) TV scaling

Eesh. I'll figure it out!