Sage 3.07 Sound issue and jerky playback

[ptaylor]

I've been testing the various 3.0x releases and stopped using 3.07 for two issues within a week or so of its release.. I want to stop using BTV (the organization of shows in BTV is weak, but recompression is nice) and get back to Sage, but there are no new betas, so here are my issues:

The first issue is that sometimes (about 30% of the time or so) it fails to record shows with sound using my ATI 550 card... Video is there and beautiful, but no audio at all. Shows recorded with my PVR-250 are always fine. To get "around" this, I've set the encoder_merit so that my PVR-250 should be the first recorder to be used.. So, only occasionally would the possibility exist that the ATI card could have a bad recording... (Note that I'm not having issues with sound on recordings done via BTV, so I'm pretty sure it's not a hardware problem.) So far, no one from Snapstream has been able to help me here, though I did open a ticket.. I installed the latest ATI 550 drivers and the problem seemed to disappear for a few days, but came back, so I think I was just lucky for a few days. The encoder_merit setting should make this a less likely occurence (but the ATI 550 has better image quality, so I'd rather use it most of the time if the sound worked consistently).

The second issue that really bugs me is that I get jumpy playback after I fastforward... If I watch a show from start to finish without fastforwarding, it plays fine, but when I FF even once, I typically end up with a jumpy scene.. Sometimes rewinding seems to help. Stopping playback, then restarting where it left off always fixes the jumpy playback... Also, it appears that occasionally (once every few minutes or so) it seems like video playback skips some frames, but there is no audio skip. Note that this happens regardless of if I have FF'ed or not.

I don't notice playback issues on BTV at all... (Even the occasionally skipping that I see in Sage is completely absent)

Any suggestions to sort out these issues would be appreciated.

[michelkenny]

The fast-forward skip bug has been around for quite a while. The only way I can make it stop is by using Overlay instead of VMR9, though I would prefer to use VMR9 since the picture looks better. I have tried the couple of things mentioned on other threads but without any success.

[blade]

The FF/RW problem is a well known issue and there is a simple solution to it.

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8831

Keep in mind that using the dll from 9.0b will fix the ff/rw bug; however, it breaks Sage's FSE mode. If you're able to use VMR9 with FSE disabled you should be fine. If you need FSE in order to use VMR9 then you're kinda screwed until MS actually fixes DX.

Also later releases of DX9.0c already includes the 9.0b dll, which is why some people who use 9.0c don't experience the FF/RW problem, but instead experience the problems when trying to use FSE.

[michelkenny]

Hmm... I don't use FSE and I've already tried replacing that DLL, but I still experienced the FF/RW bug in VMR9.

[blade]

Did you do it in safe mode and confirm by looking at the version number of the file that it was actually replaced?