New to Sage, Easy questions (hopefully)

[k9k9]

Got sage working and I really like it. I have a few questions that I'm hoping some old timers with plenty of experience might be able to answer:


1. All of my shows have recorded fine. Except for one show this morning. When I play it back, it has no sound and is playing back too fast (like I have the FF button on or something). What's the deal?

2. Some of my channels have a wierd line at the very top... I tried moving the screen up to get rid of it, but I would rather it just be gone! I can't really describe what it looks like, but it's not a different color or anything, and it moves! It kind of looks like this:

~~~~~~~~~~~~
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So my normal screen is fine, but at the top it's like waves or something. Any quick fixes or things I can check out about it?

3. After Following the DVD guide from the sage community... I bought the cineDVD pack. I added this to the advanced settings for DVD playback (Visual and Audio) and the playback of the DVD jumps every 4 to 8 seconds like it has to catch up or something. I spent 15 bucks on that pack and I'd like to get it to work (they claim it's the best one out there...heh).

4. Also per the DVD guide, I've been backing up my DVD's. I enjoyed learning about this as well as going through the steps to get around that sony stuff for my collection. But I can't seem to play them in SAGE. Do I need to have those TS files in seperate folders? Right now I have the movie folder, then the Files in that folder (all together). WMP can play it fine but Sage wont show anything in the folder. Also, how do I separate them if I have to? The names are confusing and I don't know which file goes where.....

5. You don't have to answer this one because I plan on looking it up when I get home... but what's all this Service mode stuff about Sage?

Specs:

XP Pro
p4 3.2
nVidia GeForce FX 5200
PVR-150 MCE
2 GB ram
2x 250 gb seagate

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by k9k9

2. Some of my channels have a wierd line at the very top...

See this discussion.

4. Also per the DVD guide, I've been backing up my DVD's. But I can't seem to play them in SAGE. Do I need to have those TS files in seperate folders? Right now I have the movie folder, then the Files in that folder (all together).

In the v4.1 PDF manaul, Appendix I (p. 243) covers playing DVDs from the hard drive.

5. You don't have to answer this one because I plan on looking it up when I get home... but what's all this Service mode stuff about Sage?

See the info starting on p. 14 of the v4.1 manual. The service runs in the background, separate from the UI. If the UI fails, the service keeps going. If the service fails, it can be configured to restart itself.

- Andy

[k9k9]

aah I knew it was easy stuff...... when I get home, I'll be hittin that manual pretty hard.

Thanks!

[stanger89]

Well I guess you were the straw that broke the camel's back so to speak, I finally fixed the guide a bit The pictures work now.

Originally Posted by k9k9

3. After Following the DVD guide from the sage community... I bought the cineDVD pack. I added this to the advanced settings for DVD playback (Visual and Audio) and the playback of the DVD jumps every 4 to 8 seconds like it has to catch up or something. I spent 15 bucks on that pack and I'd like to get it to work (they claim it's the best one out there...heh).

I uses Sonic decoders for a long time and never had any problems. That said I use nVidia now. Of course I do feel somewhat bad when my recommendations go awry. You might want to give the Dscaler decoders a try (they're free) or possibly the nVidia ones ($20). But first doublecheck your audio decoder settings.

4. Also per the DVD guide, I've been backing up my DVD's. I enjoyed learning about this as well as going through the steps to get around that sony stuff for my collection. But I can't seem to play them in SAGE. Do I need to have those TS files in seperate folders? Right now I have the movie folder, then the Files in that folder (all together). WMP can play it fine but Sage wont show anything in the folder. Also, how do I separate them if I have to? The names are confusing and I don't know which file goes where.....

Yes, the DVD files (IFO, VOB, etc) must be inside a "VIDEO_TS" folder. Sage uses that structure to find/recognize them as DVDs.

Sounds like you've got:
Moviefolder\files
What you need is:
Moviefolder\VIDEO_TS\files

5. You don't have to answer this one because I plan on looking it up when I get home... but what's all this Service mode stuff about Sage?

You can run the backend, recording/scheduling/server portion of Sage separate form the UI/Playback portion. This increases overall reliability as if you crash the UI/Playback portion (which is where the vast majority of the infrequent crashes occurs) it doesn't disrupt the recording functions.

[k9k9]

Great!!! thanks for the help.

This forum has really surprised me with how nice and helpful everyone is. Any other forum (*nix) would probably give me 10 RTFM posts.

I don't think I'm running in Service mode right now. It's just one box, so I don't have to worry about accessing network drives or anything. How do you switch between the modes? I shouldn't have to reinstall Sage. right?


As for the decoders, I plan on testing the Sonic decoders with my DVD backup files. If they work fine then I'll assume it was the disc. The audio was always in Sync, the picture just skipped. Who knows, the disc could have been scratchy or something... I'll also try the other ones too. Thanks for the tip.

Then this weekend I'm going to tackle comskip and the webserver.... this is fun!!!

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by k9k9

How do you switch between the modes? I shouldn't have to reinstall Sage. right?

Close Sage, open the Service Control app, and enable the service. You'll probably have to go into the service control panel (Start->Run->services.msc) and setup the user with Run As Service privilages.