Sage vs WinTV Recording Quality

[lodrigj]

I ended up at SageTV after trying GB-PVR and Beyond because Sage has the most features. I really like everything about it. Except for one deal killer.

The quality of the video recordings is exceptionally poor.

I'm sure it's not a hardware issue because the quality of the recordings from WinTV that came with the Hauppauge 150 card are just fine. GB-PVR and Beyond also had good quality on the recordings.

So, I'm at a loss as to why Sage is so bad.

I can see compression artifacts when viewing "live" tv on Sage as well as recorded programs. I realize "live" means recorded with a slight delay, so I guess it's no surprise that the quality is the same.

I'm viewing on a regular old TV, not a PC monitor or HDTV or anything fancy.

I started with the default "Great" quality setting. It sucked. I have also tried the highest quality settings for the record mode, and I can't see any difference at all.

I get very good quality with WinTV at the equivalent 2/gb per hour setting, but Sage leaves a lot to be desired.

I've tried reading some of the threads ( http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...ighlight=WinTV ) on these kinds of issues, and although I consider myself reasonably knowledgeable about computer stuff, I admit that my eyes glazed over when the people who were trying to help others with these same problems start talking about hacking the registry, installing different codecs, pixel adaptive deinterlacing, etc...

All of this seems a bit ridiculously complicated for my particular situation since the system hardware and software are definitely capable of producing a good recording as proven by WinTV. So, why can't Sage do the same with the default installation?

What do I need to change in setup?

One other question... the remote that came with the Hauppauge 150 has 43 buttons ( I even counted them twice). The setup only offers choices of 34 and 45 button remotes from Hauppauge. What's up with that?

Thanks,

Jerry

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by lodrigj

One other question... the remote that came with the Hauppauge 150 has 43 buttons ( I even counted them twice). The setup only offers choices of 34 and 45 button remotes from Hauppauge. What's up with that?

Thanks,

Jerry

I just count mine, 43 separate buttons too But if you look at the Vol and Ch buttons, they have an up and down feature, which gives 2 addition buttons, so the remote can send 45 different button presses.

As for the rest, I dunno, I run at Great - 2gb/hour on a 27" CRT and it's good enough for me with no obvious artifacting.


edit: reading the post again, I'd say to check what decoder Sage is using to display the recordings. It may be different than what Beyond and GB-PVR were using, and a good MPEG2 decoder is needed. Many people like the Nvidia PureVideo decoders, http://www.nvidia.com/object/dvd_decoder.html, its a bargain at $10 for what it offers and there is a 30-day free trial.

Sage includes an Mpeg2 decoder, but it is entirely software driven and uses the CPU to render, whereas the Nvidia decoder is hardware assisted and can use the video card to help process, reducing the load on the CPU.

It may be that Sage is making the recordings with no artifacting, but it having issues during playback. You could try and play the recording through a different program, like Windows Media Player, or burning to DVD, and see if you still have the artifacting.

[cslatt]

I agree that the default "Great" setting looks...not so great. I would double check and make sure that you didn't mess up or misunderstand when trying to set the encoding quality higher. I've got mine set to record in DVD long play, and it looks great to me....remember that this is the quality that it records in, so once you've set it you'll have to wait for something new to record using the new setting before you'll see a difference. Things that recorded previously will still look bad.

[Opus4]

In addition to starting a new recording after changing the rcording quality, how did you set the quality?

And, to make sure that is the quaity being used: record a show, then go to Recording Details screen for it. Scroll down to the bottom to look at the "Encoded by" line. After the tuner name, what does it show as the recording quality?

- Andy

[lodrigj]

Originally Posted by ke6guj

I just count mine, 43 separate buttons too But if you look at the Vol and Ch buttons, they have an up and down feature, which gives 2 addition buttons, so the remote can send 45 different button presses.

Ah, that explains it.

Does the Nvidia PureVideo decoder work with other video cards? Is it just a codec that is called by Sage?

I did try it in VLC and they all looked awful. But they looked ok in Windows media player. Go figure.

Thanks,

Jerry

[lodrigj]

Originally Posted by Opus4

In addition to starting a new recording after changing the rcording quality, how did you set the quality?

Hi Andy,

I set the quality in Setup > Detailed Setup > Multimedia > Recorder Quality > Default = Best and Hauppauge = Best.

And, to make sure that is the quaity being used: record a show, then go to Recording Details screen for it. Scroll down to the bottom to look at the "Encoded by" line. After the tuner name, what does it show as the recording quality?

I'm not seeing that information there. All I see is the category of the show, Original air date, language, showID, file location, and size.

I did move these files to a different hard drive and then re-formatted the hard drive for the video files with 64K clusters, and turned off anti-virus on the program and the video files directory. Then I moved them back. Perhaps the encoding info was lost in this process?

The different quality recordings end up different file sizes, so I'm assuming the quality settings were changed ok.

I looked at the MPG files from WinTV and Sage in a couple of different players, including VLC, Windows Media Player, and Irfanview, and they all looked pretty much the same. So it doesn't appear to be a recording quality question. Equivalent quality settings looked the same in both Sage and WinTV.

So, it might be a playback decoder issue with Sage.

What's my next step?

Thanks,

Jerry

[david zero]

It's funny you changed to WinTV for better record quality. I found the opposite. Changing from the free WinTV to Sage was based upon better recording quality with Sage. WinTV was producting these lines dividing the screen and a strange wave that passed from top to bottom of the screen. I didn't have any of this with Sage. Also, of course, the Sage TV Program Guide is much less of a pain than WinTV's Titan TV web interface. It's not bad for free though.