Sage won't play tv shows on laptop

[tawd1992]

I recently put Sage on my laptop (Dell Latitude C600 PIII 750mhz, 256mb ram, fresh install WinXP pro) mainly so I could transfer shows to it that I recorded on my desktop & use comskip & the skip forward & back buttons. An mpeg file that I recorded with Sage on my desktop will play fine on my laptop with Windows Media player or Media player classic, but with sage I only get sound with a black screen. I tried every mpeg decoder/video renderer combo possible with no luck. The only time it will even show a picture is with Nvidia post processor as the mpeg decoder & default for the video renderer. Any help is greatly appreciated.

[GTwannabe]

Sounds like your laptop's video system can't handle hardware video acceleration. The nVidia Post Processor uses your CPU to decode and render instead of the GPU.

[raulinigo]

I have a Dell C610 1ghz/512mb and couldn't get it working either. I just figured it was the video card and gave up.

[michelkenny]

It's an old laptop, so it has a pretty old video card. That's probably your problem.

[tawd1992]

I was afraid the video card was too old. At least it still plays in media player. Any recommendations on a player that would recognize a comskip text file or that has a skip forward function? Thanks.

[jominor]

Originally Posted by tawd1992

I recently put Sage on my laptop (Dell Latitude C600 PIII 750mhz, 256mb ram, fresh install WinXP pro) mainly so I could transfer shows to it that I recorded on my desktop & use comskip & the skip forward & back buttons. An mpeg file that I recorded with Sage on my desktop will play fine on my laptop with Windows Media player or Media player classic, but with sage I only get sound with a black screen. I tried every mpeg decoder/video renderer combo possible with no luck. The only time it will even show a picture is with Nvidia post processor as the mpeg decoder & default for the video renderer. Any help is greatly appreciated.

It sounds like the decoder to me. I have a newer Aspire 3000 and an older P3 Compaq P3 500 and both work. I use the Nvidia puredecoder on the Aspire and the PowerDVD decoder for the compaq.

Try one of those.

[stevech]

I have the black screen problem with an older desktop.
At 1280x1024x16 bits (S3 chipset) I get black.
At 1024x768x32 bits it does play the video.
I have the latest video driver, directX, etc.

This is a 32MB video on the motherboard device.
The BIOS has a setting for 8 and 16MB too - beware.

I bought a $30 PCI bus video card, 32MB. Installed. Changed BIOS to make this the preferred display card.
It does playback at 1280x1024x16 bits. I guess it's the driver is better. It's an nVidia (old chipset).
It also works at 1280x1024x32 bits bit it's too slow in routine windows operations like scrolling small fonts. So I use it at 16 bits.

[tawd1992]

Originally Posted by jominor

It sounds like the decoder to me. I have a newer Aspire 3000 and an older P3 Compaq P3 500 and both work. I use the Nvidia puredecoder on the Aspire and the PowerDVD decoder for the compaq.

Try one of those.

I tried playing around with different resolutions & colors without any luck. I had an old copy of Powerdvd laying around & installed that & still got just a black screen. Media player classic is probably better for what I want to do anyways. The videos open right up & I can fast forward & rewind with the ctrl+left/right keys.