Best Decoder and Settings for Geforce 6200??

[grooves12]

Here are the specs of my computer:

Geforce 6200 128MB
Pentium 4 3.0 w/ HT
250GB Serial ATA
1GB DDR2 Dual-Channel
2 Twinhan 102g's w/ Mytheatre Network Encoder Plugin.

I have tried a couple of different codecs, but can't get an acceptable solution that will allow me to use this HTPC as a primary STB replacement DVR.

The Nvidia codecs give the best overall video quality, and get me the closest, but its not QUITE perfect. If I use VMR9 as the renderer w/ it I get noticeable tearing some slight jumpiness. I I try to enable FSE, it hangs and/or Crashes Sage.

With overlay the picture quality is really nice... but it has some stuttering. Looks sort of like it is dropping frames, kind of like a strobe effect. This pops up about every 30 seconds or so and last 3-5 seconds each time. Sometimes it will go longer, sometimes less, but it is often enough to be distracting.

Any ideas??

[Rogue9]

What resolution are you running at?

It seems like I remember there being some issues with the GeForce 6 series, VMR9, and higher resolutions. I have no problems with my 6600 (256MB) @ 1280 X 720, but I know many people on the AVS forums had problems at 1080. I believe FSE mode fixed a lot of the tearing for most people in ZP, but I'm not sure about Sage. I'm also not sure what would cause FSE to crash Sage for you, either.

[blade]

The nvidia decoder is going to be your best bet for quality. You'll have to run FSE if you plan to do VMR9 at 1080i, if not you're going to get tearing. You might be able to get away without FSE if you use 720p. If you use FSE you'll need to launch Sage in fullscreen and keep it there. If you leave fullscreen or don't launch into fullscreen you will likely get playback errors and have to reboot. Make sure you have the latest drivers, decoder, and DX version.

Overlay shouldn't be giving any problems. Check the tray icon and make sure it's set to automatic and not smart. Smart can sometimes cause artifacts and jerky playback.

All of this is assuming you're watching SDTV content. Of course if you're doing HDTV then it's going to be much more demanding and I'm not sure what the 6xxx series cards are capable of in that case.

[grooves12]

I am viewing SDTV throught the Compoite TVout on the card set to 480p and am still experiencing all of the problems. I will try launching the program into full screen with FSE enabled and see if that helps.

[grooves12]

ok, I looked into it again... as I was posting this from memory...

But launching into FSE it does not lock up, it has no video showing in the Sage window, and there is an Activemovie window playing in the background that is showing the video that should be playing in the Sage window.

Any ideas on how to get around this problem??

[blade]

I've seen that problem before when DX wasn't playing nice with FSE.

Microsoft had a mess with DX9 that caused quite a few problems. DirectX v9.0c was broken and caused problems with VMR9 when not using FSE (Sage didn't do FSE at the time). Microsoft released a "fixed" version that simply used a file from an older version of DX. That helped with the problem, but broke FSE. When Sage added FSE my setup would do exactly like your's and Windows would not let me revert back to the "broken" version of DX. I ended up doing a fresh install and haven't had any problems since. I'd suggest updating to the latest version of DX and see if they've fixed the problems or not. Hopefully you won't end up having to do a fresh install. Maybe someone else that understands the problem a little better can give you a better suggestion than I can.