New to HD - Need your help please!

[ikarus79m]

Hi guys,

I succesfully installed my Avermedia A180 with SageTV 5.04 and am now enjoying HD on my 4:3 Television set. (I just couldn't take the 4:3 version of Lost beeing broadcasted on ABC Standard definition anymore...)

However, I've got a few questions, and maybe you can point me in the right direction:

1. Aspect Ratios: When watching actual HD shows on my 4:3 TV they get letterboxed and everything is fine. However, if I watch Standard Definition Shows on my new HD channels they don't fill the screen completly but have an border all around. Changing to any of the other "Aspect Ratio Settings" in Sage doesn't help either, at the most my picture only gets stretched from top to bottom. Any advise?

2. Dolby Digital Sound: Are HD shows broadcast in 5.1 over the air? My computer has an integrated SDPIF out, which is connected to my 5.1 setup, however, I don't think I am actually getting 5.1 sound. Do I need to do anything special to get that working?

3. Quiet Sound Levels: The sound levels on my HD channels via the A180 are WAY quieter then on my Hauppauge cards. Any way to adjust that? I am using the AC3Encoder that I think came preinstalled with my SageTV setup. (In the audio encoder settings)

4. Can I install a second HD tuner card and simply "split" in-door antenna signal, or will that degrade quality?

5. Should I get an HD Tv now that I got HD goodness?

Looking forward to your help!

Philipp

[DwarF]

I'll do what I can:

1. Aspect Ratios: I have noticed that 4x3 sometimes have a larger than necessary box at the verticle. I have a widescreen, so it is difficult to judge the horizontal. It is part of the signal, and thus I think you are stuck with it. But other's should contribute to this part of the thread.

2. Dolby Digital Sound: I'm useless on this one.

3. Quiet Sound Levels: I installed a seperate AC3 encoder. It has individual adjustments for voice, etc. I had to fiddle with it a while to get it "right".

4. Can I install a second HD tuner card and simply "split" in-door antenna signal, or will that degrade quality? Yes. I have a 500, so it is all in one co-ax cable coming in. I understand that you want a high quality cable splitter in order to not introduce any new noise to the signal coming into your 150s.

5. Should I get an HD Tv now that I got HD goodness? Tough one there. If you are expecting to get an HD signal in and show it on your TV, you may be a bit underwhelmed. If you only want Over the Air HD signals (ATSC or something like it cause I'm not going to look up the anacronym right now), then you need a HD tuner, and it should work as long as you are within signal range. If you want to receive HD from your cable box, then you will again have to dump your 150s, and get a firewire interface to your Set-Top box. If you have satellite, then I understand that you can modify the box yourself for some considerable $$$. If, like me, you have cable, and they will not provide a set-top box with firewire, and they encrypt the signal on the co-ax, then you can not get HD over the wire directly to your HTPC (QAM). But your DVDs will be amazing.

[ikarus79m]

DwarF, thank you for your help! Actually, I did go out and purchase a Samsung HDTV FitSilm 30inch just to give this a shot. Not sure if I will keep it yet.

I now notice that I seem to have some issues watching HDTV through SageTV and my Avermedia A180. If I connect my indoor antenna directly to my TV the picture is very fluid and smooth. If I connect it to my A180 card, however, and play it through SageTV the video is extremly choppy.

Where is my problem? Is it a problem with the A180 card? Is it a problem with Sage? Has anyone experience something like this?

My System:

Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz - 1GB RAM - NVIDIA GForce 6600 - Hauppauge 250 - Hauppauge 350 - Avermedia A180. Windows XP SP2.

[popechild]

Where to start? I've actually got more questions than answers - after reading your posts I'm a little confused.

You apparently don't have an HD tv as of now, right? Then I hate to tell you, but right now you're not getting HD goodness. I'm assuming you're getting an HD signal into your a180 and then outputting an analog SD signal to an SD tv. If this is the case, what you're watching is very clear SDTV. Don't get me wrong, it still usually looks better than any other SD you'll get. But it is not HD by any definition. So yes, you definitely want to get an HDTV.

1. Aspect Ratios: Unless your 4x3 SD tv has zoom options (which almost none do), there's not going to be much you can do about it except mess with the zoom settings within Sage (not the same as the AR modes). This can help you fill your screen, but the quality will be somewhat degraded. The reason is that almost all HD transmission is designed for 16:9, so it's either a 16:9 show or it's a 4:3 show "pillar-boxed" into a 16:9 signal. So your 4:3 tv is getting a widescreen signal, which causes the letterboxing on top and bottom. And within the 16:9 signal, the network is pillarboxing the 4:3 material, which is causing the left and right bars.

2. Some HD material is 5.1. Lots is not. You shouldn't have to do anything special to get it to passthrough if the show contains it.

3. No idea.

4. If you've got any kind of decent signal, splitting your antaenna to two cards isn't going to hurt anything. I've got the same setup - antaenna to two a180s - and the picture's perfect. Don't waste your money on a special splitter unless you find you have to have it.

5. As mentioned before, go with the HD tv. No question. Otherwise, it's like you've got a high end reference quality cd player and you're hooking it up through a radio shack boombox.

EDIT: Looks like maybe you already got an HD TV to test. The "choppy" problem is because it takes a lot of computer power, and a well configured system, in order to output full res HD smoothly. Your specs seem to be fine, but there's about a million and a half things that can cause choppiness when trying to play back HD. Do a search on here or over on htpcnews.com and you'll find plenty of threads. You kind of just have to go through them and try all the various suggestions to see what might work for you.

It's almost definitely not a problem with your card, or your tv, or Sage. You've just got to get everything tweaked just right to get flawless HD playback. One of the hassles of htpcs. Oh, and if you're wondering why you might be able to hook up your normal SD tv and output the signal from the a180 without any problems to it, it's because in that case you're still just outputting an SD signal, which doesn't take anywhere near the computer strength that an HD output takes.

Hope that helps some.

[ikarus79m]

Popechild, thanks for your help. I did actually get an HDTV to test all of this out and unfortunately I do have a choppy picture through my A180 in SageTV. When I connect the Antenna directly to my HD Television Set with a build in HD Tuner I get a perfect picture.

Therefore, the VERY choppy picture problem must lie somewhere in my SageTV box. I checked the CPU usage while playing HDTV channels and it never goes above 30%. Where could my problem be?

EDIT: I watched one of the HD recording streams on a different machine (Dual 3GHz Pentium) and it plays fine in there. So I guess it's really a playback issue. Where do you think the bottleneck is? Shouldn't this system be strong enough to play back HD?

Edit#2: The recording Quality for the A180 card is set to "MPEG2- Max Quality" is that correct?

Edit#3: I ran some benchmarks on my Harddrives with the following results: C-Drive: Read 15.803MB/s - Write: 5.924MB/s - 13.106MB/s --- Recording Drive: Read: 26.357MB/s - Write: 47.1210MB/s - 51.132MB/s.

[jptaz]

The problem in playback could be from any number of sources:

1. How are you connecting the Computer to the TV? DVI, Component, VGA, HDMI? If you are using SVideo you are NOT displaying HD.

2. What Resolution are you outputting 1280x720 (720P) or 1920x1080 (1080i). If you are using 1080i then you may not have a fast enough video card or processor.

3. Are you using VMR9 or Overlay?

4. What Video Decoder are you using? I use NVidia Purevideo decoders and they are smooth on my setup, which asside from being AMD is very comparable.

John

[ikarus79m]

Hi John,

1. I'm connecting my Computer to the TV via Component Cable, so that should be fine.

2. I'm outputting 1280x720 (720p) to my TV.

3. I'm using VMR9. I had overlay before when I had my SDTV connected, but that looked like cr*p on my HDTV set so I changed it to VMR9

4. I'm using the Default Video Decoder.

Shouldn't this all be ok? Is my C Harddrive to slow? It's a really old drive, but I'm not recording anything to it. Should that matter?

EDIT: I tried to switch my Software Decoder to the SageTV MPEG2 Decoder and playback has improoved quite a bit, but is not perfect yet. Can anyone pinpoint my problem?

[bcjenkins]

Originally Posted by ikarus79m

Hi John,

1. I'm connecting my Computer to the TV via Component Cable, so that should be fine.

2. I'm outputting 1280x720 (720p) to my TV.

3. I'm using VMR9. I had overlay before when I had my SDTV connected, but that looked like cr*p on my HDTV set so I changed it to VMR9

4. I'm using the Default Video Decoder.

Shouldn't this all be ok? Is my C Harddrive to slow? It's a really old drive, but I'm not recording anything to it. Should that matter?

EDIT: I tried to switch my Software Decoder to the SageTV MPEG2 Decoder and playback has improoved quite a bit, but is not perfect yet. Can anyone pinpoint my problem?

Try the nvidia 30 day demo. Pure video is the cat's meow..

[ikarus79m]

Ok, the nvidia decoder really made a difference. My choppy video playback ha stopped now. However, the video playback still isn't 100% smooth. It's not choppy stop and go anymore, but it looks as if I'm not playing at full frame rate. This is especially obvious on pans and fade ins and out to and from black. Any suggestions how to take care of that?

I've got a pretty strong system, it should be strong enough no?

EDIT: So in Summary I got the following settings in my Video/Audio Setup now:

Video Render: VMR9
MPEG-2 Video Decoder Filter: NVIDIA Video Decoder
DXVA MPEG Mode: Default
DXVA Deinterlacing: Default
DScaler Deinterlacing Filter: Disabled
Audio Render: Default
MPEG2 Audio Decoder Filter: AC3Filter

Does that sound right? And again, I just compared by SageTV Video against my build in TV HD Tuner and everything is very smooth there. So that "strobing" effect that looks as if it's not running full frame rate or something still must happen somewhere in the computer. Could it be my slow C Drive? Is my GForce 6600 not good enough? Just a software problem? Or is this to be expected when viewing HD through SageTV?

Edit#2: I currently have the NVIDIA GeForce 6600 in my SageTV box, but also have a NVIDIA GeForce 6800GS available in my other computer. Would this be a better card for playing HDTV content in SageTV or is the 6600 plenty enought?

Edit#2: Do I have to set-up the Nvidia Pure Video Decoder somewhere after installation or are all settings made in SageTV? I read somewhere on here that I should set some kind of Deinterlacing to Automatic or Smart or something.... What is that all about?

[popechild]

Here's the thing. I know this isn't a pleasant reality, but HD playback on a htpc is just not a plug-n-play technology at this point. You have to be willing to tweak to get it perfect. It took me weeks of tweaking dozens of things to find the right combination that worked perfectly for my machine. (For me, the final issue was trying different versions of the nVidia decoder. The results were vastly different from one to another. All on the same hardware, same other software. And all versions I tried had been reported to work great for different people.)

You keep saying that it works fine connected directly to the tv. There's no question the jitter/jerkiness/stutter/etc is happening inside the computer. The thing you have to realize is that this doesn't mean that any of your hardware or software is necessarily bad, or not fast enough. You just have to find all the right tweaks to get it working right on your machine.

You're really best off doing a search here or on the other forum I mentioned. There are literally dozens of threads on hd jitter/stutter/etc. And when you read them all you'll realize that dozens of people post dozens of "solutions" that worked for them, but not for other people.

So I'd start there and start making a list of all the things you've tried and see where that gets you. I wouldn't worry about your harddrive. You can try different versions of the nVidia decoder that I mentioned as one suggestion. My other thought right off the bat is try Overlay. It's MUCH harder to run hd smoothly with VMR9 than with overlay. If that still doesn't work, start checking all the suggestions people have made in all the other threads on the topic and see where that gets you...

[blade]

Is your card a 6600gt or a plain 6600?

I just skimmed over the post so I might have missed it, but to do VMR9 with the 6600 you're probably going to need to have FSE enabled. If that still isn't enough you might try overclocking the card a little, both 3d and memory speed can affect playback.

You can also run FRAPS when doing VMR9 so you can see how many FPS you're getting so it is pretty obvious if you're not at the full framerate.

[autoboy]

Yeah, you are going to need to enable FSE. Nvidia cards only do HD with FSE.

[Jesse]

Hi,

I got smooth playback on a 720p plasma with a P4 3.0e and a 6600GT. I used the nvidia decoders as well. VMR9 and FSE were a must to get smooth playback. It may also help to shut down any other software that may be running on the machine (ie run nothing but sage). As the others have said, you have the hardware to get it done, you just need to find the settings that will work for you.

Good luck and have fun.

Jesse