Intel Q965 express based extender - HD issue

[thenuma]

My sage.tv extender running 6.2.7 (soon 6.2.8) appears to have some pretty bad stuttering when playing back HD content. The network is quite solid, I have a verified cat6 connection, using a managed gigabit switch. plenty of bandwidth here, however, the HD content causes cpu load on the extender to peg at 100%. the extender is a winxp machine, 1gig ram, intel 6420 chip, with a monitor at 1680x1050. Is there a solution to this? should I add a nice video card is the intel on board just a POS? an nvidia with the you pay extra for this mpeg decoder? thanks. thenuma

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by thenuma

My sage.tv extender running 6.2.7 (soon 6.2.8) appears to have some pretty bad stuttering when playing back HD content. The network is quite solid, I have a verified cat6 connection, using a managed gigabit switch. plenty of bandwidth here, however, the HD content causes cpu load on the extender to peg at 100%. the extender is a winxp machine, 1gig ram, intel 6420 chip, with a monitor at 1680x1050. Is there a solution to this? should I add a nice video card is the intel on board just a POS? an nvidia with the you pay extra for this mpeg decoder? thanks. thenuma

What video codec are you using? The Sage supplied MPEG decoder is a TERRIBLE POS. It uses no hardware decoding support, and is useless for HD. You need to get a codec like powerdvd 7 (OEM version is just fine), and esp. in XP, it will work just fine and the 965 can playback any HD MPEG2 content with it.

Thanks,
Mike

[thenuma]

installed powerdvd and switched codecs I was using. looks much better. very happy now. thanks

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by thenuma

installed powerdvd and switched codecs I was using. looks much better. very happy now. thanks

The 965 does a fine job with MPEG2 HD, it just needs a codec that uses it's hardware acceleration.

If Sage insists on shipping this POS codec with it's software, it should at least state in the documentation that the codec is worthless for HD and doesn't use any hardware assist.

People regularly make the assumption that the bundled codec is useful when it's not. This causes customers like you to waste a lot of time chasing your tail and discovering that you need something else. If they can't bundle a capable codec (like the cyberlink one), they should stop shipping the current one and causing all this confusion.

Thanks,
Mike