Choppy mpeg2 recording playback

[Jeraden]

I've been having issues playing back recorded SD shows on the HD extender and finally ready to ask for help!

I have a wintv pvr250 (old Roslyn/blackbird version). I used sagetv a while back with version 4 and everything worked fine, so I never got around to upgrading. I got the HD extender which requires version 6, so I upgraded the server and everything to the latest versions. Now something wierd is going on with mpeg2 recordings.

If I play back any of my "old" mpeg2/SD recordings from sagetv v4, they play fine on the extender. Any of the "new" ones from v6, are extremely choppy, blocky, etc. So it appears something is different on the server when its recording. Using SageTV client on my PC, I get the exact same issue depending on what decoder I use. If I use the nvidia purevideo decoder, I get the same choppy/blockiness. If I change that to the sagetv mpeg2 decoder, its still a bit blocky, but its at least smooth and not choppy. Using ffdshow there, its smooth and not blocky.

So I don't know if there is something non-standard with the way its recording mpeg2/SD streams now, but it seems its picky about what decoder to use to get smooth playback. Unfortunately on the extender, there is no option to pick a different decoder, so I get the choppy playback no matter what.

I tried updating drivers for my pvr250 card, but there aren't really any recent ones as its the now-unsupported roslyn/blackbird version. I've tried various versions of it, and they all have the same issue. I couldn't see any sage properties to set on the server to change the way it encodes the mpeg2 stream either, so I'm kind of stuck.

I was going to think about just upgrading to a different tv tuner (right now I use a pvr250 for SD and a fusion hdtv 3 for HD), but I'd rather just fix what I have now since it used to work great and works good other than this issue.

Any ideas/help? Sorry for the long post! :P

[gplasky]

Make sure you run hwclear.exe before installing the new drivers. Worse case, back up your orignal directory (Keep in mind you original directory may have been Frey Technoligies, a new install will use a SageTV directory)and uninstall your original and try a clean install. Set it up from scratch and verify that works. Then copy back in your wiz.bin file. (only that.) See if that helps.

Gerry