HD-PVR flickering jagged top edge of video

[zumpner]

There is a line on the top of the video. It looks like many white dashes that flicker. It is very annoying. Has anybody else seen this? Is there a resolution?

[JGAM]

Sounds like an overscan issue. The are overscan adjustments in Sage to try and rectify this. It's somewhere in the setup. Basically you just "zoom in" to eliminate the line".

[zumpner]

I thought the overscan setting just adjusted the SageTV GUI and not the video. Is that incorrect?

[phelme]

it's typical of cable broadcasts. my Comcast source sometimes has this on SD material too.

you can use the Aspect Ratio settings under Detailed Setup->Multimedia to stretch the picture a couple percentage points to hide it.

[sic0048]

Long story short - it isn't an HD-PVR issue, it is noise introduced at the broadcast level and the HD-PVR is simply showing the picture as received.

The noise is usually the closed caption being broadcast in the feed. Broadcasters have been spoiled because older TVs always had a small amount of overscan (ie the TV never showed 100% of the actual broadcast feed). But now with the new HD TVs, most show 1:1 and have no overscan.

THe broadcasters are having to go back and rethink how the include stuff like closed caption, etc. Some have already done this, but others have not. That is why you will see the noise on some channels or during some broadcasts, but not others.

To "fix" the problem, you basically need to enlarge the picture slightly (using a zoom feature) or reduce the viewable screen size slightly (using the over scan feature) to crop off the broadcast noise.

Hopefully this is a problem that will become more infrequent as more broadcasters fix the issue from their end.

[zumpner]

Wow, that's a much more interesting explanation than I expected. Thanks for the insight.

Where is the zoom that you're talking about? Is that something within SageTV or in the video card configuration. If it's in the video card config, I'd rather not mess with it as my desktop fits perfectly.

Also, I have tried toying with the overscan and aspect ratio settings to crop the video with no avail. The overscan seems to just move the OSD up and not the video.

Also, in messing with these settings, will my OTA HD video be effected as well?

[scavenge]

Of course zooming your pic a bit may stop your machine playing HD reliably. At least this is what happened to me, I zoomed to 103% horizontal and vertical and all of a sudden my HD channels playback started crashing Sage.

I'm just running a 780G's onboard 3200HD using ffdshow though, so a more powerful machine or different codec may not have a problem.

[zumpner]

Where is that zoom option?

[bastian74]

I have the same flickering, except at the bottom. The "overscan" setting in sage is for the menu system only.

[zumpner]

so, you have not been able to fix it then?

[bastian74]

Not yet

[Opus4]

The UI overscan is not what's being referred to -- check out Detailed Setup -> Multimedia -> Aspect Ratio Settings. You can set different values for all 4 AR modes. If using an HD100, then you can create custom AR modes via the Options menu while playing a video.

- Andy

[zumpner]

There we go...perfect....for my satellite... It's just too bad it will effect my OTA Antenna which was working well without stretching.

Is there any way to set this tuner by tuner?

[bastian74]

Instead of stretching I used the vertical shift and shifted it down gradually until the flickering was gone. That way no other edges were cropped.

[zumpner]

I tried that...vertical shifted -11 to remove the garbage ... and then set vertical stretch to 102% to get rid of the black bar that was left from the vertical shift at the bottom.

After doing this, I switched over to my OTA turner. Now it's all jacked. Before I start tinkering again, does anybody know if you can adjust this tuner to tuner??