Old video frames flash back on 1080i programming?!?!

[TBacker]

I'm pulling my hair out on this one

When watching 1080i content, I'm getting old frames popping up again every few seconds. In other words, in video of someone walking through a door and across the screen, while they are walking across the screen, I'll get a one or two frame flash of them in the doorway from a few seconds ago. Now have that happen over and over - it's unwatchable.

720p content is fine ( as far as I have seen).

This is all from OTA recorded programming (2 Fusion HDTV5 cards & 1 HDHR).

I have tried:

• Different Sage MpegDemuxes, including the one from 6.4.8
• Different codecs (tried Cyberlink 8 for video, NVidia audio, etc.)
• Different drivers for the video card (178.24, 180.48)
• With FSE / Without FSE

I'm stumped. Did something video-wise change in this beta besides the demux?

Currently Running:

• 6.5.6 RC
• nVidia 9600GT video card with drivers 185.20
• PureVideo decoder
• AC3 audio decoder
• VMR9, 3D accel, FSE
• Windows XP SP3, 1 gig ram, Core2 Duo processor
• Sage in service mode with client on same machine
• 9600GT feeds the HDMI input on my 32" Panny CRT HDTV

[HelenWeathers]

I had this same problem with my nVidia 9600GT video card. My card was the silent one with the passive cooler. That was three months ago. I think I solved the problem by rolling back the drivers to 178.xx or so. I also had issues with cooling on that card and ended up with a third party (with fan) cooler on the card. I don't have the issue any more but I have since gone to Vista for the EVR rendering (I was using XP Pro with overlay video rendering before).

Do you have another video card you can try? Does this problem show up when you first fire up your computer or after it's been on for a while? Does the problem show up in other rendering modes?

Try rolling back the driver and if that fails I see troubleshooting in your future.

[TBacker]

Originally Posted by HelenWeathers

I had this same problem with my nVidia 9600GT video card. My card was the silent one with the passive cooler.

I've got the Gigabyte NX96T512HP, which is their passive cooled design. Barely fit in my full size HTPC case due to depth (heatpipes had pressed up against the power connector on my media drive).

Originally Posted by HelenWeathers

I think I solved the problem by rolling back the drivers to 178.xx or so. I also had issues with cooling on that card and ended up with a third party (with fan) cooler on the card.

Well, after staying up until the wee hours trying different things, I'm 90% there....

1. Tested more drivers. The nVidia cards are great once you go through your mandated 1 week driver swap hell. I had tested 4 WHQL releases before posting here. I ended up on an earlier beta, 177.26, last night.

2. This board comes from the factory overclocked at 720 MHz for the core, 1008 MHz for the memory. Being I'm using it for HTPC video only, I backed it down to the chipset default of 650 Mhz / 900 MHz for lower heat and max stability.

3. All Cyberlink 8 decoding - audio and video.

4. Old Sage MpegDemux from 6.4.8

5. VMR9 + FSE enabled

I have inverse telecine enabled on the card to smooth out the 1080i film-originated content that seems to dominate CBS's schedule. I also have edge enhancement on to compensate for some lack of sharpness on my 32" CRT Panny HDTV.

It was very late (or very early?), but the quick tests were promising More after the weekend...

[TBacker]

FWIW - Problems fixed.

With everything as in the previous post, I'm getting some of the best HD quality I ever have out of my system.

I have also switched to the .28 version of the SageDemux and it is finally working right!

Now all that's left is to get the mkv/h.264 to work 100% of the time...

[GTwannabe]

I had that problem with CBS-HD 1080i shows with my nVidia cards + hardware accelerated codecs. ATI cards also worked fine, but only with the ATI MPEG decoder.

EVR mode fixed my problems. I use the PDVD8 codec + EVR on all my Vista machines and now have silky smooth video. My laptop is XP, but it doesn't have enough CPU or GPU for HD, so I don't worry about it.

[TBacker]

Originally Posted by GTwannabe

EVR mode fixed my problems.

Getting OT, but...

Yeah - I've had evil thoughts about going to the dark side that is Vista. Between some of Vista's persistent warts, and the idea of spending 3 weeks of rebuilding and tuning the system after the shift, I haven't done it.

I think I'll be happy with this for a while. When I do my next OS change, it'll either be Windows 7, or to a server / extender topology.

[GTwannabe]

Originally Posted by TBacker

Getting OT, but...

Yeah - I've had evil thoughts about going to the dark side that is Vista. Between some of Vista's persistent warts, and the idea of spending 3 weeks of rebuilding and tuning the system after the shift, I haven't done it.

I think I'll be happy with this for a while. When I do my next OS change, it'll either be Windows 7, or to a server / extender topology.

You can try the XP-EVR hack. You don't get DXVA acceleration, but at least you can use EVR that way. I did it on my laptop, but the CPU (1.6ghz Dothan) is too wimpy for even SD video.

[mpogr]

I have a very similar problem: after a while, old video frames jump back and forth while audio is going on... Completely unwatchable. I had it on 1080i H264 recordings from my satellite provider (YES DBS Israel).
This happened in ANY media player (tried Sage, Zoomplayer and Windows Media Player), so it was clearly not Sage fault. After some trial and error, I figured out the following:
1. It happened only when using any codec having hardware acceleration support (tried Cyberlink 7.3, Cyberlink 8.0 and Elecard). When hardware acceleration was turned off, the phenomenon disappeared.
2. It happened only on computers with ATI-based video cards. I have it happening on both 2600 and 3650. My other computer, where this doesn't happen, has NVIDIA card (8800GTX) but that one doesn't have hardware acceleration for H264 content, so the comparison is not 100% correct.
This lead me to believe that this is caused by a bug in hadrware acceleration mechanism of the ATI drivers. However, with additional data points from here, it might be a bug in the codecs themselves after all, or maybe a combination of both.
The question is, how we can solve it? It's clearly not Sage fault, and seems like a solution for NVIDIA also has been found (rolling back to older drivers). However, I haven't had any luck with any ATI drivers (8.8 through 8.12), so I'm really clueless what to do. So far, my solution was using CoreAVC decoder for these programs (it doesn't use hardware acceleration), but it's not always powerful enough for producing smooth picture. And using Cyberlink without hardware acceleration is a complete suicide on my HTPC which has a relatively weak processor...

[TBacker]

This stuff is always a little bit of luck mixed with a bit of frustration and animal sacrifices to get working right, and as you pointed out, the solution is a bit different for everyone.

Unfortunately the best answers are expensive or daunting.

1. People seem to have fewer (notice I didn't say "have any") issues with Vista. I'd wait for Windows 7, but both need fairly beefy hardware to run on.

2. Run the decoders without DXVA, but you should have a very fast dual core, or even a decent quad core, to do so consistently with HD content. Again, $$$.

3. Go with the Sage HD extenders / server setup. People seem to like them, and seem to be happy with the video decoders in them. There are some issues with STV's and STVI's, and some audio limitations. The flip side is this approach would cost fewer $$$ than options 1 or 2 for 1 or 2 rooms of Sage.

4. My approach - tweak and adjust until blood is shooting out of my eyes. Not really cheap (I upgraded to the 9600GT card, and hate blood transfusions ), but so far it all works nicely.

What the world needs are a few video cards optimized ONLY for HTPC/HD video use, not gaming. The core and firmware would be optimized for HD video, perhaps even a hardware decoder for MPEG2 / 4 / h.264. It would be a bit more pricey, and we "HTPC'ers" are a small market, but I would imagine lower end professional video applications could use such a card as well. I'm sure higher end solutions exist, but I'm not an eccentric millionaire.

Also, I see more and more set-top solutions coming to market. They're not up to Sage's capabilities yet, but they're out there, so there must be some demand.

This will be the last video upgrade to my machine. In the future I'll probably just convert it to a server and get an extender or two. But then again, I like to tweak to my satisfaction than leave it the he11 alone and enjoy it once it's good.

Themes for SageMC, well that's another mental issue entirely

[mpogr]

Originally Posted by TBacker

This stuff is always a little bit of luck mixed with a bit of frustration and blood to get working right, and as you pointed out, the solution is a bit different for everyone.

Unfortunately the best answers are expensive or daunting.

1. People seem to have fewer (notice I didn't say "have any") issues with Vista. I'd wait for Windows 7, but both need fairly beefy hardware to run on.

2. Run the decoders without DXVA, but you should have a very fast dual core, or even a decent quad core, to do so consistently with HD content. Again, $$$.

3. Go with the Sage HD extenders / server setup. People seem to like them, and seem to be happy with the video decoders in them. There are some issues with STV's and STVI's, and some audio limitations. The flip side is this approach would cost fewer $$$ than options 1 or 2 for 1 or 2 rooms of Sage.

4. My approach - tweak and adjust until blood is shooting out of my eyes. Not really cheap (I upgraded to the 9600GT card), but so far it all works nicely.

This will be the last video upgrade to my machine. In the future I'll probably just convert it to a server and get an extender or two. But then again, I like to tweak to my satisfaction than leave it the he11 alone and enjoy it once it's good.

Themes for SageMC, well that's another mental issue entirely

I already use client/server setup. The whole point of HTPC is to be small and quiet as much as possible, that's why beefy CPU is not really an option here...
Extenders are fine, but the main problem with them is inability to extend their functionality beyond their basic design. So far, this affects two aspects that I really depend on:
1. Watching programs with embedded DVB subtitles. That's right, Sage doesn't support them even in the PC client, but I can use other players for content recorded with Sage (e.g. Media Portal) to get them displayed properly.
2. Watching full Bluray/HD DVD titles downloaded from the net, with full menus, choice of soundtracks and subtitles. You need some old build of Cyberlink PowerDVD 7.3 in order to watch them off HDD.
So, I'm stuck with a PC client with weak CPU. The reason I went for ATI cards is because their hardware acceleration in XP is much superior to NVIDIAs. And I really don't want to put Vista burden on this poor machine.

[TBacker]

Originally Posted by GTwannabe

You can try the XP-EVR hack. You don't get DXVA acceleration, but at least you can use EVR that way. I did it on my laptop, but the CPU (1.6ghz Dothan) is too wimpy for even SD video.

Been there, done that. It was on my old 7600GT card, but I had some strange luminance and jagged edge issue with it. Because it's kind of a hack to get EVR running on XP, I dropped it.

[TBacker]

Originally Posted by mpogr

So, I'm stuck with a PC client with weak CPU. The reason I went for ATI cards is because their hardware acceleration in XP is much superior to NVIDIAs. And I really don't want to put Vista burden on this poor machine.

Rock and a hard place, my friend. HD video is demanding for any system, which limit's our choices for hardware / software. Oh, and the video card and software manufacturers seem to help to limit our options too!

Unfortunately there are just so few hours in a day and so little money to burn

[jkohn]

Originally Posted by TBacker

Rock and a hard place, my friend. HD video is demanding for any system, which limit's our choices for hardware / software. Oh, and the video card and software manufacturers seem to help to limit our options too!

BluRay players have gotten under the $200 mark and don't have these problems. My Cable CO HD-DVR doesn't have problems with video performance either (though it has plenty of other problems). There's no reason a moderately capable HTPC shouldn't be able to play glitch-free video, but the software and drivers suck and the manufacturers don't seem concerned with fixing it. I guess they'd rather keep us chasing the holy grail with upgrade after upgrade.

[Taddeusz]

IMHO, the easiest way to get smooth HD playback is by going to Vista and use the EVR renderer in SageTV. I get flawless accelerated MPEG2 and H.264 video in SageTV on my client machine which is running Vista SP1 x64.

[mpogr]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

IMHO, the easiest way to get smooth HD playback is by going to Vista and use the EVR renderer in SageTV. I get flawless accelerated MPEG2 and H.264 video in SageTV on my client machine which is running Vista SP1 x64.

I'd wish my problems were solved just by going Vista. Unfortunately, it's a bit hard for me to conduct such an experiment.
Again, my problems don't pop up while playing any video. In fact, I haven't seen it on any downloaded content (and to the date I downloaded and watched >100 Blu Ray/HD-DVD titles, most with H264 video). It pops up only when watching programs recorded from my satellite provider. Seems like something in these files structure is triggering this.

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by mpogr

I'd wish my problems were solved just by going Vista. Unfortunately, it's a bit hard for me to conduct such an experiment.
Again, my problems don't pop up while playing any video. In fact, I haven't seen it on any downloaded content (and to the date I downloaded and watched >100 Blu Ray/HD-DVD titles, most with H264 video). It pops up only when watching programs recorded from my satellite provider. Seems like something in these files structure is triggering this.

Do you have a sample you can upload somewhere?

[mpogr]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

Do you have a sample you can upload somewhere?

Sure, I have plenty of those. I can even create a short piece (say, 1 minute, which should be in tens of megs size) and upload it somewhere.
I'll figure out where I can put it and post a sample link here later.