Placeshifter, new install Questions

[dealsdyker]

Sage is newly installed on WHS in the basement. I have a Windows Vista computer hooked to the TV and installed Placeshifter. It was horrible. Dual core AMD and each processor pegged at 100% and video was completely unwatchable.... just awful. This computer used to run sage rather well (when the computer was formatted with XP). Well that was a year ago and since then I installed Vista.

So I reinstalled XP and the same (current) version of java and now sage displays video OK although for the first three to 10 seconds there is a bit of skipping. Once it is moving it moves along nice and only one processor goes to 30-40%, the other one stays at 0%. So that's great. However, on HD content the sound is kinda quiet. When I had sage on it before I could put the AC3 filter but I see nowhere to set that option on Placeshifter. I now understand that is a difference between Sage Client and Placeshifter (ability to use filters and codecs vs. just using overlay).

Question #1: So is there any other way to gain-up the sound... other than making sure that the XP sound in control panel is turned all the way up (or installing the Sage client instead of Placeshifter)?

Question #2: So the watching at the beginning being stuttery for around 10 seconds... and When watching live TV with it actually being as live as possible, I get a lot of stuttering... it is unwatchable. Processor is not maxed out. If it is a recorded show, or if I hit "pause" for 45 seconds then resume watching the live show being recorded (with 45 second delay) it plays fine. Is this expected? Is there some setting to increase the buffer of something... somewhere? the 3d-acceleration checkbox seems to have no affect.

Question #3: Is it possible to turn in the Placeshifter license for a license of Sage Client instead? I doubt it but thought I'd ask. Probably not because it is the included placeshifter that comes with the Sage WHS license.

TIA.

[BFisher]

I'm not an expert, but something sounds wrong to me. Are you running PS on a LAN? Then why is the server CPU having issues? It should be feeding it through as-is, no transcoding...

I transcode HD via PS over WAN (when I'm in hotels, etc) and don't see that much CPU usage

[dealsdyker]

I wasn't clear above. Sage is installed on the Basement WHS server. I watch upstairs on the computer hooked to the 50" TV. The server CPU is hardly utilized at all. Are you saying that on my dual core that I watch TV on (where I run placeshifter) that 30%-40% cpu on one core (15-20% total between the two cores) is high for 720p content? The video card on the PS machine is a 7600GS that was more than capable when I was running full Sage on that machine.

Anyway, still wondering about the questions above.