Help me get running with ATI hardware?

[Syscrush]

Good day. First, let me say that I read the FAQ & the troubleshooting portion of the guide, and I came on here and did a search. I found the guide & FAQ unhelpful, and the search turned up a massive thread about the Theatre 550 chipset stuff. For an open-source or shareware project, I'd consider wading through the forums to get support, but not for a commercial product.

Next let me say that SageTV is so far the most promising of the PVR solutions I've looked at. Although that's not saying much - the list of problems with the PowerCinema 3.0 software bundled with my ATI hardware, and with MediaPortal is WAY too long to include here. I'm optimistic that SageTV can be made to work in a manner that meets my needs - I just hope it's before 11:05 ET tonight, because I totally need to record the first episode of The Ultimate Fighter 2.

On to the problem description:

I've got my PC built - an AMD Athlon 64 3000+, 1GB RAM, 200GB HD, ATI 256MB Radeon x700 Pro driving a 19" cheapie from FutureShop as the primary monitor, and a 15" widescreen ProView as the secondary monitor, and an ATI TV Wonder Elite tuner/capture card. I'm running WinXP Pro.

I went through setup, and the app and service seem to run OK, but I can not watch TV. BTW - what's up with not having a menu item for "Watch TV"? I screwed around with the app, thinking I had missed setup steps or something, read the manual, going back and forth until I finally found out - OH - it's CTRL+V!

Anyhow, back to the problem.

Screen is black, and there is no sound. This is the closest thing to this problem that I managed to find in the guide:

I get sound, but my Video is black.

• You might not be using a supported capture card. Please check our System Requirements page.
• Go to the display settings for your video card. You more than likely have the Overlay surface set to be on the monitor only, so video will show up as black on your TV.
• Make sure you have a Video Decoder installed and selected in your Detailed Setup -> Video. Try a different Video Decoder. Also try uninstalling SageTV and deleting the Frey Technologies folder. Reinstall SageTV. In V2 you can also try disabling Overlay Color Keying.

HUH? :P The Theatre 550 IS listed as a supported capture device on the SageTV System Requirements. I hunted around the display settings for my card - I found some stuff about Overlay, but nothing about it being "set to be on the monitor only" - no idea what this means. And what different video decoder could/should I be using? And how would an uninstall/reinstall help? Does the SageTV installer need practice setting up the app correctly.

Note that I am able to watch TV using PowerCinema and MediaPortal, so I'm pretty disappointed that SageTV is lagging here.

Note also that I'll be trying out BeyondTV while I wait for an answer to these probs.

Take it easy,
Phil.

[thatdude90210]

Some things to check for:

Sounds like you're running trial version, 2.2x version, which means you need this file to run the theater 550 pro: link.

try switching from overlay to vmr9

try another video decoder.

[jamjam]

Not sure if applies to Sage but it definatley applies to media player and power dvd. Some video cards cannot display video on both the primary and seondary displays at the same time. I "think" this is when the video is in overlay mode. I'm not sure, I only know when I changed the TV to the primary monitor video apeared.

HTH

JJ

[Syscrush]

Thanks for the pointers.

I will say this - the 550 support has been available since March, and it's not part of the distribution? Shame on Sage!

I don't know or care what VMR9 is - initally I just want a working product.

There's only one video decoder installed on my machine and I have no idea where to look for another.

The lack of support for Canadian listings in the main distribution is ridiculous.

BeyondTV worked out of the box, supports my remote, and costs less.

See ya,
Phil.