playback problems with 3.11

[zumafan]

Hi all,

I'm having some trouble getting the new Sage beta going, was wondering if anyone has any input. I have a working sage 2.8 running on a toshiba laptop, but I am setting this up on an older PIII 733 (specs below).

1) When I watch live TV, the picture essentially freezes, sound comes in distorted bursts and the CPU shoots up to 100% and Sage is REALLY slow to respond. This is the BEST configuration I can come up with. totally unwatchable.

2) When I watch avi's or previously recorded TV mpeg's, the sound is fine but the top half of the screen has a flickering white ghost image of prior frames from the currently playing file. Sage responds just fine but the files are also unwatchable. I can watch them fine on the other sage pc.

3) I've changed the video and audio settings so many times I'm getting confused. Sometimes I change the settings and Sage no longer recognizes the hauppauge and I have to reinstall drivers and sage. argh!
I have a lot of options for video and audio decoders:

Video:
a) Sage
b) Intervideo Non-css
c) Intervideo

Audio (what's the difference between these?)
a) Soundblaster Live
b) Default Waveout device
c) Default DirectSound device
d) DirectSound: Soundblaster Live

Does anyone have any insight? I'm stumped, but hoping to move Sage to the other machine so I can get my laptop back! (is it do-able?)

Let me know if I can provide any other info, or if this post is not in the right place!

Specs:
PIII 733 - 640MB RAM
10GB C: drive w/ 6MB free
120GB HD w/ 64k blocks
Windows XPSP2 (fresh install, nothing else on it)
ATI 3D Rage Pro PCI (svid out)
Hauppauge PVR USB2 w/ 45 button remote (USB2 PCI card)
Sound Blaster Live! 24bit
Intervideo 7
Sage 3.11


Thanks for any insight!

[Thomas Wischgol]

My first guess would be that your processor is not fast enough. My first HTPC had a Via Eden C3 processor running at 600 MHz (also with the Hauppauge WinTV PVR USB2) and the processor alone was not able to play video smoothly. It seemed that a few more MHz would have done the job. But enabling hardware mpeg decoding helped a lot to get much better results. Are you sure you enabled hardware decoding? For the S3 chipset on the Eden you had so set some registry values and use the Intervideo decoder; I do not know how this works with the ATI Rage. Maybe enabling VMR9 does the trick.

[zumafan]

VMR9 doesn't seem to do anything. Can anyone help me determine how to enable hardware decoding? My impression was that it wasn't possible with the PVR-USB2. There is just so much information out there that I'm not sure where to go next.

I've read that most people seem to be running fine with a PIII-600 level chip, as long as there is enough RAM.

[Thomas Wischgol]

The PVR-USB2 uses hardware encoding automatically in Sage so that should be fine. But on the decoding end your system might need some hints. I never used the ATI Rage 3D. Back then when I tried to get my S3 Unichrome chipset I googled a lot until I found those registry settings that enabled hardware decoding.

[zumafan]

Cool thanks I'll check it out!