Poor quality in LiveTV - not Sage specific though...(long)

[rotaryracer]

SUCCESS!

First, I want to thank you all for advice, insight, and tips - my fancy new HTPC came pretty close to being an expensive Frisbee the other night!

Anyhoo, a few things I learned. First, the local college TV station (what was showing up in LiveTV because I hadn't remapped the Dish channels) is probably not the best standard to be using when trying to compare cable to HTPC LiveTV. I watched a few minutes of that channel on straight cable tonight and it's a pretty crappy picture in general. I went and remapped a couple of channels (Comedy Central, Discovery, etc.) to play around with - channels I knew had decent signals. This right off the bat made a HUGE difference. I'm such a 'tard.

Second, the Elecard decoder with dScaler plugins ROCKS! I did try the suggestion to use the Adaptive plugin, but found it to be grainy and "jaggy", although YMMV and this IS on a PC monitor, not a TV. Right now I'm using Elecard with dScaler on default. I did try playing with a few of the other selections besides Adaptive and quite honestly couldn't find any I liked as well as default. I may spend some time going through ALL of 'em, but so far life is good.

Finally, I switched to Default/VMR rather than Overlay. That seemed to smooth out the video quite a bit as well. I flipped back and forth and definitely prefer VMR, although it does "letterbox" my LiveTV window. Hopefully when I move the HTPC up to the 16x9 TV, this is something I can goof with Powerstrip.

Thanks again for the assistance - I'm back in the game now and EAGERLY awaiting Sage Studio and v2.0! Once I can call up the various Sage modules from myHTPC, that will be complete and total HTPC NIRVANA!

Now, back to playing with Sage......

[StylinLP]

Awesome Rotaryracer. I'm going to to the same thing this weekend. Use Elecard and Dscaler. Im glad to hear that default works (what ever that means heh) I havnt read how to use either of those prgrams yet. I will try to read Dscaler tonight.

I assume you just "choose" Elecard as a codex in the SageTV video menu drop down list.

[rotaryracer]

Yep, Elecard as the video decoder, which lights up the ability to use dScaler to deinterlace. Click that. There's a bunch of various filters to use with dScaler - I'm using default now, but you can play around and see what works best for you. There are 2 other options under dScaler, something about double the refresh rate and odd frame first (I'm not in front of my HTPC, but I think that's right). When I checked those, the pic got worse, so they're unchecked now.

I also tried the Hauppauge and NVDVD decoders (can't use dScaler), and noticed more artifacts and generally poorer PQ than Elecard/dScaler.

[dkardatzke]

Keep in mind that using Double Refresh Rate requires a lot more CPU power to handle the decoding. I originally tried it on my Celeron 1.4 Ghz machine and it wasn't powerful enough. Of course now I use the Hauppauge Intervideo decoder with the registry hacks and that works like a charm.

[StylinLP]

President and CEO with only a Celeron cpu? hehe
Maybe I should send you my old AMD 1700 cpu and MB i have laying around *grin*

But what your saying is that if someone DOES have the horsepower then they would benefit from something like Elecard Dscaler rather than the Hauppauge Inervideo decoder?

[rotaryracer]

Hmmmm....I've got an AMD 2500 "Barton" with 1GB of RAM. It's not bleeding edge, but I'd hope I have enough juice to try some different things!

Does the double refresh rate supposed to improve PQ on a TV, monitor, or both? I wanted to try using the Hauppauge decoder with the registry hacks, but couldn't actually find the directories/entries where the hacks were supposed to go (and yes, I've worked in the registry before). I am using the drivers from www.shspvr.com rather than the CD that came with my PVR - is there other software I need to install to enable the registry hacks? I'd like to try the Hauppauge decoders as well and see how they work.

Thanks!

[mlbdude]

You need to install the Intervideo deocrders. If you are using newer drivers, then you can download them from the Hauppauge website.

[dkardatzke]

Why upgrade the Celeron when I never use more than 30% of the CPU while recording two channels at once and playing a third program back! That's the beauty of hardware encoding, all I need now is to use a PVR-350 to drop the CPU usage to nothing...