NEW USER - Video issues - need basic help

[pgman]

I build my media center about five months ago (maybe a little before that). I tried all the DVR / media shells I could find. I decided to go with Sage because it worked the best on my machine. I am still doing SD through my S-Video OUT to my old Hitachi CRT. An HD display is still a year away. So far, I am THOROUGHLY enjoying SageTV and the freedom it gives my family to watch TV as we want.

The whole time I have used this system, however, I have had small "buggy" video issues. In the beginning, the video was "strobing" (for lack of a better word). It almost looked like the system was dropping frames to keep up. I am using an MSI 945P Neo motherboard (Intel 945P chipset) and P4 3.0 HT processor. I have 1GB of DDR2 RAM and two SATA HDDs inside (one for OS, the second for DVR). I also have a PVR500MCE tuner card, an Audigy ZS audio board and an ATI Radeon X600 Pro PCIe video board with 256MB video RAM. The OS is WinXP Pro SP2. I wouldn't think this system would lack the performance to deliver smooth video - at least not SD. I never could get this problem to completely go away, though. I tried newer (if not different) drivers for both my PVR500MCE and the ATI X600 Pro. At one point (after loading a newer driver from ATI) the problem changed. Now, on fast action scenes - especially fast panning - the top and bottom halves of my screen splits. One half lags behind the other by a frame or two (at least). This is particularly noticable if there are flames, smoke or water in the shot.

Tonight, a lightning storm moved through the area and after it passed, my local VGA computer monitor - connected to the VGA out of the X600 Pro graphics board (the main TV is connected to the S-Video out of this card) seems to be dead. The monitor acts as if it is not getting a signal from the computer (the pilot light stays yellow - it normally turns green when the computer is on). At first I thought the whole video board was dead but the S-Video output still works. So, the main TV is now my ONLY display. This makes maintenance and adjustments rather difficult. My old Hitach still does a decent job with NTSC but the Windows desktop looks pretty bad. Needless to say, I think I need to replace the X600 with something else and I am not sure what to buy.

Sorry for the long post, but does anyone have any thoughts on any of this? I will try to clarify if anyone wants to respond and needs more info. I know a fair bit about the PC hardware but this video-intensive stuff is new to me and I am not sure how to even ask the right questions.

[Dalhectar]

One thing that I noticed with video card drivers is that it's often better to uninstall and reinstall than just using the install unitility to install without removing the driver from the add-remove programs.

Also depending on your coputer you'll have a choice of different MPEG2 decoders to use. Your computer or ATi card migth have come with PowerDVD, and that's one option. Lots of people go with nVidia, Sage includes its own, there's ffdshow, etc. Trying different decodes combined with different output settings (VMR9, VMR7, overlay) and 3d acceleration will effect the speed. Also defragmenting, and using larger clusers on your storage drive will help out too.

My current sage mahcine has a x300, and it's painful to watch how slow it is in VMR9 mode, but I like the transperency effect. I'm soon gonna get a silent 7600gs and that should allow me to run Sage's transperanc effects much smoother.

Any of the mid range products should work well for a replacement video card. 6600GT, 7600GS, x1600 series all would work pretty well for HD and SD playback.

[dbfresh23]

Well, it sounds like a monitor is what you need, not a video card. If the Svideo is still working there is a good chance that vga still works. Do you see the boot screen when the pc is booting up? Can you see an osd menu on the monitor? If so is there any reset feature in it?

I would start by replacing the monitor, pick one up at a local store, if that doesn't fix it then bring it back and exchange it for a new video card.

[blade]

I agree with dbfresh, try a new monitor first. As for the tearing my guess is either the decoder you're using or you don't have something setup quite right with your dual displays.

[pgman]

First of all, THANK YOU for the input. I sincerely appreciate it.

I thought about it being the monitor. The thing that is weird is that the "CHECK CABLE" message shows up bright and clear when I disconnect the VGA cable from the computer - it just won't show anything else. After I thought about it some more, I realized that this ONLY means that the CRT circuits are still working. It doesn't necessarily mean that the video circuits are functional. That, and the fact that this monitor is really old should have given me some clue. By the way, I do see the boot screen on my TV but nothing on the VGA monitor. The only other monitor I have in the house is the wife's 19" CRT on her computer. I guess I should suck it up and haul that into the living room to make sure I don't buy something I don't need. As for the other suggestions, THANK YOU for those. I will try switching decoders and uninstall / reinstall the ATI driver. Thanks again for the help. I will post back when I find out what is what.

[pgman]

Well, it WAS the monitor - good call. Since I was working on the system anyway, I went ahead an re-formatted / re-loaded the OS because I had previously tried just about all the DVR / PVR software out there before I decided to buy SageTV. There were a number of reasons for my decision to do this - really wierd stuff like my Windows screen saver wouldn't work anymore. Anyway, after re-loading WinXP and SP2 I updated ALL the hardware drivers and then loaded Sage. Everything seemed to be going right.

I still have some "tearing" on fast-motion, but I have been able to reduce this dramatically (to almost nothing) by setting all the 3D parameters in my ATi Catalyst software to "performance" instead of "quality". I have not yet had a chance to try any other MPEG decoders, either, so this may still have more potential. I did notice, also, that the PQ on my NTSC monitor improved significantly after the re-load as well (probably the newer GFX driver).

Now, however, I have a different problem. Twice since the re-load, I have lost all my television channels above 13 - completely at random, it seems. The only way I can get them back is to un-install my WinPVR-500MCE and then re-install it AND SageTV. I don't know what to do now. I tried rolling the Happauge driver back to the one it came with and this didn't seem to make any difference. Is this a SageTV issue? I sent an official request to Sage about this already but I don't know how soon they will respond. SageTV was so stable before with a hacked-up OS - despite the little issues I was having - I would never have guessed I'd have these issues with a clean OS install.

Any ideas? Thanks.

[gplasky]

Make sure you have both tuners configured the same EPG source and for cable input. It sounds like one of them may be set for OTA (over the air) instead of cable.

Gerry