Trying to play Video Essentials DVD with SageTV

[StylinLP]

I just bought the DVD called Digital Video Essentials. I played it successfully with Theater Tek to set the Plasma levels but SageTV will not play this DVD> I tried every DVD settings DVD has with no success. Something about encrypted mpeg2 coding. Is this DVD protection coded that SageTV cant play?

I did the Hauppauge registery hack and didn't see much improvemnt if any in image quality. So the next best thing to do is try to set the SageTV video levels with the Video Essentials DVD. Wonderfull tool.

[Narflex]

I've used it to calibrate my system, and I know many others have. You shouldn't have problems using the AVIA DVD. If you do, reboot your machine and try again.

[StylinLP]

errr. I guess I should try playing a normal DVD movie and test that it works.

[Sailn]

What codec are you using? The Haupauge Card codec is a non-CSS codec and will not play encrypted DVDs. Have you installed any dvd player software on your machine? If so, select the codec from that to use for dvd playback. I have the dvd and it works fine.

[StylinLP]

ohh..thats whats wrong. I do have Theater Tek which uses the Sonic filters. I will try playing that. I assumed that playing a DVD with Hauppauge non-CSS codex is what we should use to set video levels. Or maybe what the other thread suggested is to use an external dvd player to set the video levels of the hauppauge. So it doesnt matter which codex we use to set video levels?

[edmc]

> I've used it to calibrate my system, and I know many others have.
> You shouldn't have problems using the AVIA DVD.

I believe the original poster is referring to the just-released "Digital Video Essentials". This new disk uses a fairly large amount of the navigation standard for DVDs. As such, there are a number of titles on the disk and one is often required to change channels/chapters to get to the necessary content. Not only that, but the disk makes use of some sort of Pause feature which confuses S/W DVD Players - i.e. Sage, ZoomPlayer, etc... have a Play/Pause toggle and think they know which mode is currently executing on the DVD. For instance, when I get to that Pause Point, pressing Play doesn't do anything in ZoomPlayer because ZP thinks it is already playing. Much discussion of the issues with DVE is evident over on the AVS DVD forum if you are interested...

In short, I don't think the problems are Sage-specific...