Long story short....

[Scott Martinez]

So I was in Compusa buying some inkjet paper when I saw what seemed like an affordable over the air HD card. $99 for the HVR-1600. I thought sweet! I even checked to make sure it would work with SageTV that I've used for the last few years. (since version 4) I just paid for the upgrade for 6 a day or so before and was excited for some HD.

On my way home I swung by radio shack for an HD antenna. I found a nice on that I could mount outside where my satellite dish used to be. I could use the existing cabling as well. So my running total is about $180 in upgrades.

I had two PVR-150's installed and took one of them out. Put the HVR-1600 and went through configuring it. After consulting the forum I found out that I could use the HD side or the cable side of the card but not both. Thats coming out in SageTV 6.1. No big deal. I can wait. Well I fiddled with the antenna and got the HD channels to show up in my lineup. Next I tried tunning into a station. While the picture quality looked good. The picture stuttered. Shoot...

Well, I should have looked on the forum but I checked the CPU usuage first and it was a steady 100%. Time for a CPU upgrade.

No big deal, I had a celeron 2.5ghz and I was able to get my hands on a P4 3.2 for $150. (running total $320)

After a quick test at the shop my CPU at 40 to 50% running HD on a computer monitor. It was still choppy.

I finally went to the forums. It looked like my Radeon 9000 card that I was using the s-video card might be out of date. I went to Best Buy and looked around and saw everything is a new slot I was not familiar with. PCI express? I don't have that. Well I did find a Radeon X1050 for $105. DVI out and HD resolutions. Sounded like a good bang for the buck. Bonus it had not fan. (running total is now $430)

So I am feeling a little bit of buyers remorse at this point but I put the card in and plugged into the HDMI input on my Sony 4:3/HD monitor. I found that 1280x720 looked pretty good. I can do 1080 but it flickers like hell. At least I was digitally connected.

I fired up SageTV and went to a HD channel to see if all is well and all is not.

Forums again. SageTV might be broken for some and working for others. I wondered what to do next. Let me know if this is right but in order to really watch HD I need to get a h.264 codec to use the hardware acceleration on the x1050? I can't get that from ATI. I have to get with Ahead's Nero.

OK, well they have a 30 day free trial so I downloaded that. I had an OEM version of Nero already installed and the trial version had to uninstall that. Now when the trial version went to install it asked me for a serial number. My OEM version was filled in and reported that as outdated.

It looks like that Nero wont let you do a trial when you already had another product installed. So I tried editing the registry. Found a Nero clean up tool. Even stumbled across a serial that worked but gave me errors when It tried to install some HD type .dll files. The program then reported that it was a pirated copy so then I uninstalled it. Shoot... At this point I don't know what to do. The computer is now shutting down randomly and I am about to throw it though the window. I did a system recovery and went back to yesterday.

Well, should l buy a news version of Nero. It looks like the upgrade is about $68 Is this a Hardware acceleration thing? Is it a buggy SageTV 6? I don't have a copy of 5 anywhere and it looks like Sage does not make older versions available. I've spent way to much time and money on this and am thinking about returning everything minus the CPU.

Help?

-Scott

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Scott Martinez

Let me know if this is right but in order to really watch HD I need to get a h.264 codec to use the hardware acceleration on the x1050?

No, OTA HD is MPEG-2 only. H.264 only applies if you're getting your HD from satellite (ie an R5000).

What decoders are you using?

[Scott Martinez]

I've tried what came with the program. SageTV, overlay and default. I have the renderer set to VMR9 but have tried the default. Is there something else I should try? An mpeg2 codec pack? Is the purevideo just for Gforce cards? I am using a Radeon X1050.

[Scott Martinez]

I found a 30 day trial on the nvidia site for the purevideo codec and downloaded it. It seems to work well in overlay mode and no stuttering. I am a happy camper!

My only question is should I trade up to a Gforce card like the 256 meg 6200 for my setup. I kind of think I am going to leave well enough alone.

-Scott

[stanger89]

I probably wouldn't bother updating unless you were going to make the jump to something like a 6600GT, 7600GT or 7950GT.