Easy Performance Increase for Hauppauge Users

[Narflex]

I just found a nifty registry setting that cut my CPU usage in half and made the deinterlacing beautiful when using the Intervideo NonCSS Video Decoder for Hauppauge as the selected Video Decoder in SageRecorder/SageTV.

I'd highly recommend trying this if you have the Hauppauge hardware; I'd also like to hear results. The only requirement is that your video card has some sort of MPEG2 acceleration. Nearly all of them do now.

Just change these registry settings to 1 while SageTV is asleep or you're not watching video in SageRecorder, or they both are shutdown:

HKLM\Software\Intervideo\Custom\Hauppauge\VideoDec\Dxva
HKLM\Software\Intervideo\Custom\Hauppauge\VideoDec\Hwmc

For the newer decoders the location is:

HKLM\Software\IviSDK4Hauppauge\Common\VideoDec\Dxva
HKLM\Software\IviSDK4Hauppauge\Common\VideoDec\Hwmc

[edmc]

Another thing that helped me was to decrease the quality a notch (from 3GB/hr down to 2GB/hr). Can't tell the difference on my 480p LCD RPTV and it operates smoother from my cursory viewing.

I'm running a "lowly" 1.6GHz P4. Maybe with these settings, I'll be able to go back up to the 3GB/hr quality...

Will post my results later tonight...

[SHS]

Keep mind in that this only useful with some video card not all.
The video must support DxVA (DirectX Video Acceleration) and HwMC (Hardware Motion Compensation) Like let say nVidia GeForce4 Go/MX Series cards

Some other stuff
MicroSoft DirectX
VPE (Video Port Extensions)
DxVA (DirectX Video Acceleration)

nVidia
VPE (Video Processing Engine) Think DScaler

MPEG Stuff
All Video support start with first SVGA card.
CSC (Color Space Conversion)

Some support one or two or all
MC (Motion Compensation) or HwMC (Hardware Motion Compensation)
iDCT (inverse Discrete Cosine Transform)
IQ (Inverse Quantization)

No video card support this
VLD (Variable Length Decode)

[JJarmoc]

Doesn't DxVA also require Directx 9?

[Narflex]

Nope. DirectX9 is not required for DXVA.

[SHS]

DxVA require DirectX 8 and Video drv that support it.

[edmc]

DxVA is also required for HD S/W Decoders like DViCo's FusionHDTV I (unless you are willing to live with quarter-resolution and have a very fast CPU).

[edmc]

I did discover that I was set to Default for the Video/Audio Renderers. I switched to the InterVideo NonCSS Video/Audio Renderers - no apparent difference so I guess the "Merit System" was already selecting those....

But I did not see a repeatable difference with flipping these settings. It seems the TaskMgr's Performance Numbers are very content dependent. I suppose I could playback the same content of a pre-recorded program, but even that would be hard to get accurate readings. But in no way did I see a 50% reduction in CPU Utilization.

In any event, watching a colorful music video in either mode consumed around 30% of my 1.6GHz Pentium4 CPU.

[laurenglenn]

I gave it a try and noticed that the video seems smoother in terms of frame rate. It just looked like I was watching regular TV. No problems as of yet.

BTW, I'm running XP with an Athlon 1400 and 768MB of RAM. The video card is a Radeon 8500LE and I have a PVR-250

[comprat]

Originally posted by Narflex
I just found a nifty registry setting that cut my CPU usage in half and made the deinterlacing beautiful when using the Intervideo NonCSS Video Decoder for Hauppauge as the selected Video Decoder in SageRecorder/SageTV.

I'd highly recommend trying this if you have the Hauppauge hardware; I'd also like to hear results. The only requirement is that your video card has some sort of MPEG2 acceleration. Nearly all of them do now.

Just change these registry settings to 1 while SageTV is asleep or you're not watching video in SageRecorder, or they both are shutdown:
HKLM\Software\Intervideo\Custom\Hauppauge\VideoDec\Dxva
HKLM\Software\Intervideo\Custom\Hauppauge\VideoDec\Hwmc

Let me know how it goes, I just found this out a little while ago.

Thanks,

I went to try this, but there is no "Intervideo" folder on my computer in the registry paths you gave. I am running WinXP and have a PVR-350 card. What gives?

Thanks!

[laurenglenn]

Originally posted by comprat
I went to try this, but there is no "Intervideo" folder on my computer in the registry paths you gave. I am running WinXP and have a PVR-350 card. What gives?

Thanks!

Go to this site ( http://www.hauppauge.com/html/sw_pvr_250.htm ) and download the newest version of the Hauppauge Video Decoder. Hopefully that will install the WinDVD decoder and the registry keys for you.

Lauren

[comprat]

Originally posted by laurenglenn
Go to this site ( http://www.hauppauge.com/html/sw_pvr_250.htm ) and download the newest version of the Hauppauge Video Decoder. Hopefully that will install the WinDVD decoder and the registry keys for you.

Lauren

Thanks laurenglenn, that did the trick! I probably should have thought of that first, but I just figured I already had it installed. I was fiddling with the Hauppauge software trying to get my scheduler to work right. Guess I must of uninstalled it then. That was before I found out about SageTV.

Anyway, I changed the settings but it did not seem to decrease my CPU usage. It still hovers around 35-40%, although my video is output via my PVR-350 instead of my videocard. Hopefully we will be able to disable the local video through SageTV soon. I am running WinXP, Athlon XP 1800, 768MB RAM, Hauppauge PVR-350, Ti4200 Nvidia GeForce 4.

comprat

[jw1248]

mine had both old and new registry settings.
changing the old registry settings had no effect.
after changing new registry settings, got a 33% cpu decrease

for geforce2 and p4 2.4

sagetv 45% cpu
w/ hack 35% cpu
no sagetv 15% cpu

overall a 33% decrease

[ditohead]

I'm a recent convert to Sage and the PVR-250. I just received my hardware bundle from Frey yesterday, so I'm still fumbling around trying to figure stuff out. Previously I had the ATI 8500DV. I was not at all pleased with its picture quality or the fact that my PC was pretty much useless because of CPU utilization when trying to record something with it. That's when I found the great info here and decided to give Sage and the PVR-250 a try. After getting everything hooked up and installed last night from the bundle I can say that the picture quality is awesome compared to what I had before and my computer is still very useable even while watching/recording.

The reason I'm responding here is because I tried the hack mentioned above but did not see any difference on my system. I have a Pentium 4 1.6 with 256mb ram and nvidia card (I'll have to look up the model number later). My cpu utilization hovers around 60% with only SageTV running both with and without the hack. I see a post from edmc above where he has the same cpu with much lower cpu utilization, so my problem must not be the cpu. Any other ideas on how I could lower my cpu utilization?

[dkardatzke]

I'm assuming you have the Intervideo NonCSS decoder selected in Detailed Setup > Video? If so, have you tried the different Modes, A,B,C,D to see if there's any difference?

[ditohead]

Thanks for the quick follow-up.

Yes, I have the Intervideo NonCSS decoder selected in Detailed Setup. I have not yet tried the different modes but will give them a try tonight. I'll let you know what happens.

[ditohead]

I tried the different modes this evening both with and without the hack and none of them made any difference. In fact, with the hack in place and trying the different modes I received the error message "There was an error with the MPEG-2 video setup. Failed connecting MPEG2 video stream using DirectX Video Acceerlation media type. ErrCode=0x80070057" and had audio but no video.

Don't know if this makes any difference or not... I am running Windows XP Professional. For rendering filter if I use "Overlay" sometimes I only see a small portion of what is being broadcast and do not see any more of it even if I resize the window. Other times with "Overlay" for the rendering filter I see the entire screen. With "Overlay", my CPU utilization hovers around 40%, but obviously it is a problem if I do not consistently see the full screen. If I use the "Default (Uses VMR on XP)" rendering filter I consistently see the full screen but that's when my utilization hovers around 60%.

[ditohead]

Should have mentioned in my previous post that I have ONLY tried the hack with the "Default (Uses VMR on XP)" rendering filter. I have not yet tried it with the "Overlay" rendering filter since I have had some inconsistency with that one.

[Mike Young]

From my experience, once you enable the Hack the intervideo will ONLY work in VMR mode. Dont know if that holds true for your setup, I have also found that only Default mpeg mode and default interlacing will work, but the quality is real nice and CPU util. should be in the 10% range.
also make sure you dont have both sets of registry keys and edited only one :

HKLM\Software\Intervideo\Custom\Hauppauge\VideoDec
\Dxva
HKLM\Software\Intervideo\Custom\Hauppauge\VideoDec
\Hwmc

For the newer decoders the location is:

HKLM\Software\IviSDK4Hauppauge\Common\VideoDec\Dxv
a
HKLM\Software\IviSDK4Hauppauge\Common\VideoDec\Hwm
c


Also, I have noticed sometimes you have to close Sage down and restart to get the setting to take, particularly when you have changed codec or rendering mode.

[ditohead]

Thanks for the input. Yes, I checked for both sets of reg keys but only had the new ones. I don't know what I was doing the past couple of days that had the "overlay" rendering filter behaving inconsistently, but now it is not giving me any problems. And my cpu utilization now hovers around 30% while watching live or recorded TV with the rendering filter set to "overlay" and with the hack applied when. The "Default (Uses VMR on XP)" setting still gives me around 60% utilization when watching live or recorded TV. I have also tried all of the different "mode" options with the "overlay" rendering filter (no errors for any of them) but none of them made any difference. 30% is a lot better than 60% but I'd still like to get it lower.