Closed Captions and Skylake/Kaby Lake

[hoosierengineer]

After many years of experimenting, I have SageTV client working with no video card, using both Skylake and Kaby lake processors from Intel. I haven't documented the entire journey, so a couple of things might be missing, but here are some key items:

1. The only CODEC I have found that renders closed captioning (CC)/subtitles is SageTV MPEG Video Decoder. SageTV MPEG Video Decoder uses DXVA (hardware acceleration) might need to be enabled.

2. Sage version 9.x does not seem to have options for SageTV MPEG Video Decoder in Video/Audio > MPEG2 Video Decoder Filter. Simply uninstall SageTV, install version 7, and then re-install version 9.

In several instances, my computer seemed to freeze while automatically downloading some Windows updates that Sage requires (sorry, I don't remember exactly what it was, some helper application). It took > 8 hours (around 24, possibly) for the Microsoft servers to finish up. Don't reboot your computer if it seems to have hung up, or you might need to start back at bare metal with a fresh operating system installation.

[hoosierengineer]

Additionally, I seem to have had success running SageTV under both Windows 7 and Windows 10 with Kaby Lake. I have seen claims that Kaby Lake might have problems with Windows 7, but this does not seem to be the case.

[Tiki]

The Sage MPEG decoder was a licensed product (royalties paid) and could not be released as part of the Open Source package. If you already have a copy installed from a paid version of Sage, it will continue to work with the open source version of Sage (v9), but it can't be included with the v9 installer.

i think the issue with Kaby Lake on Windows 7 is that Microsoft and Intel will not be updating their Win7 drivers to take advantage of new features in Kaby Lake and newer processors. They will probably still mostly work using the older drivers, but for example some of the new power saving / performance features won't be supported. I'm not sure how that might impact newer GPU features.

I think they reversed their position on Sky Lake and did add driver support for that processor to Win7 (though previously they said they wouldn't).