Reduced playback resolution with SageTV MPEG Video Decoder after v9 upgrade

[BACON]

I have SageTV Server and Client installations on separate computers that I finally upgraded in-place from licensed v7.1.9 to v9.1.2.662 via their respective installers, and then to v9.1.4.676. I receive over-the-air HD broadcasts, so all of my recordings are MPEG-2 PS. The upgrade appeared to take place without issue, however I've noticed on both computers that video playback is not as sharp and almost looks like it's SD content or the lines are being doubled. You can see this in the attached screenshots of two 720p recordings (I had to save them as JPEG to get under the attachment size limitation, but they still represent the problem well).

This is using the same configuration under Detailed Setup => Audio / Video as I did with v7, which includes using the SageTV MPEG Video Decoder. I tried changing from EVR to VMR9, disabling DScaler Deinterlacing Filter, and enabling Use Full Screen Exclusive Mode but with no improvement. I confirmed on the System Information page that on both systems SageTV is recognizing the full resolution of my displays. I even restored my pre-upgrade backup to confirm that, yes, v7 really was playing back HD content in HD.

I searched the forums and browsed this entire subforum and didn't find any reports of this problem. I was able to work around it by installing the LAV Filters, and maybe I'm better off with those, anyways, since they're more recent and being actively developed. I'm just curious what would cause this, why the same decoder would produce different output depending on the SageTV version? And is this not a known issue? Is the population of users that are using v9 and record in MPEG-2 and use the SageTV MPEG Video Decoder just very small (me?) such that no one has come across this yet?

[Tiki]

I'm not seeing anything in those screenshots that looks like a difference in resolution like HD vs SD. I do see that lines are more jaggy with the Sage
Decoder vs LAV, which looks more smooth. This looks like just a difference in how the MPEG decoders behave.

[BACON]

I found a much more drastic example from the same recording. As before, I took screenshots in SageTV v9 using both the SageTV MPEG Video Decoder and LAV Video Decoder. I then used a fresh v7 installation to take screenshots of the same frame with both decoders. The reason why I've only attached two images is because when I saved the screenshots for...

• SageTV v7 + SageTV MPEG Video Decoder
• SageTV v7 + LAV Video Decoder
• SageTV v9 + LAV Video Decoder

...in PNG format it resulted in three byte-for-byte identical files! When I restored my v9 installation with the SageTV MPEG Video Decoder all those straight lines on the roof of that building went back to looking like stairways to heaven.

[Taddeusz]

Is there a particular reason that you want to keep using the SageTV decoder? The reason I ask is that the decoder is not actually included in the open source version because it is copyrighted and closed source. If you do a clean install of v9 you will not get it at all. The only way is to upgrade a v7 install to v9. IMHO, the LAV decoder works just fine. If you're running Windows 10 you can go to the Store and install Microsoft's MPEG decoder for free.