Support for HDTV tuner cards

[lovingHDTV]

My understanding is that HDTV streams are mpeg2 encoded streams. As Sage requires a tuner card that has a hardware encoder and therefore supplies a mpeg2 encoded stream, can it support the current HDTV tuner cards?

Is there any plan to support the MyHD, Fusion or AccessDTV cards in the future? For me this would be the killer app. To have true HD-PVR functionality, noone can claim that today.

thanks,

[lovingHDTV]

nevermind found an old thread about this very thing. Hopefully we can get an update?

thanks,

[JJarmoc]

It's been quite a while since I've heard anything on the HDTV front, but I'm still lurking here waiting for the announcement. Last I heard, they had an HDTV card working in a non-public beta build, but it needed further work. That was quite a while ago...

C'mon guys, beat the big guys to the punch!

[Mark Lamutt]

I'd give you an answer if I had one, but I'm almost as in the dark as you are on this one.

[Narflex]

The current beta is able to playback HDTV TS files. Any feedback relating to this is highly desirable.

So record something with your HiPix, ADTV, MyHD, DiVco, or whatever card, and let me know how it goes.

[rotaryracer]

I know it's been requested about 1,000 times (I've searched and read everything I can find on the HDTV threads), but the day that SageTV announces full HDTV support, I will buy the program as well as whatever tuner card is compatible with it. SageTV is EVERYTHING I am looking for and I'm looking forward to using it in my to-be-built HTPC.

In the meantime, as I start configuring my HTPC, any direction on HDTV cards that you expect to support in near future releases would be appreciated so I can begin researching!

Thanks!

Jason

[ttriplett]

100% ditto for me on the above post!

[JJarmoc]

Rotaryracer -
I've tried and tried to get information on which cards are likely to be supported, and approximate timeframes, and haven't gottem much out of the Frey guys. Fortunately, the latest beta supports .ts file playback, so that's a step in the right direction.

Whatever PVR is first to HDTV will get my support. I hope it's sage, but if TiVo, ReplayTV or something else beats them to the punch, I'll abandon my sage box in a heartbeat.

[rotaryracer]

The irony here is that I don't even have my HDTV or my HTPC, yet I'm already whining about HD on Sage....

I've ordered a Sony 34" XBR910 which with any luck will be arriving in early September. Ideally, I'd like to get the HTPC configured and working before that to ensure a very high WAF (wife approval factor) when I magically plug everything in and it works "out of the box". She's used to me cursing like a sailor as I wrench on my PCs, so it would be a nice change to put the HTPC on the rack, connect the cables, teach her how to use it, and let 'er rip.

Anyway, if its 2 days, 2 weeks, or 2 months, I will probably hold off on purchasing Sage and components for the HTPC until I at least know the HDTV cards that will be supported.

Dan/Jeff, have you thought about marketing another version for all us HD whiners? I'd probably pay an extra $20-30 for "SageHDTV" over the standard SageTV price.

Or, I'll just keep my big fat mouth shut and wait till you incorporate it in the standard SageTV product....

[JJarmoc]

That's an interesting though, I'd pay a few bucks more for HD intergration into Sage.

Rotary - You should be very happy with that 910. I got a 34XBR800 a few months back, and have been loving it ever since. The 910 ought to be even better, but looking at my 800 I'm not even sure that's possible!

[salsbst]

Hey 'yall.... stop driving up the price of HDTV support! Isn't the plan to cook it in for existing customers?

[rotaryracer]

Here's another thought (while considering HDTV and tuner cards)...

One of the features I really like about Sage is the multi-tuner support and the very reasonable system requirements. Depending on which HD card they provide support for, will a standard PC be able to handle multiple record sessions of HD content? Will a hardware decoder (MyHD or similar) vs. software decoder (Fusion II) make this more doable? Since one Fusion II card requires a pretty punchy machine right out of the gate, could you even run dual Fusions simultaneously (without degrading quality)? Although "minimum" for a Fusion II is about a 1 gHz machine (using a DXvA card), most folks are recommending at least a 2.0 gHz+ CPU for best performance.

It's all mindgames and dreaming at this point, since popping for two HD cards would REALLY demolish the budget and Sage isn't HD-ready.....yet.

[JJarmoc]

I'd be perfectly happy with 1 HD card, and 1 SD card.

[mkerdman]

1.4.5 Beta .TS file playback

Tried the .TS file playback feature of the 1.4.5 Beta SW with Cyberlink/Intervideo/and one other MPEG2 SW decoder using a P4 2.4GHZ PC w/ 512MB and a 64MB ATI 8500DV video card.

NOTE: The function worked though I am not entirely certain that the 64MB ATI 8500DV video card supports DXVA and their web site was help.

I do not recall right now which, decoder was which but:

One had a problems fully displaying the entire 1.78 aspect ratio as full screen. It did displayed the correct ratio- but "window-boxed" (smaller) than it should have been (similar to SagTV windowed vs. full screen).

Another displayed the white "safe image" overscan lines on the left and bottom of the image.

The third worked relativly well.

It did have some picture stutter and pixelization at times as well as slight audio sync issues.

It would seem that the MPEG2 decoder used and the tuning of the hardware acceleration of the video card is critical to the picture quality and performance.


Murray Kerdman


__________________
Murray Kerdman

[mikesm]

Adding support for multiple Fusion II's should be easier than support for multiple conventional tuner cards, at least from a CPU perspective. Recording HD requires only I/O capability from the computer - the data is transmitted in digital MPEG-2, and all the card is doing is extracting the bitstream. An analog card has to do conversion from analog to MPEG-2, which very CPU intensive, least without hardware support for encoding onboard.

Since you're only doing playback of one HD stream at a time, and that dominates the CPU on the Fusion architecture type of card, the CPU needs for multiple cards are bounded. If you can play one HD stream reliably, you should be able to do while storing multiple HD streams at once, assuming you have I/O capability to do that.

At some point you'll run out of disk I/O, but practically this shouldn't be too bad an issue to handle with modern disks and raid.

What I would really love to see is Sage being able to act as a repository for these new connected DVD players. That may I can encode TV in one central server in the house, rip DVD's there as well, and view these streams with component output to TV's anywhere in the house where one of the cheap decks resides... Some will even decode MPEG-4, which is really neat for transcoded material...

Thanks,
Mike