Anyone Using ATSC HDTV & Hauppauge MediaMVP

[John.Kelly]

I realize that the Hauppauge MediaMVP is not an HDTV device, but what I am wondering is if anyone is using an HDTV tuner, Sage Version 5, and Hauppauge MediaMVP video extenters to NTSC TVs?

The reason I am asking is that I just found out that all the NTSC over the air broadcasting will cease on February 18, 2009. All of my Video & TV equipment (all NTSC) will stop working (as will everyone else's TVs using over the air signals). I don't know what the cable companies are going to do and/or are being forced to do.

I have a 3.4 Mhrz Dual Pentium Machine with a 250 GB SATA3 hard drive, and a 500 GB SATA3 drive (just for video recordings) with 2 Hauppauge 250 NTSC tunners, SageTV version 5, and 3 Hauppauge MVP units connected to 3 NTSC TVs through a 16 port 100 BaseT switch. I love my system! It works perfectly. Better than Tivo and no fees.

BUT the Hauppauge 250 Video cards are NTSC. I have no idea, if the reception (50 miles south of Minneapolis, MN) for HDTV is any good here. I know that even some locations in Minneapolis, the HDTV stations can be problematic.

The only reasonable solution to not replacing every TV in the house, is to use SageTV and the media extenders, but I don't have any experience with HDTV video cards, or streaming HDTV recorded video to NTSC TVs. I assume it isn't a problem, but not having done it, I don't really know that this is true. Before spending the money for one or more HDTV video cards, and trying this, I thought I might get advice from those who use this forum.

Has anyone out there done this?

I have been looking at the Dvico cards, specifically the Dvico FusionHDTV5-RT Gold Plus Board. Anyone using this board, or any of the Dvico HDTV boards with SageTV?

How about other HDTV boards?

By the way, when my TVs don't work, I will probably consider having 3 video tuners instead of 2.

[ke6guj]

IIRC, there are users here watching HD-recorded content on their MVP's. The catch is that the MVP built-in hardware can't display the HD signals, so the Sage Server is required to transcode the video in real-time down to SD so that the MVP can use it. IT does take some CPU horsepower to do the transcoding. You should be ok with a dual-core Pentium.

But since the MVP can't do HD, everybody has been clamoring for a HD-capable thin-client.

The reason I am asking is that I just found out that all the NTSC over the air broadcasting will cease on February 18, 2009. All of my Video & TV equipment (all NTSC) will stop working (as will everyone else's TVs using over the air signals). I don't know what the cable companies are going to do and/or are being forced to do.

This has been known for a while that NTSC will be turned off eventually. The date has been pushed back a couple times due to lack of HDTV penetration in the market. Now that HDTV sets have been selling well, they will be able to finally do the final switch from NTSC to ATSC. If you notice the date, February 18, that date was picked to place it after the Super Bowl so that the late converts won't have their TV signals killed just before the biggest sporting event of the year.

As for the cable companies keeping an analog signal after the switchover. Who knows, it will depend on the CC, some may, others won't.

[Motofreak75]

the only real problem is ...

The transcoding program used by Sage doesn't use all the processors, I watched SageTVTranscoder.exe only max out on CPU1. And I hope Sage addresses this soon, as more dual cores & even quad cores are used for Sage server. Trying to watch even one HD signal on my MVP taps out one cpu without touching cpu2 and the picture sucks and you can barely watch anything. It would bring the server to it's knees if two MVPs tried to watch anything HDTV.

[GbrNole]

this is why we all want a thin HD client it's also why the very high ghz (and high heat) chips in the final pentium 4 line tend to do better right now at transcoding HD to the mvp's.

the 3.4 ghz p4 northwood's oc'd to close to 3.8 ghz is about the only thing you can get that runs somewhat cool ( lol ) and can get in the ball park of dual core transcode speeds and a weak dual core at that.

i keep having these great ideas about upgrading my sage server to a core 2 duo but really i just want a darn HD thin client!!!!!

[blade]

Originally Posted by John.Kelly

The reason I am asking is that I just found out that all the NTSC over the air broadcasting will cease on February 18, 2009. All of my Video & TV equipment (all NTSC) will stop working (as will everyone else's TVs using over the air signals). I don't know what the cable companies are going to do and/or are being forced to do.

Everything isn't going to "stop working". It's not much different than when people first switched to cable and didn't have cable ready tvs. They just used a stb. Your 250s will still capture cable, but you'd need a stb connected to it via s-video or composite. For OTA there are already cards capable of capture.

There are still many millions of TVs out there that don't have any sort of digital tuner, HD capabilities, or connections above s-video or composite. I would guess the vast majority don't. They're not going to switch to a format that leaves these sets obsolete without providing stbs that bridge the gap.

BUT the Hauppauge 250 Video cards are NTSC. I have no idea, if the reception (50 miles south of Minneapolis, MN) for HDTV is any good here. I know that even some locations in Minneapolis, the HDTV stations can be problematic.

You may not be able to go by any of that right now anyway. For example all of my local stations broadcast in HD, but they're using secondary transmitters that run at a fraction of the power of the primary transmitters. Eventually they're going to start broadcasting the digital channels on the primary transmitters, but probably not until analog is really close to death. Larger markets may already be at full power on their primary transmitters, but I would expect things to improve for many people once analog is gone and digital is at the forefront.


As has already been said HD can be transcoded and played back through the MVP. By the time analog is gone cpus will be more powerful and we should have a HD extenders.

[jquinlan]

Originally Posted by John.Kelly

... that all the NTSC over the air broadcasting will cease on February 18, 2009. All of my Video & TV equipment (all NTSC) will stop working (as will everyone else's TVs using over the air signals). I don't know what the cable companies are going to do and/or are being forced to do.

I know the 2 cable companies in Columbus, OH (Time Warner and Insight) are planning on providing STB that output SD to all customers that don’t want to get the government sanctioned STB. They are going to drop the analog channels when the signals get dropped so everyone that wants their service will require a STB. They are planning to make a killing. The other STB's that will be availble shortly before the cut-off date will be ATSC to NTSC converters so anybody can still get a picture with a standard TV at a lower price than resorting to cable. (Not that having 100's channels is a bad thing)

[malbec]

By 2009 I would venture a guess taht there will be a reasonably priced HDTV extender akin to the MVP. Not to say you shouldn't stop the quest you are on, just that you pobably have a year or two before any need to get worried. That's my two cents anyway.

[John.Kelly]

Thanks for all your responses. I think I now understand the issues.

I now know that transcoding is a problem for the TVs that are NTSC and didn't realize that before.

I knew that those who want to watch their TVs and not their computers, were in hopes that someone would create a "thin" client. Actually, I think a video server is the future, because even students grow up and have families.

The band width that the presently non-existant "thin" clients will use, apparently will dictate that the computer having the function of the video server will have to be on a gigabyte switch if serving multiple thin clients.

I still wonder about which HDTV video cards and/or video server (like the HDHomeRun) is the best solution. I am getting the feeling that waiting for developments is probably what I am going to have to do.

I bought a Hauppauge MediaMVP three years before I finally switched to SageTV because I felt it was reasonable to pay $100.00 per NTSC TV. But I wasted my time hoping that Hauppauge would actually produce software to make it work. The progress I made only happened when I realized that Hauppauge will never have software that is acceptable. Is DLink in the same position with its unit?