HD OTA Questions

[crowland]

I am currently using Sage with an Nvidia DualTV, 2 DirecTV tuners and a MediaMVP for playback on my TV, which is only SD.

Can I, assuming I can get HD OTA, play the recorded HD through the MediaMVP on my SD TV? I assume this would not be as good as if I had a HD TV, but shouldn't it be as good as or better than my DirecTV now?

Based on what I have read here it seems I may have to convert the recording before I do this, at least until an HD version of a media extender comes out. Is this the case, and once an HD media extender is available, can I use the HD extender on my SD TV?

As far as the HD OTA, I am in a remote location (Sonora, CA), about 80-100 miles from the nearest tower, however I am at 3000 ft and on the side of a cliff and suspect that I may be able to get a good signal. What is the cheapest way for me to tell if I can get a signal? Can I just get some cheap rabbit ears and hook them up to my SD TV? Or do I actually need to purchase an HD tuner to determine this?

Thanks,

Charlie

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by crowland

I am in a remote location (Sonora, CA)

Hey, my wife grew up in Sonora. Her Mom still lives there. We spend a couple of months a year there, in fact, but I've never tested out the OTA HD reception.

You could try checking http://antennaweb.org, but I'm not sure to what degree they take topography into account.

On the MVP question, I believe the SageTV server can transcode HD on the fly for MVP clients, but don't quote me on that, since I don't own an MVP.

[matt91]

A somewhat similiar conversation occurred here recently. Not sure that it exactly answers your questions (which I am interested in as well.)

Matt

[crowland]

In that thread invisiblepin asks:

"Several of the hd tv tuner cards say that they can produce a MPEG-2 file. Are there any MPEG-2 files that the Media MVP wouldn't be able to play?"

If this works that would solve the problem, won't it?

If you had a card that only encoded in HD another option would be to automatically convert the HD to MPEG-2 in the background. You might have problems if you wanted to watch live tv, but otherwise I think it should work...

This may be a stupid question, but is there such a thing as an HD transcoder card? That works with Sage? This would solve the problem with the processor load involved with transcoding these files.

It seems like there should be a way to do this...

Thanks everyone for your help,
Charlie

[mattdcknsn]

SageTV 6 is supposed to be able to play HD shows through to a MVP. However, it really depends on your setup. The server has to transcode the HD show on the fly.

My setup cannot do this, something about the Intel procs, from what I have heard the newer AMD procs are better at this. One test is to download an HD show into your imported media and test it out. Hopefully it'll work.

[matt91]

Originally Posted by mattdcknsn

One test is to download an HD show into your imported media and test it out. Hopefully it'll work.

Hadn't thought of that. Any place to easily get a 10-second or so clip to try?

[GbrNole]

Originally Posted by matt91

Hadn't thought of that. Any place to easily get a 10-second or so clip to try?

whoa - you're not thinking about doing this on an 800mhz P3 are you? not a chance in hell of that happening.

i have a P4 2.66ghz (533 bus) in my server that will transcode everything except for HD shows - or at least it wont transcode them so that they are watchable.

thinking about sticking a P4 3.0e into the box and knocking it up to 3.3ghz and see it that will do the trick. one guy said that his 1thlon 64 3500 overclocked a little bit did the trick and it's performance isn't a whole lot stronger than a P4 3.2 stock.

[mattdcknsn]

Originally Posted by matt91

Hadn't thought of that. Any place to easily get a 10-second or so clip to try?

Apple has HD trailers on their website now, http://www.apple.com/trailers/

Microsoft has some HD content you can download, http://www.microsoft.com/windows/win...tshowcase.aspx

Although its an exe that you download so I am not quite sure what else it installs.

I didnt catch what your system stats were, but like GbrNole said, I dont think your proc will be able to handle it. Worth a download and test though.

[matt91]

Originally Posted by mattdcknsn

I didnt catch what your system stats were, but like GbrNole said, I dont think your proc will be able to handle it. Worth a download and test though.

Thanks. I didn't intend to try it (well, I might *try* it) but it was really just planning for future upgrading. Would be nice to know (on a future rig) that I can stream HD before getting too deep.

Appreciate the links.
matt