R5000 Dish HD customers to lose more channels with move to MPEG4

[NEOSG]

Starting August 1st, all Voom channels will go MPEG 4.

http://www.satelliteguys.us/dish-net...gust-15th.html

Personally, I am getting tired of losing HD channels each month. I have given my time to work with SageTV support and no solution was found. I do not mind spending money to get the right decoder. But, Sage and Nextcom worked together to get this solution plug n play for Sage users. It's about time they get their act together and get the H.264 stuff playable within Sage. I can play them using MPC.

I attached the latest email thread I had that involved us trying to get various H.264 decoders working.

Again, I do not mind paying the decoder that Sage chooses to use to get things working. Just get them frickin' working.

[mikesm]

If you can get cable and get your R5000 mod moved to a Moto box, I think you will be much happier. Though you'll need more disk space since MPEG2 files are not as small as MPEG4 files. But Sage etc... plays them fine.

Thanks,
Mike

[NEOSG]

Originally Posted by mikesm

If you can get cable and get your R5000 mod moved to a Moto box, I think you will be much happier. Though you'll need more disk space since MPEG2 files are not as small as MPEG4 files. But Sage etc... plays them fine.

Thanks,
Mike

Wish I could. My cable co use SA boxes.

Thanks for the suggestion though

-Scott

[HawgGuy]

I share your frustration. H.264 seems to be an emerging standard with niche profiles and interlacing standards. It doesn't help that there are limited decoders (Cyberlink and the somewhat defunct apparently, CoreCodec).

Since we can play these files fine outside of Sage, there should be a way to specify the splitter & decoders to use within Sage. I miss NFL-HD & ESPN2 and am not looking forward to losing RAVE.

[Fluffdaddy]

This is huge bad news

[Fluffdaddy]

Originally Posted by mikesm

If you can get cable and get your R5000 mod moved to a Moto box, I think you will be much happier.

Thanks,
Mike

Cable don't have the Voom channels. which is at least 50% of my HD viewing

[tdoris]

I've been using the H.264 codec from PowerDVD ultra. It seems to work pretty well with the Dish MPEG4 broadcasts. The only issue I've noticed is sometimes live tv will start stuttering, but pressing FF seems to fix it most of the time. All I had to do was install PowerDVD Ultra and add the following line to my properties file:
videoframe/h264_video_decoder_filter=CyberLink H.264/AVC decoder (PDVD7.x)

[Fluffdaddy]

Originally Posted by tdoris

I've been using the H.264 codec from PowerDVD ultra. It seems to work pretty well with the Dish MPEG4 broadcasts.

Do you have a R5000 modded Dishnet IRD ?

[Ron]

I've been a Nextcom/R5000 user since it's beginning and have had a variety of Nextcom modified STBs. Up until 4 months ago, when I dropped Dish in favor of Fios, I was recording Dish MPEG4 content with a Nextcom modified Dish 411, and it played back fine through Sage using the Cyberlink decoder referenced above. I didn't even have to add the properties line referenced by the above poster. Sage automatically picked up that decoder.

I'm currently out of the country and don't have access to my HTPC to reconfirm things for you, but I do recall that after one of the later v6 Sage beta updates, H.264 content recorded from Dish/R5000 worked just fine for me. I specifically remember watching movies from Starz HD, which I know were MPEG4.

Hopefully, some additional members can confirm.

[HawgGuy]

Originally Posted by tdoris

I've been using the H.264 codec from PowerDVD ultra. It seems to work pretty well with the Dish MPEG4 broadcasts. The only issue I've noticed is sometimes live tv will start stuttering, but pressing FF seems to fix it most of the time. All I had to do was install PowerDVD Ultra and add the following line to my properties file:
videoframe/h264_video_decoder_filter=CyberLink H.264/AVC decoder (PDVD7.x)

I've done the above. I have two Cyberlink H.264/AVC decoders; one (HD264) and the other (PDVD7.x). Both yield similar results watching ESPN2 (whether a recording or live) - stuttering playback (bad) to the point of being un-watchable interspersed with brief periods of smooth playback. CPU usage is around 20-25%.

The same files play smooth-as-glass in WMP or MPC using either the Cyberlink decoders or CoreAVC.

[camTexas]

what video card is everyone using? Could this be an issue where the Cyberlink is using Purevideo 2 (with extra H.264 commands) that works better on 8xxx series Nvidia cards?

[HawgGuy]

Nvidia 7600GT. If the video chipset were a factor, it wouldn't play well either in SageTV or out. Most of us can get good - I mean perfect - playback outside of SageTV.

[tdoris]

The only issues I had with it stuttering all the time was when:
1) Had folding at home service running in the background
2) Was using a 100 mb/s instead of a 1000 mb/s network connection. The 100 mb/s connection couldn't handle simultaneous remote recording and playback.

For reference here are my system specs:
Intel Core 2 4300 (1.8 GHz)
2 GB RAM
Nvidia 7600 GT ForceWare version 158.18
C-Media onboard sound
Microsoft Vista Home Basic

[HawgGuy]

Originally Posted by tdoris

For reference here are my system specs:
Intel Core 2 4300 (1.8 GHz)
2 GB RAM
Nvidia 7600 GT ForceWare version 158.18
C-Media onboard sound
Microsoft Vista Home Basic

Are you using the an r5000-hd modified STB to capture Dish h.264 streams?

[tdoris]

Yes, I have a Dish 211 modified for r5000hd. I've been able to either view live or record all channels that come with the HD Pack + locals (ESPNHD, ESPN2HD, TNTHD, CinemaxHD, local HD channels, and all the voom channels (which are still MPEG2 to my understanding), etc). Since I installed the PowerDVD Ultra codec, I haven't run into any channels yet that I'm subscribed to that don't work. The only other thing that I remember doing is setting the merit for the H264/AVC codec to be the highest. Back when I had Comcast, that was the tweak I needed with the Nvidia PureVideo HD codec to get it to run smoothly. Currently, the Dish 211 is connected to a Sage Client PC that is hooked up to my HDTV. I'm using the R5000HD as a remote network encoder to a Sage Server with 1.3 TB of space in my "office".

I was original planning to use CoreAVC since at least from a stated capability standpoint it seemed to be the most complete, but there ordering page has been down for some time and it seems it doesn't play nice with Sage anyway.

[DualQuad]

Tdoris,
So the only thing you changed was the properties file setting and change the decoder merit through something like direct show filter manager? Did you remove the Nvidia decoder software?

Thanks,
DQ

[HawgGuy]

Originally Posted by tdoris

Yes, I have a Dish 211 modified for r5000hd. I've been able to either view live or record all channels that come with the HD Pack + locals (ESPNHD, ESPN2HD, TNTHD, CinemaxHD, local HD channels, and all the voom channels (which are still MPEG2 to my understanding), etc).

Would you be able to verify that you can watch NFL-HD, ESPN2-HD, HGTV-HD and FOOD-HD? OF the channels you listed above, only ESPN2HD is h.264 (don't know about your locals).

[tdoris]

HawgGuy,

Here are the results for the channels you requested:
NFL-HD - no problems
ESPN2-HD - no problems
HGTV-HD - started recording fine, but livetv didn't work on the first try, had to restart and kill a sagetvtranscoder process. The recording from the first attempt did play back fine though.
FOOD-HD - no problems

According to the information I have, the locals for the Chicago area are MPEG4, but I'm not sure if its the MPEG2 inside MPEG4 header stuff that Dish uses in a lot of their channels. In the last week, I've only had one recording out of about 20 I scheduled fail so far, and I believe that was an MPEG2 channel. I have a few more problems with Live TV, but usually fixed by either pressing the FF button, or stopping playback and restarting.

CPU utilization is much higher (runs at about 60%-70%) with the true MPEG4 channels, memory usage seems much higher as well. I'm guessing based on the reviews I've seen that using a GeForce 8 card would cut the CPU utilization significantly, but I'll probably wait for prices to come down a bit and find a card with an HDMI out before I'll buy one of them.

It is far from perfect at this point, but I guess I should be thankful it is working at all based on a lot of the posts I'm seeing here.

DualQuad,

I installed PowerDVD Ultra, added the filter line, and changed the decoder merit using RadLight Filter Manager. I didn't have to remove the Nvidia decoder, but it is a lower merit at the moment.

[HawgGuy]

Originally Posted by tdoris

HawgGuy,

Here are the results for the channels you requested:
NFL-HD - no problems
ESPN2-HD - no problems
HGTV-HD - started recording fine, but livetv didn't work on the first try, had to restart and kill a sagetvtranscoder process. The recording from the first attempt did play back fine though.
FOOD-HD - no problems

Outstanding. You seem to be closer to the Holy Grail than anyone else as far as reporting success with dish/h.264 r5000-hd playback. Now to figure out the formula.

I have a similar machine & video card as you, but I run XP whereas you're running Vista. Are you running Sage with FSE? I have Vista, but uninstalled at the moment.
Would you be able to get a screenshot of GraphEdit after rendering an H.264 capture from your r5000-hd?

Thanks!

[tdoris]

Originally Posted by HawgGuy

Outstanding. You seem to be closer to the Holy Grail than anyone else as far as reporting success with dish/h.264 r5000-hd playback. Now to figure out the formula.

I have a similar machine & video card as you, but I run XP whereas you're running Vista. Are you running Sage with FSE? I have Vista, but uninstalled at the moment.
Would you be able to get a screenshot of GraphEdit after rendering an H.264 capture from your r5000-hd?

Thanks!

I do use FSE. I am also using Java 1.6 Update 1. I've attached a GraphEdit from a drag and drop of a HGTV-HD recording.