HD Extender, double-time video and no audio

[lukeduf]

I upgraded from 6.0.something to 6.3.5 to be able to use one of the new HD extenders. The extender seems to work fine when playing recordings made before the 6.3 upgrade but when playing recently recorded stuff or live tv, it plays for a few seconds fine (smooth and audio is ok) but then plays the video at a faster than normal rate with no audio. If I'm watching live tv, it does that until it catches up to real time and then I get stuttering video and no audio.

6.3 recordings and live play fine on the HTPC Windows box with the sage server on it.

STVs don't affect it. I've had the extender and server plugged into the same gigabit switch so it's not networking. Tried component vs hdmi, no change. Tried different channels.

I'm using an HDHomerun. I have the latest software from Silicondust.

[phuzzy]

I'm getting the exact same behavior, but I know that the drive configuration of my Sage server is sub-optimal. I've gotten some tips from mc2wheels after discussing the tuning he had to do to get his configuration running happily. Once I reconfigure it, I'll let you know if it helped or not.

The config where I get the symptoms is a Celeron D at 2.4ghz, 2.5 gigs RAM, and two 160 gig SATA-150 drives configured with software RAID 0 and 4k clusters, running Windows 2000 Server. I plan to ditch the striping and go to 64k clusters on a 750 gig SATA-300 drive, and upgrade to Server 2003.

I tried running Sage on my desktop PC (demo version) with better specs, and got much better results.

The config that works better is a Pentium D at 3ghz (dual core), 2 gigs RAM, video going to a single 250 gig SATA-300 drive with 4k clusters, running XP Professional.

[foolio]

I had the same problem. The extender has a problem with the HDHomerun .TS file for some reason in live playback. The solution is to have the HDHomerun record in .MPG instead of .TS

There is an option in your properties file:

mmc/encode_digital_tv_as_program_stream=false
set it to true for your HDHomerun and it should record as mpg. The mpeg plays fine.

The .TS files I download off the net works fine, including 1080p ones.

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by foolio

I had the same problem. The extender has a problem with the HDHomerun .TS file for some reason in live playback. The solution is to have the HDHomerun record in .MPG instead of .TS

There is an option in your properties file:

mmc/encode_digital_tv_as_program_stream=false
set it to true for your HDHomerun and it should record as mpg. The mpeg plays fine.

The .TS files I download off the net works fine, including 1080p ones.

I have had some issues with this setting when set to true, but the Sage folks REALLY insisted I keep it set to true. There are posts here by Sage folks saying don't change this to false as it messes up the transcoding.

maybe someone can comment here, as my hd homerun recordings still have some timeline issues.

thx
mike

[phuzzy]

Originally Posted by foolio

I had the same problem. The extender has a problem with the HDHomerun .TS file for some reason in live playback. The solution is to have the HDHomerun record in .MPG instead of .TS

There is an option in your properties file:

mmc/encode_digital_tv_as_program_stream=false
set it to true for your HDHomerun and it should record as mpg. The mpeg plays fine.

The .TS files I download off the net works fine, including 1080p ones.

Sigh. It was set to "true" for the HDHomeRun encoders, but not for the default. I set it to "true" in the defaults as well, and now it's behaving much better for me. I've been watching 1080i programming for about 10 minutes with no artifacts, stutters, or audio drop-out.

[lukeduf]

Originally Posted by foolio

I had the same problem. The extender has a problem with the HDHomerun .TS file for some reason in live playback. The solution is to have the HDHomerun record in .MPG instead of .TS

There is an option in your properties file:

mmc/encode_digital_tv_as_program_stream=false
set it to true for your HDHomerun and it should record as mpg. The mpeg plays fine.

The .TS files I download off the net works fine, including 1080p ones.

Thanks. That fixed it for me.