MVP Issues with HD content

[Stuntman]

I know the answer to this is "Buy an HD Extender".. but, until we can do so...

I am having a devil of a time watching a lot of my shows recorded on the HDHomerun and viewed on the MVP! Seems that I primarily have problems when I play back a SD show that was recorded via the Homerun. The shows (usually) start okay, but if I hit FF or REW or use comskip, they frequently get way out of sync.. or I get chipmunks... or I just kind of hang there... Sometimes trying to jog back and forth will fix it.. sometimes not.. usually not...

This is crippling me as far as the WAF goes.. I'm getting "Lets get rid of the HD then" type comments..

Is there any workaround, any suggestions.. or do I just accept the fact that the MVP can't cut it and I should just wait for the HD Extenders to come back?

Thanks!

[BFisher]

I have similar issues. I've heard the next release is better... but we'll have to wait and see.

One way to prevent it is to compress HD shows to non-HD before you watch them. Once they are compressed (and not requiring on-the-fly transcoding), they seem to work just fine.

I'm patiently waiting for more HD Extenders so I can watch in HD

[bbig119]

Originally Posted by Stuntman

I know the answer to this is "Buy an HD Extender".. but, until we can do so...

I am having a devil of a time watching a lot of my shows recorded on the HDHomerun and viewed on the MVP! Seems that I primarily have problems when I play back a SD show that was recorded via the Homerun. The shows (usually) start okay, but if I hit FF or REW or use comskip, they frequently get way out of sync.. or I get chipmunks... or I just kind of hang there... Sometimes trying to jog back and forth will fix it.. sometimes not.. usually not...

This is crippling me as far as the WAF goes.. I'm getting "Lets get rid of the HD then" type comments..

Is there any workaround, any suggestions.. or do I just accept the fact that the MVP can't cut it and I should just wait for the HD Extenders to come back?

Thanks!

Any update on this? Any time I play a transcoded HD material on my MVP the audio get progressively is out of sync and about 5 minutes in is very noticeable and annoying.

[BFisher]

you can compress the show in advance (doesn't help if you want to watch something as it's recording or the same night). Compress it to an SD format - then it will play reliably on an MVP without issue.

[bbig119]

Originally Posted by BFisher

you can compress the show in advance (doesn't help if you want to watch something as it's recording or the same night). Compress it to an SD format - then it will play reliably on an MVP without issue.

Yeah thats a PITA though. Usually when I watch something on the MVP its spontaneous because if I want to watch an HD show-- I normally make a point of trying to watch it on the HDTV in the living room. This is something that we shouldn't need to work around-- this should work. I'm just curious if anyone knows if/when this will be addressed. There are many people with MVPs-- we can't be the only ones who have this problem and yet it seems like nobody has complained about it in two months.

[BFisher]

it rarely happens to me anymore. CBS is usually the only channel that bothers my system - and not for every show. I'd say it happens only about once a week to me, maybe less (I only have 3 MVPs remaining - the rest are on HD Extenders which are our primary viewing). I guess it's not frequent enough anymore to be a big concern at least to me.

[ntk2]

I have the same issues viewing recorded HD content on the mvp. I have seen several references to compressing the files in advance so they do not have to be transcoded on the fly. I have experimented with various parameters for ffmpeg without much success.

Would be interested in details of how to successfully compress the files in advance on the Linux version. Have to run comskip anyway so it is just another manual step.

[bbig119]

Sorry to revive an stale thread, but I still haven't seen an answer to this.

I have audio sync issues with recorded HD material on both my MVP and also when using placeshifter. I'm assuming its related to the server doing the transcoding, but is there a answer or even a fix? Its annoying that audio gets progressively further out of sync as I watch live or recorded hd material.

Thanks.

Bryan

[CollinR]

I just put SJQ plugin on mine and set it to compress everything, SD stays SD and HD stays HD and I have no problems playing any of it via MVP.

I use the High Quality MPEG4 Deinterlaced AVI for SD and and the HD version for HD.

Originally Posted by BFisher

you can compress the show in advance (doesn't help if you want to watch something as it's recording or the same night). Compress it to an SD format - then it will play reliably on an MVP without issue.

You might try keeping the HD, HD it causes no issues for me.

All my HD content from QAM is completely unwatchable before SD HD not a big difference. Not a little studder or audio sync, completely unwatchable. This isn't inhernetly a SageTV problem if you have enough CPU it could be done, the guys b!tching about the HDPVR are completely unreasonable. Many machines can't even decode that in software much less decode it then convert it to MPEG2 SD in realtime.

Since SageTVTranscoder.exe is single threaded you want the fastest single core you can get as it's only going to use one, you might also check it's processor affinity and move it to one not has highly utilized.

[freedml]

I've installed auto-compress and it's solved the problem most of the time. One recording fails to compress, so I'll hope it's just that particular recording.

There is a possible need for gigabit hardware, and that is because I'm using one feed to serve multiple TV sets. If each one can use up to 40mbps, then I am glad I chose a gigabit switch to serve those TVs rather than having to 'home run' each cable.

One question, though. Why does compression only seem to be needed on some 1080 shows? Most play fine through my MVP but a few don't (e.g. Numb3rs and NCIS).