HD pvr playback on media mvp, ever?

[Deacon Crusher]

will sage server ever be able to transcode on the fly the hd pvr files so that media mvp will be able to play them back?

And if yes, any guess as to how soon?

thanks

[Brent]

Originally Posted by Deacon Crusher

will sage server ever be able to transcode on the fly the hd pvr files so that media mvp will be able to play them back?

And if yes, any guess as to how soon?

thanks

I can't see why not. The key would be whether your server is powerful enough. I'd guess you'd need a powerful Quad-Core CPU on your server to do it.

[Deacon Crusher]

HI Brent.

Well I certainly have that (Quad core Phenom 9850) so hopefully this will be working soon.

Hoping that a Sage staffer will reply to one of my mediamvp/placeshifter threads and tell us something about on the fly transcoding of the HD pvr files soon.

thanks

[Brent]

What does your MVP do when you try to watch a show from the HD-PVR output?

[Deacon Crusher]

same as placeshifter, black screen.

Like it's trying, but not getting anything.

[Brent]

Thats strange because when I play back a previously recorded 1080i show recorded by the HD-PVR on my MVP, it plays it, but is very, very jerky. I just thought it had to do with my server's underwhelming CPU power

[matt91]

And what happens on the server side? Does sagetvtranscoder.exe launch?

[Deacon Crusher]

interesting news (Brent's marginally successful mediamvp playback.)

Only tried this morning for a bit (media mvp is hooked to TV where I exercised so tested this a.m. before work, but did no troubleshooting.)

Will test further tonight.

[Brent]

Originally Posted by Deacon Crusher

Will test further tonight.

And I'll check to verify with a few recorded shows from the HD-PVR via MVP tonight also and report back as I'm curious as well.

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by Brent

And I'll check to verify with a few recorded shows from the HD-PVR via MVP tonight also and report back as I'm curious as well.

Yes inquiring minds want to know! I might try some tests this weekend on my setup using Brent's test files. I can't test tonight for fear of Sage not recording So You Think You Can Dance (my wife would kill me).

[bcjenkins]

I think there is some hope. You can play back the files using a VLC nightly build. I haven't tried with a recent ffmpeg svn pull, yet, but that would be the telltale sign.

B

[wado1971]

I've had some interesting results using the manual settings for a PS client - posted in a similar thread http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...0&postcount=12

Not successful results but it definitely gives me hope they'll get this going.

[Brent]

Originally Posted by Brent

And I'll check to verify with a few recorded shows from the HD-PVR via MVP tonight also and report back as I'm curious as well.

Originally Posted by paulbeers

Yes inquiring minds want to know! I might try some tests this weekend on my setup using Brent's test files. I can't test tonight for fear of Sage not recording So You Think You Can Dance (my wife would kill me).

Checked again last night. When I play a recorded 1080i show (from the HD-PVR), it displays the video, but in slow motion and very choppy. Audio is garbled as well. It is trying and isn't a black screen so I think it must be possible if you have a fast enough server PC CPU. It will probably take some tweaking in a future version of SageTV to make it work on the h.264 files.

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by Brent

Checked again last night. When I play a recorded 1080i show (from the HD-PVR), it displays the video, but in slow motion and very choppy. Audio is garbled as well. It is trying and isn't a black screen so I think it must be possible if you have a fast enough server PC CPU. It will probably take some tweaking in a future version of SageTV to make it work on the h.264 files.

Based on wado1971's post over the in the placeshifter forums, I would say it is very cpu limited at this point.

He is seeing 25% cpu usage on a Q6600. Knowing that the transcoder is single threaded, that means he is maxing out one of his cores and even with that is only able to get choppy video at best. I think it would take a Core 2 chip in the 3.0ghz+ range to even attempt this (pure speculation on my part)and that's quite a bit of horsepower! Either the transcoder will need to be severly tweaked or it will need to be redesigned to be multi-threaded.

I suppose my wife can deal with only getting to see Discovery HD on the HD100's. Maybe she will give me permission to buy another one! Hehehe.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

I suppose my wife can deal with only getting to see Discovery HD on the HD100's. Maybe she will give me permission to buy another one! Hehehe.

It would probably be cheaper than upgrading the server to be able to transcode H.264

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by stanger89

It would probably be cheaper than upgrading the server to be able to transcode H.264

Very VERY true. That's how I'm going to have to approach this....

[zoop]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

Very VERY true. That's how I'm going to have to approach this....

the only issue with that is that it doesn't work well for placeshifting... i placeshift often and would like to see a multi-threaded transcoder to take advantage of these cores that a lot of folk have sitting around. of course, that would require ffmpeg to support it as i use the linux server version.

/jer

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by zoop

the only issue with that is that it doesn't work well for placeshifting... i placeshift often and would like to see a multi-threaded transcoder to take advantage of these cores that a lot of folk have sitting around. of course, that would require ffmpeg to support it as i use the linux server version.

/jer

I'll second that. I'd also like to see a multi-threaded transcoder. I've never e-mailed Sage about it, but I assume they already know that's something a lot of us would appreciate.

[rethdog]

"X 3"

My OTA HD almost plays on the MVP. As cheap fix I've tried overclocking the old girl, but it just didn't get that much better as I pushed and pushed the clock speed up.

I would think Sage would be able transcode a high bitrate (low compression) MPEG2 file "on the fly" I say this because, A few years ago I had a athlon 1333mhz that could software encode a fixed bit rate MPEG2 stream pretty easily using a cheap ati capture card, I can't remember the processor usage but the computer was still very, very useable.

My server can transcode a Xvid (480p) to the MVP, doing so it consumes around 30% processor usage. Therefore I would guess the sagetvtranscoder.exe has problem with rescaling efficiently.

To get around this I was thinking of upgrading (Quad) my server, but from the input here that's a no starter.

I have 3 additional MVP's which I am holding out from buying licenses for, as half my recordings are OTA HD, and the other half are SD from analog cable, what's the solution? to double record?

I guess Sage would like me to upgrade to the HD box, but what's the point when I have lots of old SD tube television still working good.

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by rethdog

"X 3"

My OTA HD almost plays on the MVP. As cheap fix I've tried overclocking the old girl, but it just didn't get that much better as I pushed and pushed the clock speed up.

I would think Sage would be able transcode a high bitrate (low compression) MPEG2 file "on the fly" I say this because, A few years ago I had a athlon 1333mhz that could software encode a fixed bit rate MPEG2 stream pretty easily using a cheap ati capture card, I can't remember the processor usage but the computer was still very, very useable.

My server can transcode a Xvid (480p) to the MVP, doing so it consumes around 30% processor usage. Therefore I would guess the sagetvtranscoder.exe has problem with rescaling efficiently.

To get around this I was thinking of upgrading (Quad) my server, but from the input here that's a no starter.

I have 3 additional MVP's which I am holding out from buying licenses for, as half my recordings are OTA HD, and the other half are SD from analog cable, what's the solution? to double record?

I guess Sage would like me to upgrade to the HD box, but what's the point when I have lots of old SD tube television still working good.

Umm. OTA HD MPEG2's transcode on the fly with no problems. I have been doing it for well over a year. You just need the horsepower. My Intel e4300 @ 1.8ghz is not upto par, but over clock it to 2.4ghz and it can do it with no problems. Your XP2800 won't cut it unless you change the quality setting to "standard" which will not be as nice, but it should work.

The issue in this thread is the HD-PVR which records everything in H.264 and not Mpeg2.