Placeshifter/MVP and HD-PVR

[opusinteractive]

I have seen some discussion in other areas for this and yet I have not seen anyone say they have submitted it as a bug. 6.4.6 claims official support for the HD-PVR and yet it does not work on the PS and MVP.

My Sage Client has no problems with HD-PVR playback.

The symptom that has been reported widely is slow motion video and sound when Placeshifter uses the HD-PVR tuner. The same symptom is true for the MVP. In my case it does not seem to be a an issue with transcoding server horsepower as my CPU hovers around 25% when transcoding HD-PVR .ts recordings for PS/MVP.

Has anyone found a solution to this? I will be submitting a bug report.

In the meantime, I'd be curious if anyone knows a way to exclude specific channels OR specific tuners on the PS and MVP. Can this be done within the properties file for those clients in SageTv\SageTV\Clients?

Thanks,
Mark

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by opusinteractive

I have seen some discussion in other areas for this and yet I have not seen anyone say they have submitted it as a bug. 6.4.6 claims official support for the HD-PVR and yet it does not work on the PS and MVP.

My Sage Client has no problems with HD-PVR playback.

The symptom that has been reported widely is slow motion video and sound when Placeshifter uses the HD-PVR tuner. The same symptom is true for the MVP. In my case it does not seem to be a an issue with transcoding server horsepower as my CPU hovers around 25% when transcoding HD-PVR .ts recordings for PS/MVP.

Has anyone found a solution to this? I will be submitting a bug report.

In the meantime, I'd be curious if anyone knows a way to exclude specific channels OR specific tuners on the PS and MVP. Can this be done within the properties file for those clients in SageTv\SageTV\Clients?

Thanks,
Mark

Mark -

This has been discussed in the Placeshifter and the Extender forums. This is not a Sage issue. Its a horsepower issue. Check your server and you will see that your server can not transcode on the fly the High Def H.264 streams from the HDPVR. One core of your server will be pegged at 100%. I am assuming the reason you are seeing 25% usage is that you have a quad core server. Sage may be able to multithread their transcoder (as it currently is only single threaded) but even then it would take a heck of a server to pull this off. This isn't like the resizing that transcoder does from taking an HD MPEG2 stream and making it SD MPEG2....this requires taking an HD h.264 video and converting the video AND downgrading it to SD MPEG2 in order to playback on the MVP.

Right now the only thing you can do is switch all extenders to the HD100 and deal with placeshifter only handling everything but what is recorded by the HDPVR.

Full support is in place by Sage for the HDPVR.

Doing a search can be your friend.

[opusinteractive]

All the searching I did prior to posting resulted in topics where the user's CPU was actually pegged and not able to keep up. However, if you take a look at the attached screenshots of my server's resource monitor while transcoding, you'll see that there is headroom on both CPU cores while transcoding. While there's not a lot of CPU left, it never pegs in this one minute sample.

Am I missing something obvious here?

Mark

[gplasky]

Check your first graphic. You have zero memory free. That may be contributing to your issue.

Gerry

[bcjenkins]

Originally Posted by opusinteractive

I have seen some discussion in other areas for this and yet I have not seen anyone say they have submitted it as a bug. 6.4.6 claims official support for the HD-PVR and yet it does not work on the PS and MVP.

My Sage Client has no problems with HD-PVR playback.

The symptom that has been reported widely is slow motion video and sound when Placeshifter uses the HD-PVR tuner. The same symptom is true for the MVP. In my case it does not seem to be a an issue with transcoding server horsepower as my CPU hovers around 25% when transcoding HD-PVR .ts recordings for PS/MVP.

Has anyone found a solution to this? I will be submitting a bug report.

In the meantime, I'd be curious if anyone knows a way to exclude specific channels OR specific tuners on the PS and MVP. Can this be done within the properties file for those clients in SageTv\SageTV\Clients?

Thanks,
Mark

Check out Bob's FCL (Favorite Channel List) You can lock into specific channels by using the Parental Controls feature.

Regarding the transcoding, part of the issue may also be FFMpeg's inability to properly decode PAFF yet.

B

[opusinteractive]

Response from Sage Support (apparently) confirms my thinking that the issue is not with the server horsepower.

The HD-PVR recordings are not fully supported on the PS or the MVP yet.
We're working on this for a future version (those features use 3rd party components which need to be updated to resolve the issues which is why it's
delayed)

Hope this is all it takes to be able use the HD-PVR with those clients.

Mark

[Matt-CV]

I guess I am guilty of not doing a search to find out the incompatibility of HD-PVR to PS and MVP as well. I have 3 MVPs and a PS now, if I knew they where not going to work together I would have delayed my HD-PVR purchase.

Anyway I have it now and it works on my sage PC, and works well but will not be using it until a solution is found for place shifting content to everything I have. If I only intended to use it on my HD TV, well we all know there are other easier ways to do this ...

That being said, I live on Sage and wish nothing more than to make it all work.
Can anyone help out with the 2 below questions:

1) "3rd party components", are we wishing for a video card or such that has hardware transcoding features ? and if so where might this be in a timeline ?

2)If I cant get #1 soon, is there an easy way to record all HD content in SD as well and manage them as one ? ie.. record the same show in SD and HD at the same time ? (I have tuners to do both) but when deleting and such Sage manages both HD version and SD version as one ?

If #2 is possible then I can do everything I need to do.

Thanks in advance for any ideas

Matt

[Fuzzy]

I believe the 3rd party components they are talking about are the ffmpeg open source codecs, which are used for transcoding in sage. The version sage is currently using does not support HD-PVR files. The current development versions appear to, but they are not in a 'released' state yet, so I don't expect Sage to use them until they are.

[bcjenkins]

I don't think the ffmpeg folks release very often. SageTV usually syncs with SVN at the start of new beta cycles. Once we get the next versions, I wouldn't be surprised if they do that, especially in light of the fact the ffmpeg code is now capable of playing back the hdpvr content.

B

[pat_smith1969]

I ran into this when I first got my hd-pvr. The only reasonable solution I found is to set the HD-PVR up to only do the HD stations. This seems like a huge waste to me as it makes better SD recordings that my two Hauppauge svid capture cards.

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by pat_smith1969

I ran into this when I first got my hd-pvr. The only reasonable solution I found is to set the HD-PVR up to only do the HD stations. This seems like a huge waste to me as it makes better SD recordings that my two Hauppauge svid capture cards.

That is the only way I have mine hooked up, and not because of the limitations of MVP's, but why would I want to have my expensive "tuner" being tied up recording SD when I have other tuners than can record SD...I would rather it always be available for HD content.....Yes it probably does do a better job at SD than normal SD MPEG2 cards, but nothing else can record HD from my VIP211.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

That is the only way I have mine hooked up, and not because of the limitations of MVP's, but why would I want to have my expensive "tuner" being tied up recording SD when I have other tuners than can record SD...I would rather it always be available for HD content.....Yes it probably does do a better job at SD than normal SD MPEG2 cards, but nothing else can record HD from my VIP211.

What I would recommend is run the HD-PVR with the lowest merit. This will prevent it from recording SD unless all other SD tuners are used up, but still leave it available to do so if the need arises. HD shows will still be recorded with the HD-PVR, as sage will prefer to record a show in HD regardless of merit.