Playback Exception Error on New WHS Server

[ddoell]

This is my first post after many months of reading the forums here. My research here led me to my first adventure in building a computer and using server software in hopes of using SageTV to share all of our media around the house. I started with these parts for the server:

Gigabyte 780G motherboard
On board Radeon HD 3200 video
On board Realtek HD audio
AMD x64 5050e chip
Two SATA drives using AHCI drivers
500 GB system drive 1 TB data drive
2 GB memory

The build went fine. A few bumps with AHCI drivers during WHS install but finally got everything working. Stretched the C: partition and formated D: partition and data drive with 64k blocks per SME's tutorials. Loaded all the latest drivers from the Gigabyte website. Installed all the latest updates to WHS from Microsoft Update.

I have a HDHR on the network serving another Vista PC with Media Center that I have been using to experiment with this type of setup. So I installed the latest drivers and firmware for the HDHR on the new server and got it up and running with no problem. Set it to support SageTV in the setup. I assume it is OK to have the HDHR support Sage on the server and VMC on my other PC since the tuners are allocated dynamically.

So far so good. The last thing to do was install the trial version of SageTV. I'm using the trial because I want to make sure I get everything working to my liking before my planned purchase of two media center extenders and the license for Sage. However, I cannot get all the way through the setup of Sage and can get no video or audio from it on live TV. I get the error sage.playbackexception: error(-5,0x80040200): There was a problem rendering the audio portion of the content for playback.

I've tried every combination of audio and video renderer in the detailed setup screen to no avail. I've uninstalled and reinstalled Sage. To test the live TV I installed VLC player and live TV plays fine on it with audio. I also can play windows sounds and CD music with no problem.

I've seen this error in one other thread on the forum but it was never resolved. Does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks.

[BrianDC]

Is your goal to play video on the WHS server itself, or via clients on the network.

If you are looking to play video on the WHS Server, i.e. log into WHS and launch the Sage Client software, then you will need to load some codecs to get it working since the codecs are not installed by default on the WHS platform.

My advice, get sage working via placeshifter from another PC on your network and record a few shows. Then try to play the videos locally on the WHS server via Windows media player.
You will most likely need an MP3 audio codec, MPEG-2 video codec (WinDVD, or other DVD player software installed), and possibly a few other codecs. Windows media player should throw an error, and give you "advice" on what is missing.

I started to go down this route to do troubleshooting on my sage WHS server, and ended up giving up since I didn't want to pay for codecs, and don't like installing random "free" software from questionable sites since this was temporary troubleshooting.

Hopefully this helps get you started.

*I realize some people want their WHS server to play content, but it's not really what WHS was designed to do. It was really designed to sit in a closet and only interact with the WHS console app.

[ddoell]

Thanks for the reply BrianDC. I do not intend to play video on the WHS itself. My desire to get it working now on the server was my theory (based on my years of PC experience) that if it didn't work on the server it wouldn't work on the media center extenders I plan to buy. I see now that I have work to do to change my perception of how computers work when they are servers.

I'll start work tonight on getting the placeshifter set up and working. Then I assume when I access the server with placeshifter it will walk me through the setup.

Thanks for getting my thoughts redirected. For a while there I thought this was never going to work. I have renewed optimism now