Upgrade to HD200?

[civerson4]

I have 2 HD 100's and a Sage Server running on a Cat 6 gig-e network that are working well--except for BluRay rips where it is nearly impossible to get smooth playback.

Will upgrading to the HD200 help this? I've been a little busy at work and other home projects for the past 9-12 months, so I haven't been keeping up to date on Sage as in the past. Thanks for any guidance or advice.

Chad

[viperdiablo]

I just watched my first bluray rip (iron man) and it played back without a hicup on my hd200.

[doc]

Originally Posted by civerson4

I have 2 HD 100's and a Sage Server running on a Cat 6 gig-e network that are working well--except for BluRay rips where it is nearly impossible to get smooth playback.

Will upgrading to the HD200 help this? I've been a little busy at work and other home projects for the past 9-12 months, so I haven't been keeping up to date on Sage as in the past. Thanks for any guidance or advice.

Chad

I've got one of each.

I got myself a bluray player for the pc, AnyDVD HD and set it up on the HD200 with audio connected through the AV receiver. The only way I could get smooth playback was by setting

miniplayer/forced_max_push_size=32768 in sage.properties

I recently swapped the boxes over so I could take the HD200 on the road.
I tried a blu-ray on the HD100 just to see what happened and it played fine.

It might be worth trying this before spending your money. It's a 2 minute change, might help, might not, but worth a try.

[bits]

I have ripped 30+ BDs to HDD and played everyone of them via a wired connection to my HD200.....they all played smoothly and continuously

[paulbeers]

My experience with playing Blu-Ray's with my HD100's have been hit or miss. I haven't tried the property listed above, but the out of the box experience hasn't been good. However, with my HD200's I haven't had a problem My two HD200's are hooked to my main tv's and the HD100's are hooked to secondary televisions now (aka bedroom and office).

[cat6man]

hd200s will play bluray video fine. the only limitation i see is that they cannot
pass HD audio (in either format) because they don't have hdmi1.3 but a previous version of hdmi. a work around is that the hd200 can play the core 5.1 audio (but not HD version) for dolby HD but you you can't get any audio if the HD audio format is DTS.

i have 2 hd200s and need a 3rd but i'm waiting for the next gen h/w (hd300?) to solve the HD audio problem.
other than that, the hd200 is superb.

[autoboy]

I haven't had a problem playing BDs on the HD100. It used to have problems, but the firmware from a year ago solved the problem for me. I don't use it in my primary room, but none of the movies i've played on it had problems.

Try updating your firmware.

[Deacon Crusher]

After fighting with this for a year or more I've gotten my HD100s to play back blu-rays quite reliably, without even ripping, just have them play from the disc in the drive. Even have one doing it over a wireless connection.

The majority of this has to do with having a fast and reliable network. My theory is that the firmware that sage gets from the chip manufacturer sometimes tweaks the networking stack and when they do that the auto negotiation of speed and duplex mode gets affected. Some extender firmwares worked fine on my network and then with others I'd have terrible stuttering problems. I finally found a switch that seems to auto negotiate reliable settings (speed/duplex) with my extenders so I have one of those switches with each extender and I've been golden ever since I made that change.

I have a fast manageable Dell gig switch at the center of my network and then cat 5e cables to most locations, except the house was originally wired with Cat5 so some remote locations (upstairs for example) I haven't been able to replace/upgrade the wiring.) So the remote extenders have palm gig switches sitting next to them that sync at gig/full duplex with the dell and then sync at 100 meg full duplex with the extender.

Now works great. So, check your switches, check your cable quality and make sure things are syncing properly.

One Caveat, if a blu-ray has only a DTS sound track then you have to have your extender hooked to something that can decode and play a DTS soundtrack or you get no sound. That's when I'd rip and convert the soundtrack to AC3 although I'm currently in the process of making sure all extenders can play the DTS (2 via stereos/amps with decoders and one via a soundbar with decoder.)

So, I don't think you currently need to upgrade from a 100 to a 200 (my 200 had the same problems as my 100 before all the tweaking to network was done.)

Wait for the HD300 that can bitstream the full HD sound tracks (HDMI 1.3) and decode and downsample DTS sound tracks the way the current ones can with AC3.

Good luck.

[civerson4]

Thanks for the advice. Any idea when the HD300's will be out? Is there even an "unofficial" timeframe?

[doc]

Originally Posted by civerson4

Thanks for the advice. Any idea when the HD300's will be out? Is there even an "unofficial" timeframe?

The HD300 is still an imaginery device.

There's been no talk of one other than people putting together a wish list for what they'd want from one.

[drewg]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

My experience with playing Blu-Ray's with my HD100's have been hit or miss. I haven't tried the property listed above, but the out of the box experience hasn't been good. However, with my HD200's I haven't had a problem My two HD200's are hooked to my main tv's and the HD100's are hooked to secondary televisions now (aka bedroom and office).

What happens when it is a miss? I'm trying to play my first BD rip on my HD100. (Toy Story 1; a gift for my kid got me into this BD mess). The video will play for about 2 seconds w/o audio, then pause. The audio defaults to DCA. I can go into the menu and change the audio track to 2ch ac3 english, then the video plays for a few more seconds with audio and stops. The lights don't blink when things stop.

I'm running 6.6, and the latest HD100 beta f/w 20100212 0. I've set the miniplayer/forced_max_push=32768 (and 131072). The HD100 is on a 100Mb/s port and has no problems with max bitrate ATSC. A linux media PC on the same switch plays the video (via Boxee). This is the first time I've ever seen my HD100 not play anything I've thrown at it.

Waiting for the HD200 to get back in stock, I guess.

Thanks,

Drew

[Motofreak75]

Originally Posted by doc

The HD300 is still an imaginary device.

There's been no talk of one other than people putting together a wish list for what they'd want from one.

Will I just found this out here a picture of HD300 it has antenna on the back of it

http://www.sagetv.com/HD300.jpg

http://www.sagetv.com/HD300-wireless.jpg

[Brent]

Funny

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by drewg

What happens when it is a miss? I'm trying to play my first BD rip on my HD100. (Toy Story 1; a gift for my kid got me into this BD mess). The video will play for about 2 seconds w/o audio, then pause. The audio defaults to DCA. I can go into the menu and change the audio track to 2ch ac3 english, then the video plays for a few more seconds with audio and stops. The lights don't blink when things stop.

I noticed with one of my Blu-Ray rips on the HD100's, is that the video will stutter a lot. I don't have this problem on the HD200's. Some say they have never had a problem. I really have never tried to figure out the cause (it isn't my network because I swapped out the HD100 with an HD200 and the issue went away). Now they are on secondary televisions, so I really haven't looked into it since it isn't important to me anymore.

[drewg]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

I noticed with one of my Blu-Ray rips on the HD100's, is that the video will stutter a lot. I don't have this problem on the HD200's. Some say they have never had a problem. I really have never tried to figure out the cause (it isn't my network because I swapped out the HD100 with an HD200 and the issue went away). Now they are on secondary televisions, so I really haven't looked into it since it isn't important to me anymore.

Thanks.. I tried a few more things last night (mainly forcing the server's NIC to 100Mb/s) on the theory that going from 1000Mbs -> 100Mb/s on the HD100 was overflowing a buffer in my consumer grade switch. No joy with that either. Looks like I'll get in line for the HD300, and resign myself to having to use an HTPC for these BD rips.

Could it be something about my rip? I ripped it with makemkv. According to SageTV, the file is:

Episode: ToyStory

Aired: Jul 28, 2010 8:23 PM - 9:45 PM

Duration: 1h 21m

Description: 2/0

HDTV

Language: spa

Show ID: MF1394980

File Format: MATROSKA[H.264 1080p@24fps, DCA@48kHz 5.1 eng, DCA@48kHz Stereo eng, AC3@48kHz Stereo eng, AC3@48kHz 5.1 fra, AC3@48kHz 5.1 spa, AC3@48kHz Stereo eng, Subpic:eng 0X0000, Subpic:fra 0X0000, Subpic:spa 0X0000, Subpic:eng 0X0000, Subpic:fra 0X0000, Subpic:spa 0X0000]

Files: 
/var/media/videos/pixar/ToyStory.mkv

File Playlists: [wvx] [m3u] [pls] 
Size: 17.41GB

Drew

[RocKKer]

I may be grasping...

Wonder if the issue is with MKV support on that device? How bout ripping it (or converting to a plain ol' BRD structure? I think MakeMKV allows you to rip BRD structure without MKV conversion.

One other thing might be to re-encode to reduce the bitrate? (ala HandBrake, BR-Rebuilder, etc.)

[drewg]

Originally Posted by RocKKer

Wonder if the issue is with MKV support on that device? How bout ripping it (or converting to a plain ol' BRD structure? I think MakeMKV allows you to rip BRD structure without MKV conversion.

It is something about the audio. I told makemkv to just keep the AC3 english audio, and it made me a MKV that worked fine. The only problem is the audio is the director's commentary, and the visually impaired audio. So I then went back to another mkv that had the DTS master / DCA (non AC3 audio) in it, and used mkvdts2ac3 to try to convert it to AC3. It created a new .mkv that crashed the extender hard enough to require a power cycle

I'm in the middle of running eac3to via ClownBD in an XP VM on a BRD that I ripped. If it ever finishes (VirtualBox host/guest I/O seems very slow), I'm hoping it might actually work. I found instructions on how to run it via Wine, so if it pans out, I think that's how I'll try to convert the rest of the discs.

Now I see why people are clamoring for DTS support on extenders. What a PITA this has been. I don't care one bit about audio (I'm tone deaf and proud of it), but having an extender be able to downsample DTS to stereo on the fly would save a lot of people a lot of grief. Add me to the HD300 line..

Drew

[drewg]

Originally Posted by RocKKer

I may be grasping...

Wonder if the issue is with MKV support on that device? How bout ripping it (or converting to a plain ol' BRD structure? I think MakeMKV allows you to rip BRD structure without MKV conversion.

I think it was makemkv's mkv interacting poorly with the hd100 that was causing the playback failures. A raw BRD rip plays (but without proper audio, since there is no ac3 on the disc for the main track).

I used clownbd on that rip, with DTS converted to AC3, and it seems to work fine. So at least I know the HD100 can play it. Now to just get the process to something that doesn't involve a windows vm..

Drew