HD200/300 Placeshifter

[mickdaly]

There seems to be very little information on using the extender in placeshifter mode.

I'm interested in hearing more experience. I want to placeshift into my system from my son's.

The upload speed from my sage server lan is about 760kbps, the download speed on my son's internet is 5mbps.

If 'all else is equal' should this give reasonable performance?

[gplasky]

It should. And the Placeshifter will dynamically adjust to the thruput. But there may still be issues with recordings from a HD-PVR. Most of the ones I placeshifted with were mpg HD recordings. I just tested it to make sure I could. I don't plan on any long term placeshift viewing. I actually copy the TV recordings I want to watch to a USB drive and watch it from there when I go up North. No Internet up there for me.

Gerry

[mickdaly]

Originally Posted by gplasky

It should. And the Placeshifter will dynamically adjust to the thruput. But there may still be issues with recordings from a HD-PVR. Most of the ones I placeshifted with were mpg HD recordings. I just tested it to make sure I could.
Gerry

Thanks Gerry ... does anyone else out there have any advice? P/S on my laptop and on the HD200 are unwatchable - stuttering of video and audio.

Problem happens with both recordings from my HD-PVRs AND ripped DVDs.

Is there any setting on the server or the HD200 that could be changed to improve this?

Mick

[Gustovier]

Youre right not many people seem to be doing this, it was one of main reasons for me buying into sage. Unfortunately there's no way to configure the streaming quality for the extender(im using an hd300) In placeshifter mode and to be frank the quality sucks and I have about a 9mbps on avg upload pipe. I wish this would have been mentioned before I bought the hd300.

[paulbeers]

One thing to remember, your 9mb upload speed is still half the required bandwidth of 1080i Mpeg2 HD and around 2/3 the bandwidth needed for the HDPVR at full speed. So even maxing out your upload you will still see a considerable degradation to the image. Also what is the download speed at the other end of your connection? So your upload is 9mb, but what is the download speed where you are trying to watch?

[Gustovier]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

One thing to remember, your 9mb upload speed is still half the required bandwidth of 1080i Mpeg2 HD and around 2/3 the bandwidth needed for the HDPVR at full speed. So even maxing out your upload you will still see a considerable degradation to the image. Also what is the download speed at the other end of your connection? So your upload is 9mb, but what is the download speed where you are trying to watch?

Well yeah 9mb would not work for full 1080i but if it's transcoded I should be able to get a pretty hi quality HD picture (720p) just at a lower bit rate. Airvideo and streamtome can do this using ffmpeg as the transcoder requiring only 2mpbs upload speed. My download speed is about 20mb down too in the remote location. Sagetv just needs to use a better transcoder and/or let us adjust the quality on the extender.

*edit: just learned sage is using ffmpeg. Why they renamed it to sagetranscoder.exe I dunno. I'm wondering if I can make a wrapper for the transcoder to pass on different parameters to obtain better quality.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by mickdaly

Thanks Gerry ... does anyone else out there have any advice? P/S on my laptop and on the HD200 are unwatchable - stuttering of video and audio.

Problem happens with both recordings from my HD-PVRs AND ripped DVDs.

Is there any setting on the server or the HD200 that could be changed to improve this?

Mick

Placshifter doesn't play ripped DVDs. You will need to use the Sage PC Client for those. HD-PVR is CPU intensive on the server to transcode for PS.

Gerry