Watching my HD300 remotely!

[heffneil]

I am watching tv with my HD300 from one house to my server in another. The picture quality is fair at best but my big problem is the picture and audio freeze every 3 seconds and then continues. These small pauses make it impossible to watch. Any ideas how I can optimize settings? I contact comcast to see if I can bump up my upload speed from the place with the server. It is limited to 2 Mb and it is SLOOOOW.

Thanks!

Neil

[heffneil]

This was moved to Media Extender but I believe the issue is optimizing the server for placeshifting? I am using the transcoder. I do not believe it is a CPU issue. I have stopped everything on the server and the server is a dual quad core xeon so it has a lot of horsepower! Thanks!

[heffneil]

I don't think the transcoder can stream efficiently enough. I was able to watch my HD200 via the slingbox and it was very watchable....

I don't know if there are tweak settings to optimize but it's getting hammered with my upload cap!

[Fuzzy]

There isn't much tweaking to be done. Placeshifter software has some ability to fix the bitrate, but that is not available in the extenders in placeshifting mode. Instead, it sets the bitrate based on the buffer status of the placeshifter/extender. (buffer empty, lower setting; buffer full, raise setting). That said, 2Mb should be more than enough for smooth stable playback. Are you using SageTV7? if not, is this content interlaced H.264? ffmpeg had a problem handling interlaced H.264, but that has been fixed in the current builds shipped with v7. Aside from that, the only other thing would be your processor in the server just isn't up to the task. Of course, you'd have to be able to see the CPU loading while streaming to see.

Also, realize that even being a dual-quad xeon doesn't really help, as ffmpeg is single threaded, so it will only use one of those cores. You would probably be better off with a high clock speed modern dual core in this case.

[heffneil]

I am running v7 and it runs very very poorly. I was streaming from my HD PVR but even my videos which are VOB abd MPG's aren't streaming well!

Edit: CPU was 13% at the time of streaming. I didn't seem to see a problem with the processor...

[Fuzzy]

well, of your 8 cores, a single core being saturated WOULD be 12.5% cpu usage.

[ripplingj]

Originally Posted by heffneil

I am watching tv with my HD300 from one house to my server in another. The picture quality is fair at best but my big problem is the picture and audio freeze every 3 seconds and then continues. These small pauses make it impossible to watch. Any ideas how I can optimize settings? I contact comcast to see if I can bump up my upload speed from the place with the server. It is limited to 2 Mb and it is SLOOOOW.

I have the same problem but it seems that watching live tv the picture is fair but does not seem to stop every couple of seconds. The recorded video has the problem with the freezing and stopping making it hard to watch. I do not know if there is a difference between the two but on my local network everything works fine but over the internet there are problems with the hd300 watching recorded shows but the live tv works well.

[razrsharpe]

Originally Posted by heffneil

I was streaming from my HD PVR

to get hdpvr transcoding to work properly for my remote hd100 i had to set the following in sage.properties

xcode_fix_broken_hdpvr_streams=true

of course my problem was an a/v sync problem but it still might be worth a try... there was some (very) slight studdering too iirc... after setting that property item transcodes from the hdpvr are just peachy. Note, though, that i never had a problem with placeshifting 1080i or 720p mpgs from the HDHR, or 720p h264 mkvs

[heffneil]

Another Sunday and another lousy day of picture quality! My problem isn't just HD PVR but movies I have ripped as well. I did watch an non hd channel on my cable tv provider via the HD HomeRun source on sagetv and that ran beautifully. Not a lot of moving picture and what not. Still pretty bummed this is working so poorly!

[Fuzzy]

My only quality problems right now is that the tv keeps saying the chargers season is over... I think I need to file a bug report..

[heffneil]

At least you aren't a Steelers fan!

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by heffneil

Another Sunday and another lousy day of picture quality! My problem isn't just HD PVR but movies I have ripped as well. I did watch an non hd channel on my cable tv provider via the HD HomeRun source on sagetv and that ran beautifully. Not a lot of moving picture and what not. Still pretty bummed this is working so poorly!

Have you looked into the CPU issue yet? Do you have a faster core somewhere in your house you could use to install a trial sage install on, and see if those imports/recordings stream better?

[heffneil]

I am away and remote right now hence the need!

But I have a i5 at home that is probably faster. By the time I get home I wont' need it for another 11 months at least for as long as I can see and I can use the slingbox with the HD200 at home which is what I did for the second half of the game...

I wish I could get more bandwidth from comcast. I tried placeshifting from a laptop locally and it worked without incident?

[Brent94Z]

I'm not exactly sure of your setup but have you considered connecting your HD300 to your Slingbox? I can't stream HD using Placeshifter worth a darn (stuttering every 3 seconds like you mention) but can stream beautifully HD via the Slingbox and HD300. My stuttering is NOT a bandwidth problem either because on the Slingbox I'm getting ~4500kbps at a remote location... I don't have a super computer as my server.

Anyway, if you don't have it already, might want to try connecting your Slingbox to your HD300 instead of your cablebox

[heffneil]

Yeah I am using a spare HD200 with the slingbox. It just difficult to watch because it isn't on a TV. My quality on the slingbox is pretty poor even though it is HD compatible...

Thanks!

[Gustovier]

I also get pretty bad(well not what I believe I should be getting) quality when using an hd300 in place shift mode. I believe this to be related to transcoder settings sage is using. I have 10mbps up on the server side and plenty enough CPU horsepower. On the client side location I have a 30 Mbps down into my hd300. So the quality is not related to network speeds or CPU power. If I remove sage completely out of the equation I can successfully transcode and stream 720p mkv to my iPad and use airplay to send it to my apple tv delivering great quality HQ hd video. Or I can also use my sling box hd to deliver pretty good hd quality as well. Therefore I have to conclude it's something within sage thats giving us the poor quality. Tech support doesn't seem to help so much with this either, which is unfortunate. If the quality was better there wouldn't be a need for my sling box and I can just bring my hd 300 everywhere.

[heffneil]

I had a buddy try air video from my server and it ran pretty darn good. I would go on to say better than the slingbox but he was in the local comcast area. I don't get great quality from my slingbox but at least it is viewable. I agree there is a problem with the sage transcoder and it isn't optimized. It is a real shame and I agree that we will probably never get to the bottom of it. Any other products run server with decent transcoding? Does WMC do decent remote transcoding?

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by Gustovier

I also get pretty bad(well not what I believe I should be getting) quality when using an hd300 in place shift mode. I believe this to be related to transcoder settings sage is using. I have 10mbps up on the server side and plenty enough CPU horsepower. On the client side location I have a 30 Mbps down into my hd300. So the quality is not related to network speeds or CPU power. If I remove sage completely out of the equation I can successfully transcode and stream 720p mkv to my iPad and use airplay to send it to my apple tv delivering great quality HQ hd video. Or I can also use my sling box hd to deliver pretty good hd quality as well. Therefore I have to conclude it's something within sage thats giving us the poor quality. Tech support doesn't seem to help so much with this either, which is unfortunate. If the quality was better there wouldn't be a need for my sling box and I can just bring my hd 300 everywhere.

What kind of internet service do you have that gives you 10Mb up?

Anyway. I don't think you'll see 720p resolution from the extender used as a placeshifter. Since there aren't the quality and resolution options available like the regular Placeshifter I'm sure it's using a fairly low fixed resolution no matter the amount of bandwidth. You'll need to make a request directly to SageTV to make the extender's placeshifter options more configurable.

[Gustovier]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

What kind of internet service do you have that gives you 10Mb up?

Anyway. I don't think you'll see 720p resolution from the extender used as a placeshifter. Since there aren't the quality and resolution options available like the regular Placeshifter I'm sure it's using a fairly low fixed resolution no matter the amount of bandwidth. You'll need to make a request directly to SageTV to make the extender's placeshifter options more configurable.

In my area comcast offers a 50mb/10mb package (real world is actually about 60mb down and 9.82mb up on avg). Yes I do believe that once the process occurs that determines transcoding needs to take place it's forcing a low quality resolution. There's actually a parameter in the sage.properties file that specifies min bandwidth before transcoding needs to happen. I'm not confident it's being honored though . I've already requested the ability to adjust transcoding quality for an extender in place shift mode bout a month ago. I wouldn't hold your breath though.( I hope I'm wrong).

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by Gustovier

I wouldn't hold your breath though.( I hope I'm wrong).

What makes you say that? I have no experience in sage every NOT eventually implementing requested features, especially relatively minor ones like this (the setting ARE there in the placeshifter protocol, as it works with the software version).