SageTVTranscoder Utiliztion Issues with Placeshifter
 

Hi folks,

Trying to use my Placeshifter on HD (from HD-PVR) content, but am getting choppy playback (brief pause every couple of seconds). The situation:

* Placeshifter CPU is minimally used, it's not a local playback issue.

* Changing the Placeshifter to force low-bandwidth streaming (i.e. auto vs. 250kbps) does not change playback at all. I have a 1Mbps outbound pipe from my server.

* Placeshifting works perfectly on SD content.

* I see that the SageTVTranscoder process is hovering around 50% CPU utilization on my dual-core, but will never go any higher.

* I've attempted to raise the priority of the SageTVTranscoder to "High" and "Realtime" from the default "Below Average" setting, but that doesn't help either.

Is there any way to get the SageTVTranscoder to use more than 50% of my CPU capability so it can transcode in a timely fashion?

Server specs in my signature...

Thanks!

Short answer: no. Transcoding is (currently) single-threaded, meaning that it can't split the work across multiple cores. It can use all of one core, but not more than that (unless of course you have multiple clients running multiple transcoding jobs). For now, higher CPU clock speed is the only way to increase transcoder performance.

Bah, really? That's a shame. Just upgraded my system, so another upgrade isn't on the horizon. It's still surprising to me how few applications are multi-threaded considering the widespread use of multi-core systems...

If you're on a local network Placeshifter will not usually dynamically change its bandwidth usage. You need to fool it into thinking it's working over the internet (search dyndns on the forums) so it will do the best it can.