Is PlaceShifter that bad?

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by gveres

I assume you are talking about the PC version of placeshifter. The Mac version is just about useless at this point.

I would love to see an overhaul of placeshifter if for nothing other than local lan viewing. It is a critical piece of the infrastructure.

My wife and I have reverted to using vlc right from the file system. Mostly because we want 2x playback with audio. There are so many shows that are suitable to that playback speed.

Meh, SageTV Client is much better for watching over a LAN. At least on the PC the version of MPlayer that is used for playback on Placeshifter has issues properly converting between colorspaces.

If you've ever played a video and it's all washed out looking it's because the player is not converting from the smaller color spectrum used by TV and the full RGB color spectrum used by a computer. Even HD video has a different, smaller, color spectrum from full RGB.

I think a lot of people are so used to washed out video that they take for granted that there's actually a problem.

BTW, video playback on the Mac seems to be the only place I've seen colorspace conversion consistently done correctly.

[Fuzzy]

Placeshifter is not designed for local playback. It, unfortunatly, is the only option for the mac. It was done that way because being based on mplayer and java, it was easy to port over, while the client is tied to directshow. It would be great to create a mac version of the client, and that may be possible - I'm not sure what sort of video playback api's are available on the mac - and I know next to nothing about macs - but this should really be the end goal here. Placeshifter needs improvement, for sure - but it is not the ideal platform for local, high quality playback.

[valnar]

I've dumped Placeshifter too now that Plex is available on so many platforms - only for remote access of course. Both the Sage Client and HD300's are miles better for local access, and the primary reason we all stick around.

I just add my Sage_recordings folder to Plex and my server will transcode whatever is needed. I miss the scheduling integration, but go in after the fact over VPN to my house (if in a hotel, for instance) and fire up the Sage Server interface to set the show to watched, then delete. Cumbersome, but it works.

It would be nice if there was better Plex integration, or a future Placeshifter client for iOS now that it is open-sourced. Either way is good. But something tells me both might become irrelevant once the Silicondust PVR takes off.

[Stu Gare]

I attempted to use the HD300 whilst on vacation, unfortunately hotel wifi only allowed authentication through web page. Shame as it almost worked, tried over mobile broadband but not enough bandwidth. Still plan b was place shifter on laptop with hdmi to the TV. This did work well but without the convenience of the hd300 remote.

[Fuzzy]

I only took the HD300 on one trip, and didn't really use it much, as the bandwidth was just too iffy. Now I use my phone (which has HDMI) and Plex. Plex handles intermittent bandwidth far better than placeshifter, and I can sync content to the phone for when the bandwidth is just not there.

[Stu Gare]

I guess plex is fine for pre recorded content but I wanted live TV (EPL).
I guess with the open source projects (fingers crossed) the transcoding in sage can be improved. Not sure how old the current transcoding engine is but must be quite a few years behind the curve.
I'm Pleased placeshifter works well enough to replace the 3 English speaking news channels I have available. And no geolocation problems that would require a vpn like the web accessible content.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by Stu Gare

I guess plex is fine for pre recorded content but I wanted live TV (EPL).
I guess with the open source projects (fingers crossed) the transcoding in sage can be improved. Not sure how old the current transcoding engine is but must be quite a few years behind the curve.
I'm Pleased placeshifter works well enough to replace the 3 English speaking news channels I have available. And no geolocation problems that would require a vpn like the web accessible content.

The Placeshifter encoding is quite old (vanilla MPEG4). I'm ont entirely sure what 'tweaks' were done to ffmpeg to make it work with placeshifter, but those would need to be done, or replaced with a newer function, to update to a newer encoder. Probably possible, probably not an early tackled open source project though, since MOST of this can be done with Plex.

[cupp]

I just used a hd300 for placeshifting this last weekend. I was up north at my friends cabin with a good internet connection. I thought it worked pretty good. My wife and kids were excited to be able to watch some of there shows with commercial skip.
I usually compress them to mpeg4, copy them a USB hard drive and watch them on an old hd200 when I'm on vacation.

[tvmaster2]

ok, bit the bullet and installed Windows 10 on an old Dell XPS M1330 laptop which had Windows 7.
It also had a functioning Placeshifter installation.
After the upgrade, Placeshifter produces audio, but not video, with this error:

"SageTV Placeshifter has detected an incompatibility in your video hardware. It does not support Overlay. You may need to upgrade your video driver, or you can try enabling 3D Accelerator under the Placeshifter settings"

first, 3D settings were already enabled. Second, it's possible Microsoft updated the nvidia drivers as part of the Windows 10 upgrade. I rolled the nvidia drivers back, but that didn't help.

Anyone have any ideas?

edit: Windows 10 strangeness. Disabled 3D settings - shut down app, opened app, enabled 3D settings, voila: picture appears. W10 is a bit of a drain on resources, at least on this older laptop...playback isn't as good as with W7