Letter from Xfinity/Comcast

[crarbo1]

I just got a letter from Xfinity/Comcast saying that I needed to check to see if my equipment was MPEG-4 compatible.

I guess they are changing the type signal coming into my Ceton InfiniTV4 PCIe tuners.

My questions may be silly, but I don't know for sure.
Are my cable card tuners ok to use? I checked their website but it didn't say.
Will SageTV record everything fine?
Do I need to change any settings on my server or mini-clients, to make it play?

The say I need to replace incompatible equipment by 6/13, so I guess I have a little while to figure something out if needed.

Thanks,
Chuck

[JustFred]

Your existing hardware should be fine.
Two of my friends are successfully running InfiniTV4 and InfiniTV6 PCIe cards with Sage, fed via Comcast's MPEG4 streams. Be sure the card has the last firmware Ceton released (several years old now, and perpetually labeled "beta"). Your sig indicates OpenDCT, which works well in this environment.

[crarbo1]

Originally Posted by JustFred

Your existing hardware should be fine.
Two of my friends are successfully running InfiniTV4 and InfiniTV6 PCIe cards with Sage, fed via Comcast's MPEG4 streams. Be sure the card has the last firmware Ceton released (several years old now, and perpetually labeled "beta"). Your sig indicates OpenDCT, which works well in this environment.

Thanks for the info. I figured it should be ok but wanted to ask if I needed to do anything on SageTV software to make it work. Sounds like I'm ok.

Thanks again,
Chuck

[trk2]

If you use comskip, I believe you have to upgrade to the donor version for it to work properly with MPEG4.

[crarbo1]

Originally Posted by trk2

If you use comskip, I believe you have to upgrade to the donor version for it to work properly with MPEG4.

Thanks for the info. I don't use comskip, but it is good to know!

[waynedunham]

Originally Posted by crarbo1

Thanks for the info. I don't use comskip, but it is good to know!

Blaspheme! Just kidding. But really why not? You can watch a half hour sitcom in about 18-19 minutes, a 2 hour TV movie in about an hour and 15 minutes. You can end up saving about 25% of the listed time for a show to do other things, like visit with the family, or maybe just start the next show.

Commercial skipping is something I've been doing for over 25 years. First with my VCRs, the ReplayTVs, and now SageTV. Whenever I'm up at my Mom's house I keep trying to hit the comskip button on the remote but it doesn't work. "Gee, I don't have commercials on my TV at home."

[crarbo1]

Originally Posted by waynedunham

Blaspheme! Just kidding. But really why not? You can watch a half hour sitcom in about 18-19 minutes, a 2 hour TV movie in about an hour and 15 minutes. You can end up saving about 25% of the listed time for a show to do other things, like visit with the family, or maybe just start the next show.

Commercial skipping is something I've been doing for over 25 years. First with my VCRs, the ReplayTVs, and now SageTV. Whenever I'm up at my Mom's house I keep trying to hit the comskip button on the remote but it doesn't work. "Gee, I don't have commercials on my TV at home."

Funny! I'm not sure why I never tried it out. I do skip the commercials however, just manually. I have my fast forward set so I can skip them in a few presses of the button.

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by waynedunham

Blaspheme! Just kidding. But really why not? You can watch a half hour sitcom in about 18-19 minutes, a 2 hour TV movie in about an hour and 15 minutes. You can end up saving about 25% of the listed time for a show to do other things, like visit with the family, or maybe just start the next show.

Commercial skipping is something I've been doing for over 25 years. First with my VCRs, the ReplayTVs, and now SageTV. Whenever I'm up at my Mom's house I keep trying to hit the comskip button on the remote but it doesn't work. "Gee, I don't have commercials on my TV at home."

You can still skip commercials manually using the skip1 and skip2 buttons on the remote. I haven't tried Comskip in years, but when I did, I found it was only about 80% accurate. Sometimes it would jut be off by a few seconds (either showing a few extra seconds of the commercial or worse, chopping a couple seconds from the show). Occasionally it would be completely wrong and chop out a few minutes of a show.

Sometimes Comskip would get it right, but the network just had an abrupt commercial cut so it looked like you missed something, but that was just the way it aired. I never really trusted Comskip, so I would waste more time trying to go back and see the what I might have missed. And then if you tried to manually skip a few seconds near a cut mark, Sage would jump to the beginning or end of the cut mark.

I like the idea of Comskip, but for me if the accuracy is less than 99.999%, it's easier to just skip manually.

As an added bonus, while manually skipping (90 sec with skip1 and 7 sec with skip2), I still see a couple seconds of some of the commercials and occasionally something will catch my eye that I am interested in actually seeing.

[waynedunham]

It is true that Comskip isn't 100% accurate, but for the most part it does an excellent job IMHO.

I have my skips set to: Skip 1 10sec back/30sec fwd, and skip 2 is 3min back/3 min fwd. Even when Comskip misses, or doesn't work on a show (i.e. when there's a storm and the local channel has the cancellations crawl at the bottom of the screen) I can get past commercials in only a couple presses of the button.

Since it isn't 100% accurate I have mine set to NOT auto-skip and use the right and left arrow keys near the OK button to skip fwd/back to the next/last comskip marker.

IMHO still WAY easier than doing it completely manually. Especially since you never know if it's a 2 minute commercial break, or a 5 minute commercial break (yes they do go that far sometimes)

On the issue of the abrupt breaks, there are settings in there to set the padding of the breaks. So you can have it mark a few seconds after the commercial starts and a few seconds before the commercial ends so you can "feel" the commercial break from programming to and back from the commercial.

[wayner]

One of the other great plugins for SageTV is Tmiranda's Dynamic Skip Times plugin that let's you set skip times based on the show title. I use this all the time for sports adjusting the SkipFwdx2 to (usually) 120 or 150 seconds depending on the sporting event and you can set it to 180 seconds for many regular TV shows. This lessens the need for Comskip.

[waynedunham]

Originally Posted by wayner

One of the other great plugins for SageTV is Tmiranda's Dynamic Skip Times plugin that let's you set skip times based on the show title. I use this all the time for sports adjusting the SkipFwdx2 to (usually) 120 or 150 seconds depending on the sporting event and you can set it to 180 seconds for many regular TV shows. This lessens the need for Comskip.

I'll have to take a look at that to see if it would help with some sports. Unless they are in a 2 minute/no huddle offense a 30 second skip is almost perfect for NFL games. "And he is tackled at the 18 yard line" SKIP "HIKE!".
But for MLB games 20-25 seconds is probably better between pitches. "And the batter steps out", "Now the pitcher steps off the rubber". JUST THROW THE DAMNED BALL!!!!