Help understanding - 4K, x265, 10bit, hd300

[jptheripper]

All,
I am missing something and would really love to understand better. Before I try to get "yet another copy" of all my thousands of movies and tv shows stored on server, latest windows installer

My setup is a windows 10 server with 3 HD300s and 3 windows clients.

x265 just doesnt work. Anywhere. Usually its a black screen, often failed to render video 0x0 type errors. I assumed (incorrectly apparently) that if a video stream was requested by a client it would be transcoded to a format the client could render.

I dont care how "beefy" a server I need, i just want it to work. What am i missing? why wont the files transcode on the fly to a useable format?

Thanks

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by jptheripper

All,
I am missing something and would really love to understand better. Before I try to get "yet another copy" of all my thousands of movies and tv shows stored on server, latest windows installer

My setup is a windows 10 server with 3 HD300s and 3 windows clients.

x265 just doesnt work. Anywhere. Usually its a black screen, often failed to render video 0x0 type errors. I assumed (incorrectly apparently) that if a video stream was requested by a client it would be transcoded to a format the client could render.

I dont care how "beefy" a server I need, i just want it to work. What am i missing? why wont the files transcode on the fly to a useable format?

Thanks

SageTV does not transcode when using local Clients ... it only transcodes when using placeshifter . H265 is not supported by SageTV extenders.

[wayner]

HD300s are almost a decade old. H.265 was not even a flicker in someones eye back then.

The best that you can do with SageTV extenders is 1080p encoded with H.265.

If you want H.265 or 4K you will need SageTV clients which requires a full PC.

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by wayner

HD300s are almost a decade old. H.265 was not even a flicker in someones eye back then.

The best that you can do with SageTV extenders is 1080p encoded with H.265.

If you want H.265 or 4K you will need SageTV clients which requires a full PC.

I thought extenders cannot do H265 you get audio but no video.

[phelme]

someone here is working on a plugin that will allow H.265 content to be at least recognized (not its intended use, but a benefit of it), theoretically a server based transcoder could be put together from there. Some of the groundwork is likely in place, as the Placeshifter server code does basic conversion already.

[KryptoNyte]

I just installed the latest miniclient from Josh and I think that 4k content works fine on the fire stick 4k. I could only find files without audio, though.

http://jell.yfish.us/

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by KryptoNyte

I just installed the latest miniclient from Josh and I think that 4k content works fine on the fire stick 4k. I could only find files without audio, though.

http://jell.yfish.us/

They work fine using the mini Client also Fire Cube and ShieldTV.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by nyplayer

I thought extenders cannot do H265 you get audio but no video.

You're right that was a mistake - I meant to say H.264

[jptheripper]

Originally Posted by nyplayer

SageTV does not transcode when using local Clients ... it only transcodes when using placeshifter . H265 is not supported by SageTV extenders.

I guess this is what i am asking, can i force my server to transcode for the local clients, or can this be added to the server code

[jvl711]

Originally Posted by jptheripper

I guess this is what i am asking, can i force my server to transcode for the local clients, or can this be added to the server code

The SageTV Transcoder is pretty old, and is not capable of transcoding h.265. It could be upgraded in the future to do that. I may attempt it at some point, but I am focusing efforts on SageTV Mini Client, and the format detector plugin. When those two are more stable I will continue to work on expanding the ability of my ffmpeg library to include transcoding capability. Hopefully I will be able to add something to Sage in the future....

If it were me I would not be waiting on that feature to come to Sage though. I would look into replacing the HD300/HD200 with something that can more reliably handle newer codecs. Transcoding H.265 takes a lot of horsepower.

Josh

[wnjj]

Originally Posted by jvl711

The SageTV Transcoder is pretty old, and is not capable of transcoding h.265. It could be upgraded in the future to do that. I may attempt it at some point, but I am focusing efforts on SageTV Mini Client, and the format detector plugin. When those two are more stable I will continue to work on expanding the ability of my ffmpeg library to include transcoding capability. Hopefully I will be able to add something to Sage in the future....

If it were me I would not be waiting on that feature to come to Sage though. I would look into replacing the HD300/HD200 with something that can more reliably handle newer codecs. Transcoding H.265 takes a lot of horsepower.

Josh

If you do try to take on updating ffmpeg for SageTV, drop me a line. I went through the very extensive code differences and completed what I think were the equivalent edits needed for SageTV. I hit a wall when it came time to compile and subsequently lost interest. Those large multi-platform projects have crazy complicated sets of build scripts/Makefiles.

[jpwegas]

Originally Posted by wnjj

If you do try to take on updating ffmpeg for SageTV, drop me a line. I went through the very extensive code differences and completed what I think were the equivalent edits needed for SageTV.

Do you have your work available in a git repo or similar?

Thanks,

--John

[wnjj]

Originally Posted by jpwegas

Do you have your work available in a git repo or similar?

Thanks,

--John

It's in git on my local machine but I could push it to Github when I get the time. I started from ffmpeg's repo at the time.

[jpwegas]

Originally Posted by wnjj

It's in git on my local machine but I could push it to Github when I get the time. I started from ffmpeg's repo at the time.

That would be great when you get a chance, maybe someone else can pick up all the work you've done and deal with the build issues you ran into.

--John

[jvl711]

Originally Posted by wnjj

If you do try to take on updating ffmpeg for SageTV, drop me a line. I went through the very extensive code differences and completed what I think were the equivalent edits needed for SageTV. I hit a wall when it came time to compile and subsequently lost interest. Those large multi-platform projects have crazy complicated sets of build scripts/Makefiles.

I know this conversation is jumping between two threads.... I played with the transcoder a little bit with the mini client. I was wondering if you could help with a few questions. I would like to see if we could move this forward a little bit.

1. What exactly are the modifications to the ffmpeg that make the SageTVTranscoder? Are they still needed with the more recent versions of ffmpeg? Depending on what they are, it may be easier if we could support ffmpeg out of the box. I am willing to try and help if I can. I am not really a C/C++ programmer, but I would be willing to try.

2. Any idea what container sage is using for format "DVD". I was trying to hack SageTV to transcode mpeg2 for ExoPlayer. I am wondering if ExoPlayer on a device that does not support mpeg2 will even support the DVD container format. I was able to get it to transcode to mpeg4 720x480 by hacking the code. It did display in IJKPlayer and looked decent, but ExoPlayer thru an error.

Thanks,
Josh

[wayner]

Originally Posted by jvl711

1. What exactly are the modifications to the ffmpeg that make the SageTVTranscoder? Are they still needed with the more recent versions of ffmpeg? Depending on what they are, it may be easier if we could support ffmpeg out of the box. I am willing to try and help if I can. I am not really a C/C++ programmer, but I would be willing to try.

2. Any idea what container sage is using for format "DVD". I was trying to hack SageTV to transcode mpeg2 for ExoPlayer. I am wondering if ExoPlayer on a device that does not support mpeg2 will even support the DVD container format. I was able to get it to transcode to mpeg4 720x480 by hacking the code. It did display in IJKPlayer and looked decent, but ExoPlayer thru an error.

If you guys haven't already done so you should really contact narflex and stuckless as they can probably save you tons of time on this. There is (was?) also a user around thes forums who did a lot of the original video work at SageTV in the pre-Google days.

[wnjj]

Originally Posted by jvl711

I know this conversation is jumping between two threads.... I played with the transcoder a little bit with the mini client. I was wondering if you could help with a few questions. I would like to see if we could move this forward a little bit.

1. What exactly are the modifications to the ffmpeg that make the SageTVTranscoder? Are they still needed with the more recent versions of ffmpeg? Depending on what they are, it may be easier if we could support ffmpeg out of the box. I am willing to try and help if I can. I am not really a C/C++ programmer, but I would be willing to try.

2. Any idea what container sage is using for format "DVD". I was trying to hack SageTV to transcode mpeg2 for ExoPlayer. I am wondering if ExoPlayer on a device that does not support mpeg2 will even support the DVD container format. I was able to get it to transcode to mpeg4 720x480 by hacking the code. It did display in IJKPlayer and looked decent, but ExoPlayer thru an error.

Thanks,
Josh

Check out this post from Narflex where he answers #1. https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/sho...5&postcount=19 Keep in mind that the code is used to build the transcoder as well as the sagetv stream demux filter so it may not be obvious which changes are needed for each.

When I get a little time, I can share the base version of FFMPEG Narflex provided as their starting point. From there a diff versus SageTV can show all of the specific changes. I painstakingly went through them all attempting to make the equivalent change in the (then) current version of FFMPEG. There are some tricky things to watch for, like strings that are output from FFMPEG that the SageTV java wrapper parses. Some of those change spelling or case in newer versions so I reverted them but longer term modifying the Java code make be cleaner.

I don’t know much about video formats other than what the internet says about DVD .vob files being MPEG2.

[wnjj]

Here’s the post Narflex made with the base FFMPEG they started with: https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/sho...95&postcount=6