Slow, Med & Fast speeds - one last time. Why not?

[matterw]

Ok, I just want a simple explaination why SageTV can't support the TiVo-like Slow, Med & Fast forward play of a recorded show. I really love this feature in TiVo and want to know what they know that SageTV does not.

Thanks!

[stanger89]

Straight from the horses mouth:

The MPEG2 files created by Hauppauge, ATI, Creative, etc. are all different. There's different packetization techniques they use as well as different timestamping techniques & GOP structures.
...
[Fast forward] requires special handling of the MPEG2 data. This special handling depends heavily upon the packetization & timestamping & GOP structure used for the streams.
...
We decided to go the route of supporting various cards and decoders and not doing something MPEG2 was never meant to do (fast forward & rewind). This yields the most stable and compatible product.

See the following for the entire explanation.
http://forums.sage.tv/forums/showpos...2&postcount=16

[jglev]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Straight from the horses mouth:


See the following for the entire explanation.
http://forums.sage.tv/forums/showpos...2&postcount=16

Beyond TV supports multiple tunner cards and many of the same ones that Sage supports, yet they are able to do multi-speed ff and Rew, so I don't totally buy the explaination.

[mlbdude]

There really is no such thing as FF smooth playback. All BTV is doing is auto skipping ahead a set number of frames. I would guess that Sage could do something like that too, but honestly the effect is cheesy and not worth the stability problems (currently end tasking BTV after testing out its FF).

Try out the Play Faster command in Sage. It is basically FF 1x in BTV.

[stanger89]

He never said it was impossible, just that they decided (in April 2003, long before BTV was even BTV) that they would support more cards over smooth ffw.

Remember, Sage supported HW encoders from the get go. From looking at the supported HW list for BTV, I see they support basically two cards, the 250 (and it's siblings 250MCE, 350, USB2, and "Blackbird"/MCE cards. Sage also supports the OSD on the 350, and output via the 350 (smooth FFW may be impossible with that?).

Sage supports those, plus the Creative Digital VCR, Provideo PV259, PV258 Series, PV256C or PV256T, and soon the Plextor ConvertX.

BeyondTV and HW encoders is a rather recent development, and probably either:
They chose to support smooth FFW since Sage didn't
or (IMO probably more likely)
They had to since they already supported it with their older recording formats and wouldn't want to remove a feature.

If you think it's a valuable feature, post in the feature request thread. I'd imagine that if they though there would be sufficient return on their development costs, that Frey would impliment smooth FFW.

[kny3twalker]

If you think it's a valuable feature, post in the feature request thread. I'd imagine that if they though there would be sufficient return on their development costs, that Frey would impliment smooth FFW.

this has been asked for as much as MVP support, Studio, X card OSD support and PVR 350 OSD fixes

They really should consider it

WinTV, the biggest piece of carp, software has it and it works fine

they could put an option in the properties file to disable it for those that have problems

have both would not hurt

[matterw]

It would seem with all of the great things that SageTV has this one would be a no brainer. In fact, most DVD players (eg, PowerDVD, WinDVD, etc...) have the option to play the DVD faster to fit more into an hour...

[stanger89]

Well my Pioneer Elite DVD player doesn't have smooth FFW, it has "rapid-skip-a-few-frames" FFW, so not everyone does it.

[lovingHDTV]

My panasonic DVD player does not support smooth FFWD either.