SageTV on low-end HW?

[dZeus]

Does anyone have experience with low-resource MPEG2 decoders? I'm trying to build a Sage client with just a Celeron 333 and a videocard without decode acceleration. I will upgrade this to a celeron 533 (Mendocino) somewhere in the future. No deinterlacing is needed other than force weave.

DScaler5 0.06 release doesn't seem cut it, as I get massive framedrops. The non-directshow player from mplayerhq.hu can play back recorded streams from the sagetv server over the network with just a few framedrops (thus the 533 should be plenty fast for at least mplayer). However, I need a directshow based decoder for SageTV but mplayer convinces me that a 533 MHz based system should be possible without framedrops. If nobody has any advice, I might try nvDVD, windvd, sonic, powerdvd... maybe even ffmpeg?

[mikejaner]

333mhz seems waaaaaayyyyy too slow, even with the best video card out there. With a 533Mhz Celeron proc, your looking at similar results. I can see an Xcard, or 350 working out here, but you would be running a slow interface still.
That being said, an Ati Radeon 9XXX series, or Nvidia Geforce 5XXX series or higher card, coupled with NVDVD should give you the best results in a standard video output setup.

[dZeus]

really? I was under the impression that with HW MC and HW iDTC that DVD-res/bitrate MPEG2 decoding should easily be achievable at 333 MHz... mplayer can nearly do it in full software at 333 MHz, and that's why I'm convinced that it should be more than possible at 533 using directshow.

[mikejaner]

Are you talking about Mplayer on Linux, or on Windows? Either way, I would think you could playback video, but I think your overall experience would be too much for the machine. Video playback would take most if not all of your processor, therefore making the UI slow to unresponsive, and other things in windows Which kickoff randomly would cause choppiness in your video from time to time. Like I said before, if it were to work, your best bet would be with the before mentioned ATI and Nvidia cards with NVDVD.
I guess I'm saying that anything below 1ghz is pushing it. I would not be happy with how sluggish the box is below that speed.

[dZeus]

hmm the problem is that I don't know if the latest nVidia/ATI cards can output SDTV without rescaling it internally, messing up the interlacing on my TV when watching interlaced contents.
Right now only Matrox cards (I'm using the Matrox Millennium G400), PVR350 and Realmagic Hollywood&X-card can do that, as far as I'm aware of. The PVR350 and X-card are limited to outputting the video formats that they can natively decode in hardware, so I prefer using my G400 which can output any video codec. Maybe I should try and borrow one of the latest nVidia/ATI cards to give those a go, but I'm sceptical about rescaling.... all their previous cards would rescale internally before outputting to tv-out.

btw. you don't need a 1GHz machine for SageTV PVR... my main HTPC is a P3 @ 933 which can play back and record simultaneously (pure software decoding) without any hiccup or framedrop, with cpu cycles to spare. I'm just curious about how low you can go

[mikejaner]

933Mhz~1Ghz, is about the same, and what I am saying. There is overhead left for other things that may need the processor in Windows, like Girder etc....
I would imagine you could get a 500-600mhz machine running with NVDVD and a video card just about perfectly.

Also note that the Xcard, and Media MVP provide perfect hardware output of these MPEG2 Streams.
As for a Matrox, the problem with the mode they use for having those perfect scanlines (DVDMAX) is that the SageTV interface does not show up when you are using that mode, from what I remember.

The 350 would be perfect for a slow machine, just don't expect to play DVD's.

[dZeus]

ah the interface works fine on the Matrox cards, it's the OSD that normally appears on top of video streams that's missing. But it's not crucial in use, as you can do anything you want with the remote control without needing the OSD. It's just less convenient to use. I suppose a VFD/LCD with the sageTV plugin would probably get rid of most of the disadvantages of not having OSD.

the X-card/PVR350 are too restrictive regarding codec usable trhough tv-out, etc. I'll try the different filters and see if I can find a really 'efficient' one. I'm sure people played back DVD back in the days of the Pentium2 without hardware acceleration. Maybe back then the filters were lower quality, but they definitely were able to play back without framedrops... I'll just look hard and try to find those filters needed

[Tiki]

I am successfully using the following 2 tuner system:

Pentium III - 550MHz, 256 MB RAM, Windows XP Pro,
Hauppauge PVR150
Hauppauge PVR150MCE
Radeon 7000 AGP w/ SVIDEO out

It defininetly is pushed to the limit during video playback (uses 75-85% CPU) or Comskip. Occasionally the UI is slow to respond (i.e. when I press "Play" the screen freezes for 2-3 seconds before it starts to show video). It works well, but I wouldn't recommend anything less powerful than this.

By the way, CPU utilization is very low during recording (around 10%), since the Hauppauge cards do all the encoding work - or if playing back from a networked computer, since the remote PC is doing the MPEG decoding.

[dZeus]

it sends the data uncompressed over the network cable?

thanks for the specs anyway... the radeon does hw IDCT and hw MC, so that might help though (if the filter you use to decode is using them)

[dZeus]

update on this:
I've swapped the celeron 333 for a p2-350 @ 466 MHz. DVD playback with ReClock in SageTV is just about smooth now, using the Cinemaster decoder engine (and it seems that DScaler5 is just a bit more cpu demanding).

[steingra]

I have tried running sagetv client on 4 different pc's now (not including the main HTPC server)

On the sagetv main server PC, everything works fine. When I have installed and tried it on 4 other machines, the audio/video are always choppy, even if I resize the main window down to like 15% of the full window size.

THe lastest machine I tried this on, was a 1.3Ghz AMD, with 1 GB of system ran, and 256MB ATI 9600 video card. And then I tried to watch live tv, and watch sage recordings. ANd both are slow and choppy on audio and video, but mostly audio seems bad. Not in synch.

I checked CPU usage and its high like average 85%, going up to 100% every 15 seconds or so...

I cant believe that a machine of this speed, ram, video card, cannot play back videos without problems.

I also tried various combinations of different audio and video codecs...and nothing seems to matter. The response stinks. And the OSD is almost non responsive, since main SageTV client is taking up a lot of CPU cycles.

Can someone maybe give me a few clues of what else I could be doing wrong to get such poor results?

OPS
There is 100 Mbps network connection, at least that is what I assume since both the devices are plugged into the same 100 Mbps switch.

I am not ruling out networking problems yet.

[paulbeers]

Steingra -

You definately have some issues. As you can see by my signature, that my current sage box is considerably less powerful than your box and it runs videos just fine. Oh sure it is a little slow when you push a command button, but beyond that I have no studdering issues. What codecs are you using? I am currently using cyberlink codecs for decoding (at least for my video, I am not sure in my main box what I am using for sound). There is no reason why you shouldn't be able to get SDTV to work on that. I think you probably do have some sort of networking issue. Have you checked your network connections to make sure you are connected at 100bt? and not 10bt? Have you tried just copying the videos from the server to your client and trying to play them that way? That will tell you very quickly if it is your network or not because you have removed the network from the equation?

[dajota]

I had a stuttering issue when I switched from a 10Mbit NIC card to a 100Mbit on board NIC. I had to mess with some settings but everything seems fine now. Are you using an onboard NIC?

[steingra]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

Steingra -

You definately have some issues. As you can see by my signature, that my current sage box is considerably less powerful than your box and it runs videos just fine. Oh sure it is a little slow when you push a command button, but beyond that I have no studdering issues. What codecs are you using? I am currently using cyberlink codecs for decoding (at least for my video, I am not sure in my main box what I am using for sound). There is no reason why you shouldn't be able to get SDTV to work on that. I think you probably do have some sort of networking issue. Have you checked your network connections to make sure you are connected at 100bt? and not 10bt? Have you tried just copying the videos from the server to your client and trying to play them that way? That will tell you very quickly if it is your network or not because you have removed the network from the equation?

Well lets see, I am using a wired network on 2 of the 4 pcs that I am using the trial 15 day SageeTV client 4.0. And wireless on the other 2. But I the one I reported on here was the 1.3 Ghz which is wired using a 100mbps NIC. I changed setting on the card to force it to 100Mbps.

Tonight I am going to try to run some tests, and see what my transfer rate is from the main HTPC to the Sagetv client pc, just copying files, and then doing the math to figure out what my throughput is.

Also, you made a good point, I havent tried watching a movie from the local hard drive (after copying from main HTPC) I am about to do that now. Will see how that goes. I would expect it will work fine. Somehow it seems that I must not be getting enough thruput on the wired portion of the network.

I will see how that goes and post back here. Thanks again

Update: Let me see if I got this right
100Mbps = 100/8 = 12.5MB per second x 60 seconds = 750MB in one minute (theoretical not accounting for data transfer overhead)

So that means if I copy a 750 Megabyte file from HTPC (where sagetv server is running) and paste onto this client using windows explorer, that it should take slightly longer then 1 minute to copy it right?

If thats the case, I have a major network problem. And I also realized that I used a 10/100 USB network adapter, because I was too lazy to open up the PC and put a real network card in there. I am going to stick a 3com NIC in there tonight, and then re-run my test.

I just copied a 369,264KB file (thats like ~365MB?) from HTPC (sage server) to the Sage client, and it took like 12 minutes. OMG that is reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaly slow. ummmmm thats going to cause a serious problem. I cant believe it even worked at all.

But let me know if I got the calculation done correctly
Thanks

[steingra]

Originally Posted by dajota

I had a stuttering issue when I switched from a 10Mbit NIC card to a 100Mbit on board NIC. I had to mess with some settings but everything seems fine now. Are you using an onboard NIC?

can you tell me what kind of changes you made? Did you change settings in the Advanced tab of the NIC settings? Like the transmit rate (or whatever its called, where you can say 10Mbps, 100Mbps, etc

Just curious what you fixed

[Menehune]

Originally Posted by steingra

I just copied a 369,264KB file (thats like ~365MB?) from HTPC (sage server) to the Sage client, and it took like 12 minutes. OMG that is reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaly slow. ummmmm thats going to cause a serious problem. I cant believe it even worked at all.

But let me know if I got the calculation done correctly
Thanks

The calculation seems correct.

You could check to see if there are new USB2 drivers available for your motherboard. USB to Ethernet devices will never perform as fast as Internal PCI or onboard NICs. 480MB/s is the peak speed for USB2. Sustained speeds (I.e. large files above 10MB or so) are much slower.

Earlier testing I did a few years ago on my machine revealed:

My image files are 2GB (2,097,152KB) in size. The drive is a Maxtor 5000DV (250GB 7200rpm 2MB cache?) with USB2.0 and FireWire ports. No programs running, nothing in the background.

USB2.0
Copy time: 3 min 15sec.
Thruput (sustained): 10.5MBs

Firewire
Copy time: 2 min 15sec.
Thruput (sustained): 15.1MBs

[steingra]

Update: well I copied a 10 minute video clip from the sagetv server to the 1.3 ghz pc, and played it, and it looked and sounded fine. Played in Windoze Media Mangler..player

I also did some googling, and found a simple Client and server piece of software to run speed tests between 2 pc's or a pc and a web server. So I am running that now, on the same file that I copied manually. I want to see what it says.

Here was the software I found to do network speed tests. Its free and seems to work very easy. http://www.raccoonworks.com/

And I attached a jpg of the output it gave me for this test (I pointed it at the same file I copied using Windows Exploder). If you look at the graph it made, it seems to be about 5 Mbps which is too slow I suppose for playing sagetv over the network????

Gee that sure isnt the 100 mbps that Windows says it is. Now that just doesnt make any sense to me. How can it Windows report the properties of 100Mbps and only give ~5 Mbps?

PS
You might have to maximize the picture to see it clearly if you use IE to view it. Its a big picture so you can see details

Here are the results for running my test using this file
11/5/2005 10:29:43 PM - Received 369,264.00 KB (378126336) in 557151 milliseconds
11/5/2005 10:29:43 PM - 662.77 KB per second

so ~662KB/sec * 8bits in a byte = 5296 /1000KB in a MB = 5.2Mbps

=5.296 Mbps [Megabit-per-second]
=5296 Kbps [Kilobit-per-second]
=0.662 MB/sec [Megabyte-per-second]
=662 KB/sec [Kilobyte-per-second]

[steingra]

I thought my network was OK. As you know, just using it for emails, web browsing, transferring smaller files, downloading files from the net isnt very taxing on the LAN. But when you try to use SageTV client to watch videos across the network, you better make sure your network is healthy. I just crawled around and dug into the big ball of wires behind all my equipment, check the small Linksys switch and NONE of the 100 Mbps lights were on. hmmmm

So I re-routed a few cables, and removed the USB -> RJ45 network cable, and now have a standard 3 COM NIC in the 1.3 Ghz PC.

Then the fun started. I fired up the pc, it auto registered the 3com card (always like that) and then I reran the same test.

I about fell out of my chair. It only took 47 seconds this time!!!!!!!!! to transfer the file.

Here is the results and I attached a graphic.
11/6/2005 12:46:36 AM - Receiving data - timer started.
11/6/2005 12:47:12 AM - Received 369,264.00 KB (378126336) in 36413 milliseconds
11/6/2005 12:47:12 AM - 10,140.99 KB per second
11/6/2005 12:47:12 AM - Test finished

WOW I cant believe how much faster it is now. I had no idea it was operating at such a slow speed. Im just glad it was suggested to dbl check it, and I am also really grateful that the Linksys switch has the 100Mbps lights on it.

You really cannot take the health of your network for granted when you get into streaming video across the wired LAN. Next will see how the Wireless clients fare. The connection between the SageTV server was definately a bottle neck here. Its 100Mbps light was not on either. It is now Just had to switch a few cables around. Too tired to know why exactly. Maybe had a bad cable going back to the other switch.

Now that I have that fixed, I will try SageTV Client again, and I think it should work fine now. Will update after I run some tests.

PS If you look at the attached graphic, the red bar is the actual file that was transfered. THe other bars I put on there (just a menu option does that) for comparison.

So if you need a good network test tool that is free check it out
http://www.raccoonworks.com/

[steingra]

Well, I just watched like 1 hour of star trek 4 on the 1.3 Ghz SageTV client, after I fixed the network problem, and now its working smooth as silk. Not single skip, or stutter. It was perfect.

Out of curiousity I monitored the network utilitization on the task Manager on both the sagetv server and client and they both showed about 10-12% usage while the movie was playing. And the CPU usage on the SageTV client was only 10% or so. Much less than the 80 to 95% it was before I fixed the network. Guess I am not sure why it was using so much cpu power to play it before.

On the sagetv server it was only using 2%-4% while I was playing it back. I was really suprised to see it that low. But it never really jumped much more than that. I expected it would have impacted the server more than that...but I suppose the server really isnt doing anything at that point, right? Except pushing the packets across the network. And the SageTV client was doing the decoding.

And actually I was watching the SageTV server with VNC server running on it, and that was using CPU power too. So basically it seems like there was hardly any noticble cpu usage on the Sagetv server, during movie playback on the client. If you subtract out the overhead of the VNC server process.

I am happy to have seen it working the way I figured it always should have. I will now be trying on the other machines, both wired and wireless, to get them working better. Although I think because I fixed the main link between the sagetv server, and the main switch, that the others may be donig a lot better now.