Placeshifting and HD

[ldavis]

I just installed .9 and am trying out the placeshifting. My system is 100% OTA HD so I have no SD to play around with, and I am seeing what I expected. I have a 2.4 P4 on my server that is overclocked to 2.6, and I have turned off video post processing in placeshifting. What I am getting on the server is 100% CPU usage (which I think is due to decoding not encoding-but I have tried reducing the quality of the encoded image). On the client, I am seeing am image that looks ok but every few seconds it backs up maybe a second or two and repeats itself. My guess is that, short of buying a new server CPU, I really have no chance of placeshifting on my system. Do any other users have better experiences with HD? Maybe there is some way to tap into the GPU on my video card to do the decoding. Of course that would render my server useless for playback during placeshifting, but that would be acceptable to me.

BTW, I have not been able to placeshift music though I thought that was supposed to be fixed. All of my music files are WMA lossless.

[dadams]

ldavis,

I just thought I would mention that I also have wma lossless and they seemed to play fine, although it took a minute or two before they started playing. You might try to give it a little more time to be sure. FWIW.

[Narflex]

ldavis,

FWIW, We've had placeshifting of HD working on a PIV 3.0GHz HT machine.

[ldavis]

Originally Posted by Narflex

ldavis,

FWIW, We've had placeshifting of HD working on a PIV 3.0GHz HT machine.

Narflex,

Was the cpu pegged or was there any headroom left?

I just ran placeshifter w/transcoding disabled (local machine). Obviously no CPU problems, but I had the same backward studdering problems that I described above, so the main problem is elsewere.

[Narflex]

ldavis,

Try it with transcoding forced to a certain bitrate. If I recall, there was still about 20% left on the CPU when doing it. We know there's issues with HD playback in the Placeshifter when not using transcoding (and we'll fix them). But if it's using the transcoder then it should work OK.

[ldavis]

Originally Posted by Narflex

ldavis,

Try it with transcoding forced to a certain bitrate. If I recall, there was still about 20% left on the CPU when doing it. We know there's issues with HD playback in the Placeshifter when not using transcoding (and we'll fix them). But if it's using the transcoder then it should work OK.

Narflex,

I pushed the bitrate to as low as 50 kbps, with very little effect. In fact, it seemed to work better letting it dynamically adjust.

I you would like to see this problem in action just PM me.

[Deadbolt]

Originally Posted by Narflex

ldavis,

FWIW, We've had placeshifting of HD working on a PIV 3.0GHz HT machine.

Narflex,

Will the Media Extender software allow for the MediaMVPs to watch HD transcoded to SD MPEG also?

Thanks!

[jlabrue]

I have been able to watch HD on the MVP using transcoding but it is VERY slow and studders every few seconds. However the image and audio is excellant as it attempts to play back. Definately shows promise for using an MVP to view HD content in the future. I would guess only one stream at a time though but possible. I have an Athlon 64 2800 and 1Gb ram

[Deadbolt]

Originally Posted by jlabrue

I have been able to watch HD on the MVP using transcoding but it VERY slow and studders every few seconds. However the image and audio is exellant as it attempts to play. Definetly show promise for using an MVP to view HD content in hte future. I would guess only one stream at a time though but possible. I have an Athlon 64 2800 and 1Gb ram

Thanks for the post jlabrue! Unfortunately I have a system about the same speed as your so I'll probably not be happy until I upgrade. Good to know that it does it though. What can you play...m2t off and HDV camera? TS, TP streams? Just wondering.

Thanks!

[jlabrue]

It is a stream recorded with the Vbox Cat's Eye 150 in whatever format Sage does by default. I have not changed any of the defaults for HD that I am aware of. I also downloaded a couple of clips from one of the card manufacturers (can't remember which) and they all played the same.

I don't know if this was just dumb luck or not. It could be that there is experimental support for transcoding HD in Sage and I just stumbled across it.

[ldavis]

Narflex (and all),

What I have done is re-installed one of my recently retired PVR-150s. This works a lot better than trying to stream HD. Somewhat jumpy, but I will definately be able to keep up with the NCAA trounament games.

This leads me to a feature request. It may have a limited audience since it would really only be useful for those of us with OTA HD only. I would like to have a channel lineup unique to my placeshifting client. I do not want to leave the analog channels permanently in my channel lineup as I do not want to use the PVR150 for intelligent recording. I simply add the channel I want to watch and then remove it before exiting placeshifter. If the channel lineup was unique, then I would not need to do this. Even better would be a recording directory and favorites that would be unique to my placeshifting client. I could then record a few shows that I might want to playback at lunch. It would sort of be like having a seperate system. Don't know if it is possible but it sure would be great.

In either case, I'll probably be purchasing a placeshifting license very shortly.