HELP! I'm new, and I'm lost. Codec Question for HD via IEEE.

[achernob]

Okay, first off thanks in advance to anyone who is willing to help.

I built my HTPC about a week ago, and have been reading this forum in an effort to best set up my system.

The problem I am having is with my HD signal through the firewire port on my Moto cable box.

I have followed the directions posted here, and got my signal and channels changing via the firewire port on the cable box. Everything is working great (sort of)

I have no issues with an SD signal. Its when I try to watch an HD broadcast things start to go south.

Whenever I tune to an HD channel, I will get the little Sage hourglass thingie. My hard drive will start to churn like crazy, and I eventually get no picture on the screen.

My assumption to this point has been that because I am using Firewire to retrieve the signal as opposed to my PVR150 card that the MPEG compression is occuring via software.

Because of the software compression, my PC can't handle it, and everything is slowing to a crawl.

Is this an accurate conclusion?

I have tried various Codecs, including the new Invidia one, and nothing seems to remidy the issue.

Is there a solution to my problem? Has anyone had similar issues? I gotta think I'm not alone.

Is my hardware sufficient?

Here's the nuts and bolts to what I'm running:

Intel Celeron 3.2Ghz. Processor
1GB RAM
Invidia 6600 AGP Video Card with 256MB RAM
Hauppage PVR-150 tuner card.

Thanks again for reading and any input.

[cohnhead]

No, the whole beauty of firewire is that we just capture the encoded stream. No encoding happens anywhere.

Your hardware is certainly sufficient. I can do HD with a slower processer, less ram, and less video ram.

There are two possibilities for your problem.

1) Tuning timings. Play with the delays in the SGR ini file and the sage.properties file to make sure the channel change is complete before sage starts recording.

2) 5c. Get a PVR from the cable company.

Good luck

[DFA]

Also, you said your HDD starts to churn like crazy. Are you formatted 64k clusters?

HD MPEG is about 7 to 10 times the data rate of SD MPEG all other things being equal (such as quality level).

As stated above, the firewire stream is already MPEG compressed so it just simply goes to the bus and then straight to the HDD. Nothing acts on it for recording purposes. The MPEG stream is a Transport Stream (TS) as opposed to a Program Stream (PS).

DFA