Slow frame rate for placeshifting HDTV material

[mkanet]

Is this a CPU limitation or something? I tested placeshifting locally and the framerate isn't anywhere near 30fps. It's more like 5-10 FPS.

[mkanet]

I tried the various options in the Placeshifting software. It's actually unwatchable. The video and audio get stuck most of the time. This is on a relatively fast PC... 2.6GHz P4 with hyperthreading on.

[mkanet]

PS: Most of the time, the video/audio willl get stuck like a broken record. I dont have any of these issues wtih ORB using the same material.

[mkanet]

It's obvious that this is a CPU resource limitation. But, there should be some settings to tweak for HDTV transcoding.

ORB Networks (using Helix Encoder) can transcode HDTV correctly and is very well optimized.

Jeff, can you offer some undocumented settings to help make this work better. Disabling post-processing doesnt make any difference.

[Narflex]

Are you forcing the bitrate? If you don't, then it's not even doing any transcoding if you're playing back over a LAN (which means it's a different kind of playback issue that you wouldn't see if you were using it over the internet)

[mkanet]

HI Jeff, I'm forcing a bitrate roughly equal to my upstream so I "can" test transcoding.

Are you saying I wont hae this issue via the Internet? What's the problem if this only happens for all ATSC material?

[mikejaner]

I too am forcing the bitrate to 700Kbps, which is well below my 1-2Mbps upload speed. I get the same broken record sound and frame pauses etc... with HDTV recorded streams. With SDTV it looks and sounds great. I chalked it up to a processor limitation, casue it pegs my 1.8ghz box when trying to transcode the HDTV signal, whereas the SDTV signal only hits 50%-60%.
Is anybody testing this with a dual core processor, somewhere over the 3.5ghz range? I wonder if the transcoding is possible in realtime for HD content with a second processor.

[mkanet]

I am having this difficulty with a 2.6GHz PC as the server. This is still adequate processor power for realtime HDTV-> CIF video transcoding with Windows Media Encoder. In other words, it works on ORB whereas it doesn't with SageTV placeshifter.

I'm still waiting to hear back from Jeff if we can have placeshifter usable and optimized for HDTV material without having to uncessarily buy new hardware. It doesnt seem FFmpeg2 is CPU friendly when compared to what comes for free with ORB (windows media Encoder 9). Maybe, there's optimization needed for FFmpeg2 for HDTV material?

Jeff can you please help out with this? Most of my recordings are HDTV, not analog. I think if I'm going to buy a license, it should at least do what ORB does correctly for free.