Placeshifter vs Orb

[sainswor99]

K,

I'm posting this in the spirit of suggesting improvements for Placeshifter; it may sound like a gripe session, but please take it in the spirit of identifying an area for improvement.

I really like Sage; I especially like the client server setup. I like having the MediaMVP, and I like being able to watch my recorded shows from any PC in the house (it was expecially useful two nights ago while sitting outside on the deck waiting for 6 8-year-old kids to go sleep in the tent in the backyard).

HOWEVER, tonight was my first attempt to use Placeshifter on the road. I'm sitting in a Quality Inn in downtown Montreal with a "high-speed" (HA!) internet connection, and Placeshifter is stuttering like a mad man. Luckily, I set up Orb on my main workstation reading the video files from network shares on my media server. Orb looks great! Of course, the CPU is maxed out to 100%, but that's another story.

For those of you are interested, my specs are below:

Media Server: Pentium D (Dual-core) 2.8 Ghz, 2 Gig RAM
Workstation (Orb server): AMD Athlon 64 3400+, 2 Gig RAM

I'd much rather use Placeshifter, but I gotta go with what works. If anyone has any suggestions about how to improve my Placeshifter experience, please let me know.

Stu

[mayamaniac]

Its probably stuttering because you are using the "dynamic" setting in PlaceShifter. Set video bitrate equivalent to whatever Orb is using and you should get the same performance. The dynamic setting automatically adjust the video bitrate up and down which is nice, but on a poor wireless connection such as a hotel, it is best to manually set the video bit rate to get better results. Usually, the default manual bitrate of 300kbps is fine, I think Orb uses that bitrate.

[sainswor99]

Tried that as well, and no dice. I've got Placeshifter set at 300 kbs, and Orb at 600 kbs.

Thanks, but any other ideas?

[mayamaniac]

does it stutter when you connect from home?

[sainswor99]

No; I did a little more experimentation last night as well. I wanted to watch Heroes (from Monday's recording), and was having difficulty getting Orb to let me advance (for some reason the timestamp was not being interpreted correctly). So I went back to Placeshifter. At a very low fixed rate (300) with b-frames turned off and client-side post-processing disabled, I had only a few pauses.

I noticed that the file I was watching was recorded on one drive but I was recording on to another drive (my system is recording almost constantly); if I tried to watch a show that was on the same drive that was being recorded to, it was unwatchable using Placeshifter (Orb would play it fine).

Thanks for the questions.

Stu