Media extender works with h264?

[flipz]

Hey,

I am new to Sage but not new to HTPC's. I have been storing everything I have in x/h.264 format. From what I read, Sage will play them but I want to make sure that the media extender will too?

It does say it supports MPEG4, and AVI, so I assume the answer is yes. But both of those can be related to non-x/h.264, so I just want to make sure! I haven't actually purchased Sage or an extender yet, but if it supports it I will be buying very soon!

Thanks in advance.

[sainswor99]

Perhaps someone can come up with a more definitive answer based on experience, but according to this post:

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...18&postcount=3

H.264 should be supported on the MVP. However, technically, the MVP's only play back MPEG2 (AFAIK); you need a relatively beefy server to transcode the video on the fly.

Does that help?

Stu

[flipz]

Hey Stu,

Thanks for the response. That does help a lot! But I will still wait for a definite yes or no on whether or not it will definitely work. Maybe I'll email support if I don't get any posts here.

My server is kind of "beefy". It's a core 2 duo with 2 gigs of ram, but I still would need to know if it will actually work.

Thanks!

[mayamaniac]

I've tested a Quicktime movie trailer from Apple.com which is compressed with h.264 codec, and the MVP Extender plays it. The server transcodes the h.264 to Mpeg2 for the MVP to play. One problem is SageTV doesn't display the aspect ratio correctly, the 16:9 video was stretched to fill my SDTV. And there's no option to correct the aspect ratio.

[flipz]

Originally Posted by mayamaniac

One problem is SageTV doesn't display the aspect ratio correctly, the 16:9 video was stretched to fill my SDTV. And there's no option to correct the aspect ratio.

Hrm, alright. Good to know. Now I'm not sure how I feel about it. Thanks for the info!

[dvd_maniac]

some of my H.264 videos play fine and others just show black screen.
There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to why some play and others do not though.
Most of my H.264 videos are around 700-900kbps video and HE_AAC audio at 32kbps.
My AMD 4600 X2 with 2GB DDR should be able to handle it and most of the time it does...
If I can't get it to work with all my videos I will have to check out the refund policy.

[dvd_maniac]

Nobody else having this issue?
I also noticed that it doesn't play .mkv files either.
I am getting dissapointed...

[davephan]

The H.264 to Mpeg2 transcoding process should work fine on your media extender, if you have enough CPU to do the task.

My H.264 files played back just fine with my old SageTV system that had a Athlon XP 2800+, but the CPU was nearly maxed out during playback at times. After my mainboard went bad, I replaced it with an older Athlon XP 2100+ system, which does not seem to have enough CPU to transcode the H.264 files into Mpeg2 for playback on the media extender without stuttering. I plan to replace my SageTV system with a QX6700 quad-core based system after the July 22nd Intel price drop, so that will be more than enough CPU for the transcoding process.

You can download H.264 files to test your system from www.crankygeeks.com or dl.tv.

Dave

[dvd_maniac]

The problem does not seem to be whether my Server can keep up with the H.264 files. It plays some and not others and the ones that play are the same bitrates and use the same codecs as the files that don't play.

VERY CONFUSING!!!

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by dvd_maniac

The problem does not seem to be whether my Server can keep up with the H.264 files. It plays some and not others and the ones that play are the same bitrates and use the same codecs as the files that don't play.

VERY CONFUSING!!!

Try an experiment and revert to 6.0.19 with ONLY imported videos since the Wiz.Bin may not be backward compatible. My ASP MP4's play fine with 6.0.19 but not with 6.1.8 on the MVP. Turned in a bug report on this and got one response back but that was it. Back when 6.1.8 was the release version - I just haven't upgraded to see if the problem went away with the new version.

[dvd_maniac]

I tried to upgrade to the latest 6.1.9 last night and still had the same issue.
I will try to install 6.0.19 and see what that does.
But like I said and unlike your problem:
my MVP will play some files but not others and they are all the same H.264(2x64 codec) video and HE-AAC(Nero AAC codec) audio. All videos have the same bitrates and codecs. It simply doesn't make sense that some work and others do not?
I am going to try to demux one of the .mp4 videos and remux into .avi and see if it will then play if your suggestion doesn't work.

Thanx for the tip...

[dvd_maniac]

Just received a response from Sage Support stating that the file I sent them to test will be supported in the next release (6.2) which is in private beta right now, so it shouldn't be too much longer.
I just hope that .MKV files will work then too...