MythTV HD refugee

[drewg]

Hi,

With the impending demise of MythTV's DataDirect scheduling information and no concrete information about any replacement, I'm considering making the switch to Windows / Sage.

I've been running Myth for over 2 years on the following hardware:

- 1080i CRT HDTV
- 3.0GHz Northwood P4
- Intel 965 based motherboard
- AGP Nvidia 5200 DVI (or VGA -> Component box)
- On board Intel sound via SPDIF cable to TV
- Air2PC ATSC (nxt2002 based)
- Air2PC HD5000 ATSC/QAM tuner (LG based)
- Dvico HDTVFusion5 (LG based))
- Dvico USB MCE remote (came with fusion card)
- a 250GB + 300GB drives
- Atheros based "G" wireless

I have the following questions regarding sage:

Will at least 2 of my tuners work?

- How well is the 1080i display handled? Eg, is interlacing broken in Windows like it is in Linux, or can the Nvidia drivers (and Sage) properly output 1080i material to a 1080i display? Can Sage (and/or the Nvidia drivers) handle "telecined" HD, which confuses Myth (24fps filmed material broadcast at 30fps)? Is my CPU and/or video card beefy enough to handle output to 1080i in Sage? Myth truly stinks at these things, and I'm forced to run my 1080i display at 720p and run a deint filter because of it. I'm hoping that Sage will have better quality.

- Will commercial skipping work for HD sources? Reliably? I have to admit, this is the reason I'm still with Myth despite the video quality issues.

- How far out does the guide data go? Since it is from DataDirect, I assume it is 14 days like Myth currently is?

- Can Sage handle putting videos on 2 different drives, or do I need to use some sort of software raid to make them appear as one big drive?

- Will HD work OK on Win2K, or do I need to go out and buy a copy of XP?

- In terms of WAF, how long should it take me to get something working reasonably well with the above hw? I'm formerly a *nix sysadmin, and currently device driver programmer, but I've never run a windows machine
(and this would be the only one in the house..).

Thanks,

Drew

[bcjenkins]

If your ATSC cards have BDA drivers you should be okay.. I have Fusion 5 cards running in my 2K3 server now. Interestingly, I am switching from Windows to Linux shortly in large part to better QAM support.

As far as your video card goes, I think it won't do so well for you. You may want to consider http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814150210

Comskip.exe is what I use for scanning commercials and I will use it in linux too under wine.

Install Java 1.6u2 prior to installing SageTV though. I assume Sage is still shipping with 1.4.11.

Sage can handle multiple drives easily.

B

PS SageTV is very easy to install and depending on your sources should be up in no time.

[stevech]

The XMLTV volunteers hope to have a non-for-profit corporation under contract with ZapToIt in August, to continue data direct.

I'll weigh on on your questions re migrating to SageTV... The WAF for me is very high. Takes an hour or so, cumulative, to get the hang of using SageTV's menus and managing favorites. I spend no time administering SageTV, other than an unattended backup of the data base.

Recording drives: Yes, any Windows drive letter or UNC path, and with care/caution, you can move the recordings around as you change/add drives.
Tuners: any number.

The Guide goes out about 10 days; I'm guessing, from memory. The recording plan is about 6 days. Most of these things are user tweakable.

HD: I have no experience.

I'd go to XP as W2K is increasingly problematic and Vista is, well, Vista.

[mayamaniac]

Originally Posted by drewg

Will at least 2 of my tuners work?

SageTV hardware support.

- How well is the 1080i display handled? Eg, is interlacing broken in Windows like it is in Linux, or can the Nvidia drivers (and Sage) properly output 1080i material to a 1080i display? Can Sage (and/or the Nvidia drivers) handle "telecined" HD, which confuses Myth (24fps filmed material broadcast at 30fps)? Is my CPU and/or video card beefy enough to handle output to 1080i in Sage? Myth truly stinks at these things, and I'm forced to run my 1080i display at 720p and run a deint filter because of it. I'm hoping that Sage will have better quality.

I think your hardware might me a little slow, both CPU and video card, especially in VMR9 mode. Might be ok in Overlay though. But likely you'll have to upgrade to a Core2Dou and Geforce 7 series.

- How far out does the guide data go? Since it is from DataDirect, I assume it is 14 days like Myth currently is?

Its 14 days in sagetv also.

- Can Sage handle putting videos on 2 different drives, or do I need to use some sort of software raid to make them appear as one big drive?

Yes, you can setup multiple sources to store the recordings, sageTV handles the drive space.

- Will HD work OK on Win2K, or do I need to go out and buy a copy of XP?

I don't see why you need to use XP assuming all your hardware drivers works in win2K.

- In terms of WAF, how long should it take me to get something working reasonably well with the above hw? I'm formerly a *nix sysadmin, and currently device driver programmer, but I've never run a windows machine
(and this would be the only one in the house..).

only one way to find out, download the 15 day demo and take it for a test spin.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by drewg

How well is the 1080i display handled? Eg, is interlacing broken in Windows like it is in Linux, or can the Nvidia drivers (and Sage) properly output 1080i material to a 1080i display?

Essentially yes, it's broken, well, works the same, it's more of a PC thing I think than an OS thing.

Can Sage (and/or the Nvidia drivers) handle "telecined" HD, which confuses Myth (24fps filmed material broadcast at 30fps)?

Your card (5200) probably won't do so well. There are a couple options, being that you have AGP, a 6 series (6600GT, 6800) should handle HD quite nicely. Better yet a 7 series (like a 7950GT).

Is my CPU and/or video card beefy enough to handle output to 1080i in Sage?

I'd suggest a video card upgrade for optimal performance, but it should work with Overlay. Probably not with VMR9.

Myth truly stinks at these things, and I'm forced to run my 1080i display at 720p and run a deint filter because of it. I'm hoping that Sage will have better quality.

I'll qualify this with an "I really like linux on principal", but IMO, and in my (admittedly not recent) experience, Linux is far behind Windows when it comes to video support.

- Will commercial skipping work for HD sources? Reliably? I have to admit, this is the reason I'm still with Myth despite the video quality issues.

Yup, and it should work awesome. Digital broadcasts, especially HD, lend themselves very well to commercial detection. ShowAnalyzer works great.

- How far out does the guide data go? Since it is from DataDirect, I assume it is 14 days like Myth currently is?

Just a small correction, to mitigate any confusion, Sage's data comes from Zap2It/Tribune, but it does NOT come from Z2I's DataDirect service. SageTV has it's own, commercial setup. SageTV (the program) downloads it's data from the SageTV servers, not from Z2I. The Sage servers presumably get the data from different Z2I servers.

Anyway, yes, 14 days.

- Can Sage handle putting videos on 2 different drives, or do I need to use some sort of software raid to make them appear as one big drive?

Sage can utilize as many drives as you want. It will automatically "load balance" them, ie it always writes to the drive with the most free space.

- Will HD work OK on Win2K, or do I need to go out and buy a copy of XP?

If you have 2K, I'd try that, I'm not sure how well hardware accelleration works on 2K. As for XP, at this point, I really wouldn't advise buying it. Companies (nVidia) seem to be abandoning it in favor of Vista.

- In terms of WAF, how long should it take me to get something working reasonably well with the above hw? I'm formerly a *nix sysadmin, and currently device driver programmer, but I've never run a windows machine
(and this would be the only one in the house..).

You know, there is a Linux version of SageTV . Though I'd spend some serious time researching on the forums (HW support, playback, etc), Linux version is not officially supported by SageTV for individuals (technically it's OEM only).

[drewg]

Originally Posted by drewg

Hi,

<....> I'm considering making the switch to Windows / Sage.

I've been running Myth for over 2 years on the following hardware:

- 1080i CRT HDTV
- 3.0GHz Northwood P4
<...>

Darn. It looks like the grass is not necessarily greener in Windows. :-(

After a few hours of fooling around, I managed to get my system installed with Win2K Pro, SP4, the Nvidia 162.18 drivers, their trial "pure video" codec, ffdshow, the downloadable trial of Sage, and (after a bluescreen from using the wrong drivers), the correct driver for my dvico fusion hdtv5 card. Sage didn't see my technisat air2pc, but I haven't tried to debug that yet.

While the Nvidia drivers were able to display very nice 1080i and 720p both via the DVI and/or the VGA->component cables, I was unable to get a watchable HD picture (using live tv, I never recorded anything). I tried the various mpeg2 decoders, and video settings in all combinations, with no good results. The defaults chosen by Sage included the "overlay" video method, unfortunately this did not work on my system (sage complained of errors displaying the video portion..). Depending on which settings I used, the picture varied from bad to worse (either severe tearing, or severe jerkiness, or both).

I was somewhat surprised that I had problems with outputting smooth video even at 720p (and even for a 720p channel). Is it my 2.5 year old hardware, Win2K, the Nvidia driver version, or the lack of the "overlay" video? Since MythTV (and mplayer, xine and vlc) work fine on Linux, I'm assuming there is some driver or codec problem.

Is there any way to debug why overlay does not work? I'm hoping that might be the root cause of my problems. Every time I chose it, I would soon (sometimes before I even switched to viewing tv) get a message which said: "there was a problem rendering the video portion for playback" with some hex (-4,0x8.....).

On a good note, the sage setup was WONDERFUL. I especially liked the overscan setting. Myth could really learn from that..

Thanks,

Drew

PS: Will your mac product ever support the HDHomeRun? My wife's core2 based macbook has no problems driving 1080i, and vlc can easily display a 1080i video (though I need to run a deint filter). This setup gives a picture as good as the built-in tuner on this TV. If you supported the HDHomeRun on OSX, I'd probably go out any buy a new core2 mini and put my current clunky system on ebay..

[Jesse]

Hi,

I can give you a little info about HD on "older" hardware. One of my clients is a P4 3.0 (Prescott core) on an AGP mobo. I am able to get excellent playback in 720p via component. I am using the nvidia decoder, VMR9 and FSE. I started out with a 6600GT AGP and it was very close. When I upgraded to a 7600GT things really smoothed out. Note that VMR9/FSE are a must for smooth playback on my system. I would also seriously consider using nvidia's pre-vista drivers. I here about nothing but problems with the later versions running on XP. I would have to look to be sure, but I believe I am using either the 94.xx or 97.xx version drivers.

Because this machine is really minimum spec for HD I configured windows for maximum performance and I have no other programs running on this machine. No AV, no nothing but sage.

I did try 1080i when I first set the machine up but the results were not good. 720p was much better. That was before I upgraded the vid card. With a 7600GT 1080i might work ok.

In short, with a vid card upgrade you should be able to get your machine to work well with HD.

HTH.

Jesse

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by drewg

Darn. It looks like the grass is not necessarily greener in Windows. :-(

After a few hours of fooling around, I managed to get my system installed with Win2K Pro, SP4, the Nvidia 162.18 drivers, their trial "pure video" codec, ffdshow, the downloadable trial of Sage, and (after a bluescreen from using the wrong drivers), the correct driver for my dvico fusion hdtv5 card. Sage didn't see my technisat air2pc, but I haven't tried to debug that yet.

Get rid of ffdshow, unless you're trying to do something specific, it will just cause problems. It's possible (likely?) for it to insert itself into the playback chain effectively disabling hardware accelleration. IMO, ffdshow has no place in HD playback.

[drewg]

Originally Posted by drewg

Is there any way to debug why overlay does not work? I'm hoping that might be the root cause of my problems. Every time I chose it, I would soon (sometimes before I even switched to viewing tv) get a message which said: "there was a problem rendering the video portion for playback" with some hex (-4,0x8.....).

OK, I made some progress. I've found that if I use the overlay method, with the nvidia mpeg2 decoder using VGA output, I get very low CPU usage, and the picture seems smooth and clear, even when outputting at 1080i (based on 5 minutes of watching the news in HD). The only problem is that the picture is in black and white. If I use the DVI port with overly, then I get the "problem rendering the video portion..." error

Since the symptoms vary depending on if I use the DVI or VGA port, then I'm assuming this must be an nvidia driver bug. If anybody has any pointers, I'll be glad to hear about them..

Drew

[drewg]

Originally Posted by drewg

Since the symptoms vary depending on if I use the DVI or VGA port, then I'm assuming this must be an nvidia driver bug. If anybody has any pointers, I'll be glad to hear about them..

Drew

Ah! The overlay saturation slider in the nvidia display settings was at 0! If I move it to 100, I have color! Wow, the display looks pretty decent now via VGA->component. I need to watch some sports to confirm..

On to the next problem..

Drew