HD Homerun macroblock dropout (FEC exhaustion?)

[benjatelcom]

Just built a new system, Brisbane based on a 790 chipset. I have a brand new HD homerun box in my house connected to cox cable, I can pickup 13 clear QAM channels.

When watching in VLC, everything is perfect. When watching in Sage, I see frequent loss of data (missing macroblocks), that comes in intervals of around ten seconds. I can play 1080i clips from other sources with no problems, and I have tried several decoders, overlay and VRM9.

I am using the latest firmware from Silicon Dust's site... Any suggestions?

[jlmdxtv]

Is this happening with real-time viewing and/or with recorded shows off of the HD-HOMERUN?

Do you have any SageTV Clients?

I have a weak video card in my Sage server, and can't really use SageTV to view anything reliably in HD on that server. But I can use it to record six programs at once without any problems. VLC has no problems though - even directly on the server displaying HD material - it appears to use an internal codec which works very well.

john

[benjatelcom]

The stutter/macroblock dropout affects both live viewing, and recorded content.

I don't have any clients yet... And when I am using tuner 0 and 1 at the same time, it gets worse (more frequent freezing).

Its most apparent on higher rate bitstreams, like HD programming off of PBS.

Tuning into QAM on Cox cable service. The server plays H.264 1080p, MPEG2 1080i, and VC1 1080p with no problems. I can play 1080i MPEG2 clips in sage and they roll smooth. I am running an AMD/ATI 3450 video card, which is the "weakest" of the ultra-powerful ATI video cards. Certainly my video card should be up to the task.

Thanks

Benjamin

[benjatelcom]

Additional experimenting and information:

Recording 1 HD show off cable via SAGE, and one HD show of cable via VLC.

VLC records perfectly, even if I opt to play locally also.
SAGE records data loss as described earlier, even if the recordings are played later in VLC.

And check this out, if I play the video recorded from VLC from within Sage, I get the same stutter and pixelation.

No matter what video decoder I choose, DxVA on/off, overlay/VRM9, Sage can't play video properly from HDHR. The recorded video from VLC plays fine in Cyberlink Ultra 7.3, and WMP9 (probably using cyberlink directshow decoder).

My Ethernet network is pure Gigabit, with managed Dlink switches in both the house and garage linked via MM glass. I first tried the HDHR between two buildings, and then both in the house. Same result.

My router probably isn't important... its uninvolved with this directed unicast traffic.

[ToxMox]

Sounds like either a throughput issue or a disk write bottleneck.
I am assuming you are doing writes to your RAID 5 via the 3Ware. Temporarily just try having Sage write to a regular drive to rule out the RAID. I've seen things like this on my Areca 1261ML happen with RAID and HDHR and Sage.

Running Vista? Try turning off SuperFetch service and if that doesn't work try disabling MMCSS service...see here http://tiredblogger.wordpress.com/20...and-the-mmcss/

[kevine]

If it were disk throughput, signal or network problem VLC recording would be a problem as well.

BTW, Sage plays everything as a recording, so live is also recroded and playing the stream after it is written to disk.

[benjatelcom]

The RAID 5 subsystem benchmarks 158MB/sec in Sisoft Sandra. I can move around 800mbps between two machines with high performance disk arrays on my network.

I also installed a single drive in the 5th sled of my raid enclosure, and timeshifted off of it, same issues. The 5th drive was directly attached to the SB600 SATA interfaces, not the 3Ware card.

Cox cable guy just left the house, and was truly fascinated by the HDHR box, and then he promptly blamed it for my digital telephone problems.

Whatever the problem is, its related to how sage is processing the HDHR video stream. The stream works by itself, and sage works by itself.

[Polypro]

If Vista: Installing SP1 and doing a reg change of the NetworkThrottlingIndex to 70 (Google it), cleared up a network encoder dropout/macroblock problem I had. My HDHR is direct connect.

P

[hemicuda]

Originally Posted by benjatelcom

Cox cable guy just left the house, and was truly fascinated by the HDHR box, and then he promptly blamed it for my digital telephone problems.

what a moron. i'm not sure the CrapTastic techs around here are much better though. Lot of times I know more about any problems I've had than the people that "should know."