R5000 tip for StarChoice users

[gveres]

Ok, this is probably equally valid for other sat providers as well, but I use StarChoice and I know this is necessary.

I assume that all of you running the R5000 know about the setting to strip the padding from the recordings. If you don't do this, you get huge files. The downside to this is that the mpeg files that you get are a little corrupt because of the removal of the padding - or maybe its the way that StarChoice encodes them.

Anyway, this weekend I found a fix for that problem. I am working on the configuration to have the fix run automatically but its not done yet.

VideoReDo has this feature called QuickStream Fix. If you run this tool on all your recordings, you get perfect mpegs out of it.

I was having the following problems:
1) VLC didn't know how long the video was and it couldn't keep track of teh time code. This meant that I couldn't seek around in the file. This is fixed with this tool above
2) The Mac client and the HD extender were having a hard time seeking around in the HD files that were produced by the R5000. This would manifest itself in audio sync problems and generally slow skipping forward and backwards. Tonight I will verify that the audio sync problem is gone, but right now I can verify that seeking in an HD file is as fast as seeking in a non-hd file after running the tool on the hd file.
3) I have had some out of sync audio after compressing some of the files. I expect this to be fixed as well, but I will have to wait until I get the system completely configured and do some compression.

Right now I am looking at using the SQJ plugin to automatically run VideoReDo on each recording, then do comskip on the ones I want. I am then hoping that this will just integrate perfectly with the SageMC Video Tools STVi. I expect it to.

Once I get all this ironed out, I think I have solved 80% of my sage problems. (I still have a problem where the placeshifters don't launch some times until I power cycle the sage server process, and I have missed more recordings using Sage for 2 months than I did with BTV for 4 years. )

Hope this helps other fellow Canadians.

Once i get it all setup, if there is interest, I can post my configuration to do all this automatically.

Greg

[HawgGuy]

Originally Posted by gveres

Hope this helps other fellow Canadians.

How about a fellow Texan? I've noticed the same things. I use Dish Network for my r5000 source. I've always stripped the padding. Do you think the problem is the file format of the r5000, or the stream content from the satellite?

[gveres]

You should give it a try. I suspect it will help. I think what happens is that the satelite provider is sending a valid mpeg stream. The R5000 is picking up the stream mid way and so the start of it is a little rough, then it pulls out the padding, making the file even rougher and probably not stricly a compliant mpg2 file.

The QuickStreamFix apparently fixes the stream. The demo is free to try so there is no harm trying it out.

Greg