Video quality suffers on STX-HD100

[smdear]

Hi, folks.

I just bought a new server machine - quite powerful :
1 TB for video storage
Quad-core 2.66GHz CPU

My HD100 and my server box are both hooked to Ethernet ports on my home router.

I just installed SageTV Server on this machine, and I find that it is now overwhealming my clients.

I have a laptop where I run client software (1.86 GHz CPU, 504 MB RAM), and I find its CPU gets pegged to 100% when I try to play a video. The audio is mostly OK but stutters occasionally, but the video frame rate drops to around 1 frame/second. The video quality is as high as the original video file.

I'm having a different problem on my HD100 media extender - on this device, the video quality is significantly worse than the original video file (the screen appears mostly pixelated), sound is OK.

Is there any server configuration / tuning I can do to improve the playback to achieve the best possible video quality on my two client devices ?

[Mitch G]

I would start by verifying the network is not the problem - especially for the HD100 problem. I have not seen video quality issues on my HD100 at all.
Although the HD100 is 100BaseT, does your server run Gig-E? Also, is your network Gig-E?

The other thing to look at - especially if you are seeing the problem with standard def programming - is to make sure the server is set up to capture at the best quality possible.

Just a couple of thoughts,

Mitch

[pjwerdna]

Are your discs formatter with 64k cluters?

If not then even a CPU machine might have difficulty getting the data off disc fast enough to play it.

Also what speed are the ethernet ports on the router? 100Mb hopefully. Try a differant one if you can.

[Yooper]

I would also check the video cabling goiing into your video board on the server. Did you add any splitters, or how many splitters do you have from the source? How long is the cable? Is the cable RG59 or RG6? Dual or quad shield?

Also, what is the quality setting for the video source on SagetTV?

How is your HD100 connected to the TV? via composite, S-video, component, hdmi? I have listed these from lowest to highest quality.

When I first got my HD100 I plugged it in and got a nasty picture. I was able to work thru the issues and now it is superior.

[jmv]

I think you have 2 potential risks...definitely the network should be checked out first to see if there is any weirdness there. You also need to worry about Disk bandwidth on your server. I don't know how many tuners and clients you have, but if you have one HD and it isn't a fast one serving everything and it is also your OS drive and it is also getting scanned by virus scanner etc...you could be seeing the server unable to keep up with the client demands. I haven't had an issue maxing my Client PC's playing back sageTV. I have pretty powerful clients but with SageTV playing back HD stream I get 20% utilization on a Core 2 Quad 2.4 GHz and 15~18% on a Core 2 Dual 2.88 GHz. I don't know what kind of 1.86 GHz chip you have or if you are playing back SD too...it ***could*** be a chip problem. You might also try playing around on the client with what Codec you are using to decode the video stream and see if that helps.

jmv