We Are Not Alone

[HelenWeathers]

I was reading up on the Direc2PC software from DirecTV. It works like SageTVClient with the DirecTV PVR working as the server. People are having a few hardware issues that I found interesting. Here are some quotes.

"Plays everything fine except for 1080i OTA mpeg-2 with a little stutter - if I allow to buffer enough it clears it up"
"Works pretty well. Sometimes I get a little stuttering."
"HD has some stutter"
"Hd takes a few seconds at the beginning to finally play smoothly"
"HD is quite jerky over HPN even after letting it buffer for a while."
"One other quirk, on XP it's nice and clear on Vista it's quite blocky/fuzzy with the latest nvidia drivers."
"Usually when it first starts is a little choppy. If I pause and play it smoothes right out and is fine."

Sound familiar? So you could invest $600 in the DIRECTV HR21PRO and get up to 100 hours (WOW) of MPEG-4 programming and face the same issues some of us have faced in moving into HiDef recording/playback. (The DirecTV PVRs have some issues of their own as well).

I will be keeping my SageTV.

EDIT: forgot the link: http://www.dbstalk.com/showthread.php?t=143737

[bastian74]

is this a reference to the last Eli Stone episode?

I think playing back hd content (especially over ethernet/wireless) is problematic. I wish media players would let you explicitly choose codecs in "advanced" menus.

[Chriscic]

Doesn't sound like any advantage over Sage + the HD-PVR; actually a disadvantage being stuck with recordings on a $600 STB vs non-DRMed on your PC (with unlimited storage).

The one thing I wonder though is how the picture quality is. My HD-PVR recordings are noticeably softer (through he HD100 or a client PC) than the same video on my cablebox. I haven't been sure whether it's the actual recording or inferiour PC/HD100 decoding.

I suspect that Direct2PC playback doesn't look any better, but wish I could see it. I'll have to dig around on the DBS forums to find an answer.

[null_pointer_us]

HelenWeathers:

That's very reassuring. (I think.)

I'll definitely be sticking with SageTV, maybe with a HVR-2250 around xmas.

[Thraxius]

Originally Posted by bastian74

is this a reference to the last Eli Stone episode?

I think playing back hd content (especially over ethernet/wireless) is problematic. I wish media players would let you explicitly choose codecs in "advanced" menus.

I use Zoom Player and I like it because I can tell it. Use this for MKV and this for AVI files...etc.

[bastian74]

Originally Posted by Chriscic

Doesn't sound like any advantage over Sage + the HD-PVR; actually a disadvantage being stuck with recordings on a $600 STB vs non-DRMed on your PC (with unlimited storage).

The one thing I wonder though is how the picture quality is. My HD-PVR recordings are noticeably softer (through he HD100 or a client PC) than the same video on my cablebox. I haven't been sure whether it's the actual recording or inferiour PC/HD100 decoding.

I suspect that Direct2PC playback doesn't look any better, but wish I could see it. I'll have to dig around on the DBS forums to find an answer.

Compare your video to a sample from the r5000 as that is the raw stream.

[Chriscic]

I've tried similar; compared a firewire capture from my Comcast box to a HD-PVR recording of the exact same clip. The HD-PVR clip looked every bit as good, but both looked inferior to the Comcast playback (again, exact same recorded clip).

So I have been thinking it's just the PC playback that's inferior, not the actual recording. But hard to say for sure. Maybe the HD-PVR recording is slightly less sharp, but the PC decoder is also taking the bitstream recording down a notch. On the other hand, the PC is certainly capable of playing back super sharp Blu-Ray content. So I am just unsure.