HD-200 Conundrum

[HelenWeathers]

I've been having problems with some of my BD conversions playing on my HD-200s in standalone mode. As an experiment I muxed the same movie (Die Hard 2) to the G:\HiDef Movies folder on my SageTV server and the G:\HiDef Movies folder on my Movies server.

I have two HD-200s, one with FirmWare 20081230 0 and the other with FW 20081217 0. I have two computers, one is named "SAGESERVER" with TV recordings and a drive G: with movies I havn't watched yet. The other is named "MOVIES" and has a drive G: with movies I want to keep. Both folders on both computers/drives are named "HiDef Movies". Both computers are part of the workgroup MSHOME. Both HD-200s are connected to the MSHOME network.

Here are my observations.

HD-200 using Standalone File Browser
File Systems > Browse Device: WDC 120 (FYI: USB attached 120GB disk drive)
select Die Hard 2 plays w Stutter

File Systems > Browse Local Network > MSHOME > SAGESERVER > G/ > HiDef Movies
select Die Hard 2 plays w Stutter

File Systems > Browse Local Network > MSHOME > MOVIES/ > G/ > HiDef Movies
select Die Hard 2 plays w Stutter

HD-200 using Extender Mode Browser
SageTV Servers > SAGESERVER (connects and goes to SageTV Main Menu)

Media Center > Browse Media Files > Browse Files on the SageTV Server > G:\ > HiDef Movies
select Die Hard 2 plays w no stutter

Media Center > Browse the SageTV server's Network > MSHOME > SAGESERVER > G/ > HiDef Movies
select Die Hard 2 plays w no stutter

Media Center > Browse the SageTV server's Network > MSHOME > MOVIES > G/ > HiDef Movies/
select Die Hard 2 > Play this video and I get "sage.PlaybackException: ERROR (-3,0x0): There was a problem accessing the file system for playback." and get thrown into live tv.

If you have converted a HiDef movie and are having trouble playing it on the HD-200 in standalone mode, try moving the movie to your Sage server and playing on the HD-200 in extender mode. Post your results here. I am thinking of submitting a bug report to Sage but am looking for some feedback first.

Thanks, Helen.

[ojosch]

Yeah, I've noticed standalone mode seems to feel a bit more sluggish when doing most things. Even the GUI menus seem to be slower and doggy. I always notice the unit acts more responsive and smooth when I just proxy all my content through my SageTV server. My theory is that since my server is a super beefy quad core with all the bells and whistles that it is doing all of the network share crap handling the streaming in a more efficient way, doing all of the network stuff with high overhead, and so when the HD200 is running in extender mode that is has more of its own free CPU to focus on its decoding task, whereas in standalone mode it has to deal with all the network shares and probably run a SMB service or something which uses more RAM and CPU. This is just total speculation on my part as I have no idea if this is the case or not. I also notice that when in standalone mode, it takes longer to access all of my shares. This might just be something on my network, but when I proxy everything through my Vista server, everything is lightning fast. So for now, I pretty much just quit using standalone mode since I mainly built my server downstairs to be a content handler

[HelenWeathers]

Well, I resolved this issue by throwing money at it. I bought another copy of SageTV and loaded it on my "MOVIES" server. Now when I fire up the extender I can connect to the TV shows server or the movies server. All my m2ts streams play perfectly this way.

My friend has one of the HD-200s also, but is not using Sage, so has to avoid the movies that stutter or buy Sage just for full HD-200 functionality.

The HD-200 is a perfect addition to a Sage system. In fact it's so perfect that I forget that it can't do everything.