Defaulting to SD?

[BobbyDing]

Hi folks,
I have the SageTV software and the HD200. My setup is still SD only for at least another year, maybe two. I've seen where I can select the recording quality of each tv show (favorites options). Is there a way to force SageTV to record ALL TV shows in SD only? Or would this be a function of the capture card (using the Avermedia that was on sale here).

Thanks for any help.

Bobby

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by BobbyDing

Hi folks,
I have the SageTV software and the HD200. My setup is still SD only for at least another year, maybe two. I've seen where I can select the recording quality of each tv show (favorites options). Is there a way to force SageTV to record ALL TV shows in SD only? Or would this be a function of the capture card (using the Avermedia that was on sale here).

First of all, if you have the hardware capable of recording and playing back HD TV, why would you want to do SDTV? Even on an standard definition television, HD recordings look much better than SD recordings.

Second, if you don't want to record anything in HD, then you can just a disable any HD channels in your channel lineup.

[BobbyDing]

Because my present pc will record HD, and play HD, but not both at the same time. I know I need to upgrade to a faster pc, but no $$$ yet to do so. I figure that if it defaults to SD for now, it'll get me by until I can get a better pc. Just looking to stretch the present setup as far as I can.

Thanks,

Bobby

[wrems]

Can you provide more details about your situation? What are the PC specs, types of tuners and sources being used…that kind of stuff.

Like reggie14 said, it sounds like all you need to do is go into your channel setup and unselect the HD stations that are appearing. It sounds like you might be recording ClearQAM… I’m not sure how it’s handled everywhere but in my area with QAM and Comcast I get 2 versions of the stations that come in as HD. 1 in HD, and 1 in SD. If I wanted only the SD I would uncheck the HD and force my HDHR to record the SD transmission.

At the same time, I can’t figure out how it would be a problem to record and playback simultaneous programming in HD with your HD200. The HD200 does all the heavy lifting, and your tuner should be taxing your cpu very little if at all.

Do you have other processes eating your cycles? Is comskip/SA actively processing your live recordings, or are you running anything else that might be the culprit…?

[BobbyDing]

Sorry so long in responding....

When I bought the PC it was advertised as a 2Ghz Anthlon. The CMOS says it's a 1.6Ghz Anthon. It has 2 G ram. Running XP Pro. One capture card (Avermedia MCE A180) for OTA. Panda Cloud Antivirus is running on it, along with the latest SageTV. Other than that, nothing that should hog cycles. Plenty of hard drive space available, and I regularly defrag all drives. 100 Ghz ethernet, running through a WRT54G-TM router with DD-WRT.

SageTV will record shows in SD or HD, no sweat. And it will play back these shows on my SDTV (no HDTV yet) via the Sage Home Theater. However, if I try to watch TV via the Sage HD200, the video/audio will skip. I figure that I need more horsepower, but I won't be ready ($$$) to upgrade the PC till maybe next year.

So I was thinking that I might save some CPU cycles if I could default to all SD recording, seeing as I don't have an HDTV yet anyway. But now I'm wondering if forcing the PC to convert any HD signal to SD on the fly would't end up using more cycles??

Any help would be appreciated in helping me squeeze a bit more out of my present system.

Thanks,

Bobby

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by BobbyDing

SageTV will record shows in SD or HD, no sweat. And it will play back these shows on my SDTV (no HDTV yet) via the Sage Home Theater. However, if I try to watch TV via the Sage HD200, the video/audio will skip. I figure that I need more horsepower, but I won't be ready ($$$) to upgrade the PC till maybe next year.

This isn't a CPU issue. Playing back HD video on the HD200 uses up practically no CPU cycles on the server.

I think its far more likely that you're running into problems because your recording drive isn't formatted to 64k blocks. Your limiting factor may be your hard drive.

Your antivirus probably isn't causing problems either. Every antivirus I've used recently doesn't scan video files by default (basically, they just scan executable-like files). I don't know about Panda specifically though.

By the way, when you bought your computer your processor was probably described as an Athlon XP 2000+. The 2000+ was AMD's way of trying to say it was roughly the same speed as a 2.0Ghz Pentium 4 (though, technically they said they were comparing them to the first version of the pre-XP Athlon processors). It was mostly fair- a 1.6Ghz Athlon XP 2000+ generally outperformed a 2.0Ghz Pentium 4.

[stanger89]

Yeah, CPU definitely isn't a problem, my server is an Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz) 1GB RAM and has no trouble feeding HD to my HD200.

What is this "Sage Home Theater" that you talk about?

[BobbyDing]

Thanks. I will try resizing the blocks. A couple questions, just to be sure. I have a drive C (20gb for the system only) and a drive D (80 gb for data). It's my data drive that needs to be 64K blocks, rite? Also, are blocks the same as clusters? I have partition magic 8, and it has an option for resizing clusters, but I find nothing about blocks?

Thanks,

Bobby

[stanger89]

It's the drive the recordings go on, yes. And resizing clusters is what you want to do.

[BobbyDing]

OK, I re formatted the data drive with 64K clusters. Watching TV through the Avermedia card still freezes occasionally (every 10-15 seconds), and trying to change the channel takes forever (all this is through the HD200). The channel I'm viewing has typically 90% or better reception rate, so I don't think it's a poor signal. I noticed that after I formatted the data drive, the XP firewall and SageTV services came up in manual (they were auto before). Also, the machine took a dogs age to load. Not sure what would cause this. I have several images of the system drive, so tomorrow I'm gonna try a clean load of XP (SP2) and just the SageTV and see how it does. Just to be sure I've got the software as tight as possible.

Any tips on tweaking a fresh install would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Bobby

[carlgar]

Check your network speed. If the network is set for auto connect, it may be connecting at 10 Mb instead of 100 Mb.

[wrems]

Not sure if it makes a difference, but I set up Sage so that I have a boot drive with an OS and then have separate drives for recording and media imports. I don’t mix them. It’s just how I’ve always done it and it’s always worked well.

Basically, I leave the primary boot drive with all my programs on the default clusters; I think its 4k… Then all my separate media import drives and recording drives are set to 64k.

I’m not sure if this would help your situation… Maybe someone can respond about a configuration like above or commingling the boot drive with recordings and keeping 64k clusters for everything.

[BobbyDing]

Hi Folks,
Thanks for all the assistance. Reloading XP fixed it mostly. It now plays WHILE recording almost without glitching It's MUCH better than before, but there have been occasional points where it freezes for a few seconds, then suddenly fast forwards to where it should be and then plays fine. It doesn't happen to often. A couple times a night. Being it fast forwards through the material I would assume it's being recorded, but the system is halting playback while it does something else for a bit, then catches up. I tried loading that reg edit thing posted here that lest you modify the java stack, but it won't run. It fails with an error. Any suggestions? I'm double clicking the application file. Should I be running the XML file instead? The hard drive is set to 64K.

Thanks for the help, it's getting there one step at a time.

Bobby