ClearQAM HD Capture output options?

[cyberfreak]

I'm using an HVR-1800 to capture clear qam hd programming and for some reason sagetv outputs everything as mpg files, but it seems theres something different about the mpg files from QAM vs SD captures and many programs cannot seem to properly decode the audio in the mpg.

Does anyone know how to configure sage to output QAM captures as .ts files?

thx

[Tiki]

With clear QAM, your capture card isn't actually encoding anything, it just grabs the stream and puts it into a file. So, the format for the video and audio will be whatever your Cable Co. or TV station is broadcasting.

When I first started capturing HD with my HDHomerun, I also had audio problems. What I found was that the audio was being broadcast in AC3. Sage is supposed to come with an AC3 decoder (you can check around in your Sage directory. Before I found out that Sage was supposed to have an AC3 decoder, I downloaded one off the internet and that got things working.

As far as changing from PS to TS (program stream vs. transport stream), I don't know much about that and don't know if it would make any difference for decoding audio. I'm pretty sure there is a setting in the Sage.properties file related to this.

[cyberfreak]

Thanks for the reply,

Sage itself seems to be OK with the audio (when I play the video I hear audio), and when I play the MPG files on another system I also hear audio - and when I look at the properties of the file in sage it does indeed say it's AC3 audio.

But when i try to use comskip, Cuttermaran, and various other utilities to try and edit the QAM captured mpg I get errors about decoding the audio - even though playing the file the audio appears to be OK. So I figured a good solution would be to try and capture it in a different format.

I would agree that maybe it's just the format coming with from the cable provider - except that if I use WinTV (the hauppauge utility for viewing video from the card) it captures in TS format (from the same QAM channel sage is capturing MPG from). That's why I was thinking it's a setting in sage somewhere...

I did also try updating my codecs with the latest ac3 but that didn't seem to help.

Does anyone else use comskip or SA to clean commercials from QAM captured video from sage?

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by cyberfreak

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But when i try to use comskip, Cuttermaran, and various other utilities to try and edit the QAM captured mpg I get errors about decoding the audio - even though playing the file the audio appears to be OK. So I figured a good solution would be to try and capture it in a different format.

It's not supported anymore, and might not work, but you may be able to record digital TV as a transport stream by setting: mmc/encode_digital_tv_as_program_stream=false

But, I'd recommend against it. Software tends to get along with program stream files better than transport stream files. The regular directions for firewire recording results in transport stream files, but I switched it to program stream to get better playback support in software.

I wonder if you have signal strength issues. Is your video always clean, or does it sometimes get pixelated or drop out entirely?

Does anyone else use comskip or SA to clean commercials from QAM captured video from sage?

I use SA to identify commercials. I don't remove the commercials from the files though, I just have Sage automatically skip them.

[cyberfreak]

Video always looks clean, so I don't think it's a quality issue... and signal strength is 100%

I'll give that a shot

[stanger89]

I don't think I've ever had an issue with comskip or SA with my OTA-sourced HD MPEG/AC3 mpeg program stream recordings (.mpg).

[SWKerr]

Originally Posted by stanger89

I don't think I've ever had an issue with comskip or SA with my OTA-sourced HD MPEG/AC3 mpeg program stream recordings (.mpg).

Same here and no problems with comskip

[cyberfreak]

Either of you guys happen to be using an HVR-1800? Maybe it's a hardware specific thing?

[Protoman]

I have a pair of HVR-1800s that I use for OTA. They both record video as MPEG Program Streams (.mpg). I use DirMon2 and ShowAnalyzer 0.9.7 and have not had any issues with commercial detection or playback. In fact, those shows seems to have the commercials detected the best.

The signal strength I get is usually either 100% or darn close to it. I used "TS Reader Lite" (http://www.tsreader.com/tsreader/index.html) to determine signal strength and not Sage's signal meter. I used the free version as it is more than enough for what I need and still provides a ton of data about your OTA signal.

Hope this helps,
Protoman