HDHomeRun Pixelation/Drop-outs/Stutter

[Diego Garcia]

I run Sage against an HDHomeRun, with a clearQAM cable connection. It works reasonably well, but I'm wondering if the recording quality can be improved.

I see pixel dropouts, or a line of solid color pixels across the screen, reasonably frequently (say, a dozen or more times in an "hour" long show). The image will also stutter (i.e., appear to freeze for a fraction of a second) about as frequently, too.

Based on previous suggestions I've tweaked my system (an aging AMD64x2 running a couple of large capacity SATA drives) to keep the recording directories from being scanned by my antivirus software. That helped quite a bit, but I'm still left with the issues I outlined above. My network is gigabit. Signal quality, at least based on what's reported by Sage, would appear to be fine (i.e., usually 100%, and I've never seen any channel below 95%).

[techhome]

Check out your CPU utilization. I'll bet the issue is in playback, not recording. Currently my Sage PC is an ancient Pentium 4 2.8G system. It can play 1080P wmv files, but PQ on broadcast 1080i via the HDHR is similar to what you describe. I also have a couple of HD200s and they serve up pristine quality Live and recorded TV from the same server tuned via the same HDHR. Your PC will be fine as a server, but you may want to consider a HD200 to connect to the TV. Note that when I was getting started w/ Sage, I also purchased a MediaMVP for one of my old SDTVs. What I didn't realize is that the Sage server must transcode in real time, to serve video to the MVP and my Pentium 4 system was not up to the task resulting in stuttering standard-def. I'm in the process of building a slightly higher power dedicated backend server around an Athlon64 X2 2800+ and will use only HD200s for playback.

Hope this helps...

[Diego Garcia]

Thanks for the quick feedback. Your point about playback looking better over HD200 than on the HDTV directly connected to my server is something I've noticed, too, but hadn't thought about in the context of the picture quality on "direct" playback. I just assumed that Sage pumping out video through a video card into a TV just >>had<< to be "easier" than sending a stream to an HD200 over a network. But it sounds like that's wrong.

Does that mean that I might be able to improve picture playback directly out of the server by using a more powerful video card? I certainly could go the route you mentioned -- hang an HD200 off what is now a directly-connected TV -- but I'm wondering if a better video card might be cheaper. Besides, I have to admit I like being able to use my 54" LCD as a computer...

[techhome]

There are others on these boards that can help you out more. I recommend starting your research higher-end ATI cards that offload processing of HD content from the CPU. 4000 or 5000 series I believe. Search in this forum and also in the HTPC forum on AVS.com and you'll find your answers.