Will MVP extender play OTA HD???

[mike30341]

I have ditched AT&T Uverse for budgetary reasons and we decided to go OTA HD for now. I am pondering getting one of the Sage approved Hauppage cards to get the stations in and use Sage as the DVR as well as all the other cool things it does. However, I don't have an HD extender, but I do have 3 MVP extenders. Would they play HD content as a client to Sage TV? I know it wouldn't be in HD, I was just curious if it's possible. I want an HD extender, but it's not in the budget for a few months.

Thanks...

[wrems]

Yes, if your server has enough power. What are your server specs? Not sure if you would be able to run watch more than 1 show at a time. You could look at setting up transcoding jobs during the night to convert your HD files into more MVP manageable files.

[mike30341]

Well it's not too much.
AMD 3800 64 2.42GHz CPU, w/1Gb RAM

I'm considering a Hauppage WinTV HVR-2250, which (I believe) does the video processing on the card, so that would free up some resources on the PC. What do you use to transcode? If it isn't too complicated, then I could try it.

I sure with they would have left the darn cable TV alone and not went digital. I know that's blasphemy to most people on here, but I had a sweet system with my sage tv. anyway, thanks for any advice.

[davephan]

The MVP will playback HD content, except there will be black bars on the top and bottom of the screen. It won't be in HD, but the picture looks good for a SD TV.

You could use the "Online" videos in SageTV, select HD Videos, then "Beautiful Places" to test it.

The HVR-2250 is a good card. I have one setup to record analog cable TV from two DTAs. I ordered a second HVR-2250 because they are on sale now at NewEgg until Sunday. The price is $99.99 after a $30 rebate. The price does not include about $8 shipping cost. The normal price is $149.95. They are still trying to sell them at Microcenter for the full price.

I plan to use the second HVR-2250 for OTA digital TV.

I have two MVPs and two HD-200s. The HD-200 audio quality is vastly superior to the MVP. The picture quality is better too. The HD-200 is also much more reliable than the MVP.

Dave

[wrems]

Dave, are you able to playback HD streams from both of your MVP's simultaneously?

I don't know specifically how to set up the transcoding jobs since I don't bother. Check around in the Sage Job Queue SJQ thread for specifics on setting up rule based transcoding jobs.

[davephan]

Originally Posted by wrems

Dave, are you able to playback HD streams from both of your MVP's simultaneously?

I don't know specifically how to set up the transcoding jobs since I don't bother. Check around in the Sage Job Queue SJQ thread for specifics on setting up rule based transcoding jobs.

The MVP can only playback mpeg2 format directly. When you playback something else, like a TS file, then your computer transcodes the video from TS format into mpeg2 format on the fly so it can playback on the MVP. You don't have to run any jobs to transcode the video on the fly, that is automatically done by SageTV. If you don't have enough CPU to handle the process of transcoding, then the audio and video will stutter. An Althlon XP 1800 isn't enough CPU to handle the load for one MVP to playback one AVI file. A Athlon XP 2100 is barely enough CPU to handle the same load. Both of those a single core slow processors compared to the current technology. Now, I have an Intel i-7 950 3.06 gig quad core CPU. My current CPU is so powerful compared to my older SageTV CPU that I don't think it would have problems with the load.

If you don't have any AVI or TS files to playback, you can use SageTV to manually compress the mpeg2 format into AVI for a 'test' AVI file. Then try playing back the 'test' file.

I don't use the MVPs very often, since they are 'retired' to very infrequently used TVs after I replaced them with HD-200s. I will try playing back HD content on both of them at the same time to find out the load on the SageTV computer. I could also test playing back both HD-200s and recording five things at once to load it down more.

The HD-200 media extender is a huge improvement over the MVP, and would be worth the upgrade. The audio quality is vastly superior and the video is better too. From time to time, I had to power cycle my MVPs when they lost the connection to the server and refused to work. Sometimes I left them unplugged for awhile before plugging them back in to get them reset. The HD-200 doesn't have those reliability problems.

I can let you know the results of a loading test, but I don't think it will help answer your question if your system can handle the load of playing transcoding on the fly for you MVPs. This would be very easy for you to test. Before and during the test, check your CPU load on your system, and watch for audio/video stuttering.

Dave

[paulbeers]

I have several MVP's that I use for playing back HD streams. As stated they have to be converted. My opinion is yes you could convert them all after they have been recorded, but then you lose the ability to ever watch anything "live". In my house that wasn't going to fly. If you want to transcode "on the fly", then you have to choose between two quality settings: Standard and High. Standard needs a lot less processing power, but I find that it is sorely lacking. Anything with a lot of movement (sports, action movies, etc.) will look bad. Here are some of my findings:

Intel Core2duos - Anything less than about 2.4ghz can not do High reliably. My 1.8ghz was not fast enough unless I overclocked it to 2.4ghz.

Intel Core i5/i7 - No problems. I tested this on my iMac Core i5 (2.66ghz) with no issues (not that I thought there would be).

AMD Athlon X2 - My 4850e clocked at 2.5ghz could not handle High reliably. It was close but it appeared that any sports recorded in 1080i would have hiccups periodically. Standard is fine.

AMD Athlon II / Phenom II - No problems. My AMD 630 (2.8ghz) appears to handle it just fine.

Also, if you want to do more than 1 HD show at a time, you are giong to need more than just 2 cores. Remember, that what you are doing is taking an HD show and downconverting it to SD since the MediaMVP can't display anything greater than SD so in the end you really aren't watching true HD (but it does look pretty darn good).

[mike30341]

Thanks guys, you've been very helpful. I'll be getting the HD200 eventually, I was just hoping to use the MVP to bridge the gap. Looks like it will.

BTW, it plays the online HD content just fine. I didn't think of that before.