Extender vs Full Sage Clients

[macsupergeek]

I have 2 SageTV extenders and they play all of my content and live TV beautifully. They play LiveTV 1080i streams from my FIOS setup pushed through HD-PVR boxes in amazing detail and without a stutter. The one that I use for outdoor movies is even connected through a Belkin Poweline HD adapter and plays perfect. With all that said, how on earth do these little boxes do this when my full size dual P4 with 1.5gb ram, and ATI x1550 cannot even come close to playing any of this content. I have tried Arcsoft, SageTV, Purevideo, FFDshow and many other decoders, even tried Win7 last week to no avail. The windows client just cant play the same content that the extender can using the HD streams -- DVD and analog are OK, 480i through the HD-PVR is barely passable. So I was curious -- has anyone had experience out there with linux and Sage 6.6, would it play any better if I take windows out of the mix? I know my equipment would scream on linux, I was hoping that Sage would too. Also, if I up my JVM to 1gb will that help video playback?

[Fuzzy]

Upping JVM Won't help the video playabck at all.. that's pretty much just for the UI goodies. I think your best option, if you want to get the Hd video playing smoothly on the desktop, is to upgrade the graphics. (You certainly don't need anything overly fancy) An ATI HD3xxx series will play back anything the extender will, with very little CPU use, and will cost you very little. (newegg has a passively cooled HD3450 card for $30)

[paulbeers]

You have to remember too, that the extenders have hardware that was specifically designed for displaying video to a tv. That is why they play content back better than most video cards (or if not better, let's call it easier). With that said, other than placeshifter on my laptops, I don't use full clients....

[OneOfMany]

I agree with Fuzzy. Your video card is way underpowered. If I recall these cards have 256MB of onboard memory, and used HyperMemory (sharing system main memory) to increase their memory storage. Playback of HD video would be tough, I don't think they can do 1920x1080 - 1080p/i resolution.

I exclusively use clients, and have no video performance issues.

Grant

[macsupergeek]

The sad part is my silly little SFF clients that played analog so well and did everything I could ever want in a client have only AGP for video, so the card I got for the 2 clients are about as good as they can ever get, its too bad really they were great little machines. But I like what the extenders can do way more, now I just need to upgrade to v7, and I will probably buy maybe 1 or 2 more and just use my tablet for web surfing and forget trying to do it all in the client PCs. FYI -- I setup the extender and connected it to a VGA projector -- I first changed the video in the extender to 720p and then used a vga to component cable -- http://www.cablestogo.com/product.as...latedItem=true -- the difference between it being plugged in that way and using RCA cables or even svideo -- is amazing. I basically had a 16ft screen on the back of my garage to watch the yankees v mets and yankees v dodgers games these past couple of days -- my god -- the quality was truly amazing.

[macsupergeek]

i just checked specs online -- this card should be good enough to do HDTV --

Interface Type: AGP 8x
Graphics Processor / Vendor: ATI Radeon X1550
RAMDAC Clock Speed: 400 MHz
API Supported: DirectX 9.0, OpenGL 2.0
Video Memory Installed ( Max ): 256 MB - DDR2 SDRAM
Video Output: 2560 x 1600
Max Resolution Details: DVI: 2560 x 1600 / VGA: 2048 x 1536
Max Monitors Supported: 2
TV Interface: HDTV out

maybe I will give linux a shot and see if it can handle video out better.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by macsupergeek

i just checked specs online -- this card should be good enough to do HDTV --

Interface Type: AGP 8x
Graphics Processor / Vendor: ATI Radeon X1550
RAMDAC Clock Speed: 400 MHz
API Supported: DirectX 9.0, OpenGL 2.0
Video Memory Installed ( Max ): 256 MB - DDR2 SDRAM
Video Output: 2560 x 1600
Max Resolution Details: DVI: 2560 x 1600 / VGA: 2048 x 1536
Max Monitors Supported: 2
TV Interface: HDTV out

maybe I will give linux a shot and see if it can handle video out better.

Yes, teh card can easily DISPLAY hdtv resolutions (much higher, even). The problem isn't displaying it to the screen, it's decoding the H.264 compressed video. This can be done in one of two places, either in software, being decoded by your CPU, or in hardware, being decoded by the GPU. Your GPU is not capable of H.264 hardware accelleration, leaving it to your CPU. Since you are seeing studdering, then it obvious your CPU is also not fast enough for the job. Upgrading the motherboard/cpu would probably cost more than just s $30 video card, though if your board is AGP only, that will be more limiting. There ARE H.264 capable AGP boards out there, but they are sold in MUCh smaller numbers, and as such, are not NEAR as cheap.

[Naylia]

There's an AGP 4650 out there for about $50. There was a thread on MissingRemote this week discussing AGP cards. Replacing the x1550 is definitely the path to take.

[macsupergeek]

believe me -- i would have much rather used something like that card, but since the machine is SFF, I am not only limited by AGP but also to the half height restriction.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by macsupergeek

believe me -- i would have much rather used something like that card, but since the machine is SFF, I am not only limited by AGP but also to the half height restriction.

Most of those AGP 3450's are half height, i believe...

[macsupergeek]

I found that one fuzzy and then I found this review --

If you intend to use this for HD playing for H.264 encoding using DXVA, you are wasting time. I finally returned this item.

1. Installation/Uninstallation very difficult
This card is very difficult to plug in the AGP. Need extra power connector or a Y connector. The fan housing actually blocks AGP lock so if you want to unplug the card, you cannot get the lock and unlock it from AGP. I almost broke my finger nail for that. If there are motherboard capacitor nearby, be extremely careful

2. The normal driver for ATI does not work. You need to get the hotfix for AGP. I followed many websites' suggestion to enable the DXVA, nothing got worked out as expected. Only 1 HD clip worked with DXVA activated when using MPC HC. I just don't understand why the DXVA is so difficult to work on this card. Later, I purchased a PNY NVidia 8400 GS PCI, it worked mostly.

The conclusion is that ATI is lagging behind on NVidia big time on HD playing. Things are totally different now. I still remember that ATI was so good in 2001.

Anybody have experience with this card -- as it sounds like it put me right back where I am -- not being able to play h264 -- which would be my .ts streams for live TV.

[macsupergeek]

I found better reviews and they all say that they have the card working with an older machine like mine and h264 from a HDPVR, so I am going to give it a whirl and see what happens.

[Naylia]

Here's some benchmarking I did with a 3650, the 3450 should be pretty similar.

http://www.missingremote.com/index.p...959&Itemid=227