What is the benefit of using the HD300 as an extender?

[Bone]

I want to know the difference of using the HD300 as a stand alone to play media on the network and using it as an extender with the software on a pc. I am not using any pvr/dvr card nor am I using it for any tv through my pc.

I would think the video coming from the extender would be the same as from the stand alone if the source of the media is the same pc? So other than using the HD300 as an extender w/ a tuner card whats the point of it?

[bcjenkins]

With the extender mode you also pick up the benefit of the other plugins for SageTV. Also, the new design

B

[bits]

Originally Posted by Bone

I want to know the difference of using the HD300 as a stand alone to play media on the network and using it as an extender with the software on a pc. I am not using any pvr/dvr card nor am I using it for any tv through my pc.

I would think the video coming from the extender would be the same as from the stand alone if the source of the media is the same pc? So other than using the HD300 as an extender w/ a tuner card whats the point of it?

The answer depends on how much and what type of video you have or plan on having coupled with your particular likes and dislikes in terms of GUI.

If you have a pretty good sized library of DVD\BD for example and desire meta data, cover art, fanart ect. and want an easy way to search for genre or last viewed or whatever then you would use the HD300 in extender mode.

If all you want is to be able to browse for a file similarly to browsing for one in Windows then standalone will work.

For years I used older network media players in the standalone mode until I tried the HD200 in extender mode....for me and for WAF there is no going back to standalone. However, we do record shows and use the auto-commercial skip feature extensively.

[Bone]

Originally Posted by bits

If you have a pretty good sized library of DVD\BD for example and desire meta data, cover art, fanart ect. and want an easy way to search for genre or last viewed or whatever then you would use the HD300 in extender mode.
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Thanks for the reply. I do have a good amount of movies, pics and videos mostly all in sd. I plan to get more hd content in the future. I do want meta data, cover art and all things like that. I noticed it was not in the stand alone. I got my HD300 2 days ago. I will look more into the software and try to find where the plug ins are and maybe get some of those.

Do you see any change in the quality of sound or video from extender mode or stand alone?

[Suntan]

Originally Posted by Bone

Do you see any change in the quality of sound or video from extender mode or stand alone?

No.

-Suntan

[bits]

Originally Posted by Bone

Do you see any change in the quality of sound or video from extender mode or stand alone?

No.

[queequeg99]

Originally Posted by Bone

Do you see any change in the quality of sound or video from extender mode or stand alone?

To reiterate two other responses, there's no difference in quality.

I actually use my HD200 in standalone mode quite often, generally when my daughters want to watch a movie and Sage isn't running on the PC a few rooms away. The one complaint I have about standalone mode (at least for the HD200) is that navigating through the menus can sometimes be slow compared to extender mode. But no so slow that I've been tempted to go into the other room and start up Sage just to speed up the process.

I've read that the HD300 is faster in this regard so that might be a reason for me to upgrade.

[wrems]

UI! Especially for movies it is much easier to navigate your library. Check out Sage MyMovies by PluckyHD. He's been building and refining his movie wall for some time now and it's pretty slick. In its current form it requires the use of MyMovies collection manager and there's some pros and cons to that.

Here is one of his overviews of what is capable with his plugin:
http://www.youtube.com/watch#!v=GG4YsvPRfAU

Check out the SMM thread too, there are more videos and screenshots:
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=49902

Plus, placing all of your media on one PC (server) allows for easy expansion. All you need to do is add more HD300(s) throughout your house and each TV will be fully equipped with all your media.

[phelme]

The biggest advantage I see of an extender beyond price is WAF. When the client on my PC would crash, my wife wouldn't always know what to do when that happened. And a reboot of a whole PC takes time. If the extender crashes or freezes, simply hit the power toggle on the remote and one is usually back up and running within 30 seconds. Very easy.

There are only two downsides I see of the HD300. One is no deinterlace options with interlaced video, but that's not a huge deal. And no ability to drop into a web browser on the occasion one would stream a show off a network's website like we could from the PC client.

[jarredduq]

Originally Posted by phelme

The biggest advantage I see of an extender beyond price is WAF. When the client on my PC would crash, my wife wouldn't always know what to do when that happened. And a reboot of a whole PC takes time. If the extender crashes or freezes, simply hit the power toggle on the remote and one is usually back up and running within 30 seconds. Very easy.

There are only two downsides I see of the HD300. One is no deinterlace options with interlaced video, but that's not a huge deal. And no ability to drop into a web browser on the occasion one would stream a show off a network's website like we could from the PC client.

That is why I have both an Extender and and my PC connected to my main TV, so I can have the best of both worlds.

[SomeWhatLost]

yea, like others said, improved UI and customization are the two big bonuses for the extender route...
the PVR part is a huge plus for me, but YMMV...
plugins are cool... I like the way V7 deals with plugins...

[ojosch]

Originally Posted by phelme

The biggest advantage I see of an extender beyond price is WAF. When the client on my PC would crash, my wife wouldn't always know what to do when that happened. And a reboot of a whole PC takes time. If the extender crashes or freezes, simply hit the power toggle on the remote and one is usually back up and running within 30 seconds. Very easy.

There are only two downsides I see of the HD300. One is no deinterlace options with interlaced video, but that's not a huge deal. And no ability to drop into a web browser on the occasion one would stream a show off a network's website like we could from the PC client.

I think his question was what are the advantages of running the HD-300 in extender mode vs running it in standalone mode. The issue here was not anything about a SageTV client PC vs the HD-300 extender. I can see where one could have easily misinterpreted his question though...


That said, I much rather use my HD-200 in extender mode since I'd much rather let my powerful SageTV server fetch up all my content, (has xeon quadcore 2.5gHz w/ gigabit LAN access), because I also have several other PCs throughout the house like one music server, a router/web server, Dlink DNS-323 NAS, and whom-ever's laptops are powered up at the time too, so it is much easier for me to just map drives to each of those servers from my SageTV server and the on the HD-200 I just navigate to 'Media Center > Browse Media Files > Browse files on the SageTV Server' and then I can simply see my C:\, D:\, E:\, F:\, G:\,H:\,I:\,K:\,M:\,S:\, and V:\ drives, and about half of those are local to the SageTV Server and the rest are all mapped network drives, all available from the same menu page on my HD-200. It makes finding my content a snap. I don't even use any of that library folder crap since it is too slow and is lame in general. I just use a simple, organized folder system in which I know where all my stuff is at. The only thing I ever use standalone mode for on my HD-200 is to connect to Play-On (UPnP service), which also runs as a service on my SageTV server. That is to watch Netflix, streaming online via the HD-200.

The other thing I notice is that when I play 1080p on standalone mode it runs a higher chance of being choppy, wheareas on extender mode none of my content ever chops, and so it is my opinion that the SageTV server-to-client streamng protocols are probably more optimized at streaming video (in a more controlled environment) from their server program-to-client than the standard Windows Netbios, NFS, or Samba protocols are out of the box without custom optimization. I know that Samba for one needs a little tweaking in the conf file sometimes for it to perform certain kinds of tasks optimally, so if you have a beefy, fast SageTV PC server with a gigabit link going out and doing all the fetching (network doesn't need any fancy dialing-in), then your little ol HD-200 / HD-300 with slower processor and 100mb/sec ethernet adapter can use its proprietary streaming protocol connection to the SageTV server and performance-wise, I see that it runs nice and never skips this way.
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[mayamaniac]

The HD300 was designed to be an extender first and foremost to compliment the SageTV server software. The standalone mode is just an added bonus. They've done much more extensive work on the extender side, especially the UI, while the standalone mode shows little to no improvement since it debut with the HD200. I love the HD200/HD300, but if I needed a standalone device, I would wait for the Boxee or look into the WDTV.

[jchisholm]

In my case the extender mode (as with the Sage v7 interface) does not
display or recognize let alone play .iso files. Neither does the Sage client properly play .mkv files so I need the HD300 standalone to browse and play .iso and .mkv files in my collection.

[ojosch]

What I do with ISOs is I just keep them all on my SageTV server as ISO files, and I have Virtual Clone Drive installed on that same server (FREE program off of Slysoft's website), and using my netbook I VNC to the Sage server from the couch, only to find the ISO I want to watch and double-click it, which if you have Virtual Clone Drive installed, double-clicking on ISO files will mount them to a Virtual Blueray drive it created at time of initial program install (in my case it's drive E:\), then back on the HD-200 using extender mode, I just browse to Media Server > Browse Media Files > Browse files on the SageTV Server > E:\ and then I find the MT2S file that is in the Stream directory of the ISO image and watch it right off the image.

This also works for me on my normal physical Blueray drive, so if I get a Blueray disc from Netflix and plop it into the D: drive, then I can browse to the proper 'Stream' directory on it from the HD-200 and just play the MT2S file (I also have AnyDVD-HD running in the taskbar tray as a service, which decrypts Blueray movie discs on-the-fly, while they are running is the BD-ROM drive). This setup is the best workaround I've found thus far for playing ISOs and real blueray discs is to just run them off the server. Because one time I tried using the extender in standalone mode to play ISO images on my server and they were pretty choppy (1080p blueray rips), so that is why I always just assumed that the streaming protocols SageTV must use for the extender to the SageTV server were a lot better dialed-in than using Samba/Windows File Sharing to manage streaming. SageTV's developers I'm sure, had a much more controlled environment to optimize the streaming since they have built both the server and the client communication engines, so they can dial them in as much as they want, since they control that entire code set on both sides.

Perhaps the reason many others never had issues with streaming on standalone mode like I did, is maybe they don't typically try to watch 1080p blueray rips like I do, but all I know is that when on Extender mode, my 1080p rips still play smooth as glass, and they skip if I'm on standalone mode. Or maybe I just have a lot of network traffic on my LAN? I do know that my HD-200 has to go through a small 10/100 Linksys switch before it gets to my 100GB/s backplane rack switch where it will then have no more bottlenecks since it will travel at 1 GB/s back to the SageTV server. But it seems to me that I even tried a straight-thru cable going right to my fast switch and it still would be choppy. I tried a lot to narrow it down but I just couldn't get the choppy playback to go away on standalone mode when playing those blueray rips. My last theory was that maybe the conversion from 100 MB/s to 1 GB/s in the switch was slowing things down, but I doubt that, because this switch is a high-end enterprise grade switch with 100 GB/s backplane and it has 2 SFP gig ports on it (which I even tried one of the SFP ports to use as gigabit fiber to my SageTV server, which I borrowed an SFP gigabit fiber adapter to install into one of the switch's SFP ports, a fiber cable, and an Intel PCIe gigabit-fiber card from my work to try it out for a few weeks, and it didn't fix that either). but for whatever reason, extender mode never had this problem, not even to the slightest degree.

The other hassle I just remembered about using standalone mode is that it never remembers my network passwords it makes me type in (on that stupid little remote keypad) which bugs the hell out of me. Whenever I reboot the HD-200 it forgets all the passwords so I have to retype them in (for 4-5 different machines) every time. My SageTV server is better suited to be the hub, because it remembers all my mapped drives and their respective passwords, so reboots are never a problem.
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[jchisholm]

Hmm interesting thanks ojosch.
Some good points there, although for my purposes the virtual drive route is a bit convoluted. My HD300 in standalone mode plays .iso files perfectly, although I do have gigabit switches.
I just don't get it why at this point in it's development the SageTV interface
still doesn't see/play iso files.
Before I got the HD300 I was relegated to using xbmc for isos and mkv files.
(Not that xbmc isn't a great product in itself!)
Jim

[phelme]

Originally Posted by ojosch

I think his question was what are the advantages of running the HD-300 in extender mode vs running it in standalone mode. The issue here was not anything about a SageTV client PC vs the HD-300 extender. I can see where one could have easily misinterpreted his question though...

Oops. Skimmed the original post and replied on no coffee. Bad idea.

[metapath]

Originally Posted by jchisholm

I just don't get it why at this point in it's development the SageTV interface
still doesn't see/play iso files.
Jim

Mine does, not sure why yours doesn't. I do have to navigate Videos/Titles instead of Videos/DVD-BDs, but they appear in the list and play just fine.
The menu list will even show covers if you label the JPG file with the same name as the ISO file.

[jchisholm]

Really? I'm not talking about the HD300 interface (which does indeed display/play isos) but the standalone SageTV v7.0.20 client/mediacenter.
No .isos there.

[metapath]

Originally Posted by jchisholm

Really? I'm not talking about the HD300 interface (which does indeed display/play isos) but the standalone SageTV v7.0.20 client/mediacenter.
No .isos there.

Yup, I'm talking about the Sage 7 beta interface.

In fact, I've been using this feature since I started with Sage just before version 6 was introduced. It seems to me you had to edit the Sage.properties file but it's been so many years I don't remember the details.

Hmmm, looking in my Sage properties, I see there's a .iso extension in the list for Seeker/video_library_import_filename_extensions. Does that exist in your sage properties file?
If not, add it and restart the sage service.