Gauging Interest in Native Netflix support for Client PC

[OneOfMany]

Yeah, looking at it that way, an extender would be good in the soaking/readingn room . Otherwise, i'm in for all my clients!

Grant

[mkanet]

I was one of the 18 people who said they would pay for this capability. I'm sorry for saying this, but I changed my mind. I would rather wait for Playon's 720p HD support (which according to them should look very close to the original quality) and have HD200/HD300 capability than be limited to PC clients only. Plus, Im going to use playon anyway for non-sageTV clients in the future.

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by mkanet

I was one of the 18 people who said they would pay for this capability. I'm sorry for saying this, but I changed my mind. I would rather wait for Playon's 720p HD support (which according to them should look very close to the original quality) and have HD200/HD300 capability than be limited to PC clients only. Plus, Im going to use playon anyway for non-sageTV clients in the future.

You will be waiting awhile, plus the pc requirements on the server for this are going to be high I suspect. Given how much of a resource hog Playon is for SD I can't imagine how bad it will be for HD transcoding.

[mkanet]

I know you've already thought of this, but I thought it wouldnt hurt to ask anyway....

Is there any very clever way to strip DRM from the Netflix API for sageTV hardware extenders that would technically be considered legal or grey area; equivalent to an HDMI/DVI/VGA "extension cord" on a remote TV. Maybe, there's a circumstance/loophole that's not mentioned in the API documentation to allow this.

Or, possibly do some kind of lossless/uncompressed redirecting of the already decoded API stream? I'm not sure how much bandwidth an HD 720 uncompressed stream would take; maybe a 1000basedt network can handle it (minus overhead)?

Originally Posted by PLUCKYHD

You will be waiting awhile, plus the pc requirements on the server for this are going to be high I suspect. Given how much of a resource hog Playon is for SD I can't imagine how bad it will be for HD transcoding.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by mkanet

I would rather wait for Playon's 720p HD support (which according to them should look very close to the original quality)

Do you have anything more up to date from PlayOn than this thread which doesn't actually sound all that promising. To sum it up: they are working on it but it is not a high priority right now.

http://www.playon.tv/forum/feedback/...support-needed

Here is a post from PlayOn date March 27:

It is not that we have not been working on HD support and we have certainly not been avoiding it. We do understand that folks have been asking for HD support and we are absolutely working on it, but we also have to prioritize which new features we focus on. It is more complicated to implement than one might imagine. Because PlayOn works with so many different devices and transcodes each video as it is being served there are certain challenges involved with HD support.

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by wayner

Do you have anything more up to date from PlayOn than this thread which doesn't actually sound all that promising. To sum it up: they are working on it but it is not a high priority right now.

http://www.playon.tv/forum/feedback/...support-needed

Here is a post from PlayOn date March 27:

+1. I've been following the HD thread on their forum and have seen nothing other than "we're working on it".

[bastafidli]

Originally Posted by mkanet

Is there any very clever way to strip DRM from the Netflix API for sageTV hardware extenders that would technically be considered legal or grey area;

Not sure if this is what you ask, but google is your friend. There is a way how to rip the Netflix feeds and save them as unrestricted video. I have never tried it since it looked pretty complicated just reading it, but apparently it is technically possible.

[brainbone]

Originally Posted by bastafidli

Not sure if this is what you ask, but google is your friend. There is a way how to rip the Netflix feeds and save them as unrestricted video. I have never tried it since it looked pretty complicated just reading it, but apparently it is technically possible.

My understanding is that it was for the pre-silverlight/playready Netflix streaming. Things changed dramatically after the move to playready.

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by brainbone

My understanding is that it was for the pre-silverlight/playready Netflix streaming. Things changed dramatically after the move to playready.

Yup and seeing as how now one to my knowledge has hacked playready (ie also cablecard's drm scheme). I don't see it happening.

[brainbone]

Originally Posted by PLUCKYHD

Yup and seeing as how now one to my knowledge has hacked playready (ie also cablecard's drm scheme). I don't see it happening.

I'm sure it's possible to crack -- you can run Silverlight/playready in a VM, so in that case you should be able step through and figure out what's going on. But with the DMCA being what it is, who's going to try? Not like Netflix streams to Russia.

Edit: It's also not the "right thing to do" when we're talking about rented content, like Netflix.

[mkanet]

I just received the following response from Playon support this morning. Playon development seems to be moving pretty aggressively in other issues; and, based on their response, I think I can wait. We watch a lot of playon (Netflix/Amazon VOD) TV shows and movies on our extender; so, it looks like HD or not, this is the only solution for extenders. The video is tollerable; certainly better than some youtube videos end up watching anyway.

"Thank you for your interest! HD Streaming has been a very hot issue for many of our customers, and we are working on on a solution. However, as of right now we are still in the planning and initial testing stages and do not have anything that is ready for public testing or release yet.
Unfortunately, we do not have a specific timeline for when this may be an upcoming feature at this time. Rest assured, though, that we are working on this and will continue to work on it because it has been such a popular request.

Originally Posted by wayner

Do you have anything more up to date from PlayOn than this thread which doesn't actually sound all that promising. To sum it up: they are working on it but it is not a high priority right now.

http://www.playon.tv/forum/feedback/...support-needed

Here is a post from PlayOn date March 27:

[brainbone]

Originally Posted by mkanet

Rest assured, though, that we are working on this and will continue to work on it because it has been such a popular request.

Translation: When the average PC is fast enough to render 720P, rip the rendered buffer of 720P, and then encode that 720P buffer (to MPEG2?) at reasonable quality in real time, at 30 times a second, without dropping any/many frames, all without the aid of "hardware acceleration".

Short answer: Not any time soon, especially if that server will be doing anything else at the time.

[mkanet]

I'm guessing this will be optional "fast PC recommended" setting. I wonder what are the minimum CPU requirements for ffmpeg to do realtime 720p transcoding. That also makes sense why placeshifter doesnt have a 720p option either.

Originally Posted by brainbone

Translation: When the average PC is fast enough to render 720P, rip the rendered buffer of 720P, and then encode that 720P buffer (to MPEG2?) at reasonable quality in real time, at 30 times a second, without dropping any/many frames, all without the aid of "hardware acceleration".

Short answer: Not any time soon, especially if that server will be doing anything else at the time.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by brainbone

Translation: When the average PC is fast enough to render 720P, rip the rendered buffer of 720P, and then encode that 720P buffer (to MPEG2?) at reasonable quality in real time, at 30 times a second, without dropping any/many frames, all without the aid of "hardware acceleration".

Short answer: Not any time soon, especially if that server will be doing anything else at the time.

Isn't the amount of data in a 720p recording about 6X the data in a 480p recording? If that is the case then if you are using less than 15% of your total CPU resources on your server then shouldn't you be able to move up to 720p? My Sage server (which is an i5-660 which runs at 3.33GHz and has a turbo boost to run faster) shouldn't that be able to handle 720p streaming?

[brainbone]

Originally Posted by wayner

Isn't the amount of data in a 720p recording about 6X the data in a 480p recording? If that is the case then if you are using less than 15% of your total CPU resources on your server then shouldn't you be able to move up to 720p? My Sage server (which is an i5-660 which runs at 3.33GHz and has a turbo boost to run faster) shouldn't that be able to handle 720p streaming?

The transcoding of 720p in realtime is less of a problem than ripping the rendered 720p video in realtime, in addition to the transcode.

Unlike just decoding a 720p h264 stream, and then re-encoding it, you also have the added inconvenience, and very time sensitive operation, of screen grabbing and buffering the rendered 720p frame before the next frame is rendered right over it. AFAIK, this "screen grab" is not a very efficient operation. It also greatly limits the amount of time you have to complete the operation.

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by brainbone

Unlike just decoding a 720p h264 stream, and then re-encoding it, you also have the added inconvenience, and very time sensitive operation, of screen grabbing and buffering the rendered 720p frame before the next frame is rendered right over it. AFAIK, this "screen grab" is not a very efficient operation. It also greatly limits the amount of time you have to complete the operation.

But surely that's something that you do in a single thread, isn't it? And that's probably something that hyperthreading would work pretty well with, so you might not need a full core, but just one thread of a core. I have practically no experience with this, but I also wouldn't think screen grabbing at 720p would be that much harder than screen grabbing at 480p. I don't know exactly how PlayOn is implemented on the back-end, but there's probably a decent chance they already screen grab more than 480p, because the virtual window they're playing back from might be bigger than 480p. And its my understanding that streaming HD video is almost always encoded at 24 or 30 fps, just like 480p material.

On the encoding side, this sounds like it might be a great use of the Intel QuickSync encoder on the new Sandy Bridge chips. A quad-core first-gen Sandy Bridge chip is almost certainly fast enough too, but maybe a QuickSync encoder would be more reliable if a PlayOn server does other tasks too. I'm not sure how dual cores would do.

Does anyone know if PlayOn already accesses HD video, but just converts? I'm pretty sure its set up to only go after SD video sources. I would think just going up to HD sources, but keeping SD encoding, would lead to a pretty big jump in quality without a huge increase in processing power.

[mkanet]

Playon uses ffmpeg code; same as sageTV transcoder.

Originally Posted by reggie14

But surely that's something that you do in a single thread, isn't it? And that's probably something that hyperthreading would work pretty well with, so you might not need a full core, but just one thread of a core. I have practically no experience with this, but I also wouldn't think screen grabbing at 720p would be that much harder than screen grabbing at 480p. I don't know exactly how PlayOn is implemented on the back-end, but there's probably a decent chance they already screen grab more than 480p, because the virtual window they're playing back from might be bigger than 480p. And its my understanding that streaming HD video is almost always encoded at 24 or 30 fps, just like 480p material.

On the encoding side, this sounds like it might be a great use of the Intel QuickSync encoder on the new Sandy Bridge chips. A quad-core first-gen Sandy Bridge chip is almost certainly fast enough too, but maybe a QuickSync encoder would be more reliable if a PlayOn server does other tasks too. I'm not sure how dual cores would do.

Does anyone know if PlayOn already accesses HD video, but just converts? I'm pretty sure its set up to only go after SD video sources. I would think just going up to HD sources, but keeping SD encoding, would lead to a pretty big jump in quality without a huge increase in processing power.

[brainbone]

Originally Posted by reggie14

I don't know exactly how PlayOn is implemented on the back-end, but there's probably a decent chance they already screen grab more than 480p, because the virtual window they're playing back from might be bigger than 480p. And its my understanding that streaming HD video is almost always encoded at 24 or 30 fps, just like 480p material.

To me, Playon always looked lower than 480P.

Fluid full motion screen grabbing is difficult to do even in SD. Boxee (not Box) had trouble doing this without re-encoding, but instead just grabbing, rescaling and displaying -- and AFAIK, hasn't accomplished HD using this method.

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by mkanet

Playon uses ffmpeg code; same as sageTV transcoder.

So, do you mean PlayOn is using the faster MPEG4-ASP/xvid codec, versus H.264? I don't think ffmpeg necessarily means MPEG4-ASP instead of H.264.

That would probably make sense, since it doesn't particular matter what size the files are. But my understanding is that the MPEG4-ASP encoder in ffmpeg doesn't scale well across cores. So, if you really need something fast, it might be that fast settings for x264 on a quad-core CPU or QuickSync on a Sandy Bridge becomes a better option. Though, probably not since you can't peg all four cores, but maybe. x264 actually becomes pretty fast if you use certain settings with it (which seems to be Handbrake's main reason for not looking to support CUDA or QuickSync encoders).

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by brainbone

To me, Playon always looked lower than 480P.

Fluid full motion screen grabbing is difficult to do even in SD. Boxee (not Box) had trouble doing this without re-encoding, but instead just grabbing, rescaling and displaying -- and AFAIK, hasn't accomplished HD using this method.

I know we're getting off topic here, but I agree PlayOn looks pretty bad. I think Netflix's SD videos are encoded pretty poorly, because they look pretty bad outside of PlayOn too. That's why Netflix support on clients is potentially interesting to me, although I don't think I'm ready to give up extenders.

I didn't think the Boxee software did screen grabbing. I thought it just had a special browser that was careful how it placed the Flash or Silverlight object. I thought the reason HD, and even SD video, is hard on it is that in general HD video in Silverlight and Flash is pretty bad to a lack of decent hardware acceleration, and generally bad decoders and upscalers (Flash's upscaler seems to be particularly CPU intensive, if I remember correctly).