Mobile Web Streaming with Ipad

[chirpp]

I have used Sage for a while and completly love it! I also appreciate the hard work others put in to enhance this product!

I am trying to see why my Web interface/streaming has such poor quality on the ipad. Maybe it is just how it is, I am not sure. But it seems like I must be setting something wrong. I have mobile Web setup and working on home WiFi-N as well as through the firewall remotely. Both give same quality results. I have tried it on an iPad and iPhone 3Gs with both N and 3G. Oddly enough with iPhone 4 using WiFi (IOS 4.3.5) it looks nice, but stops randomly.

My issue is that the quality is pretty poor. I know at first it can start poor and get better after the video plays a bit. However, it seems like it never really gets to a nice looking quality. I have been recording a show on ABC, for example. I can also play the show from NBC's app on the iPad. That program looks awesome! My recorded program looks very pixalated and distorted.

My sage server was just rebuilt on a Intel Core Due 1.8 with 2gb ram. My hd is 800GB with really nothing on it but 5 recordings thus far. Windows 7 Enterprise.

I searched through the forum to see if there are settings to choose and I only really see basic port settings for the Jetty server.

Am I missing something?

[PiX64]

Try running some tests and watch the CPU usage and mem usage on your server while streaming is going on. The mobile webui and streaming does transcoding on the fly of your recordings. If u has say an 8GB 1080i ota recording, that's a lot to transcode on the fly and will certainly require a beefy system to keep up with realtime transcoding.

1) try converting the recordings using built in sage conversion before streaming to see if that helps
2) had over to the mobile webui thread and read through a bit. There are a lot of people that have similar issues with streaming. There are a lot of ideas on that thread that may helP u out.

[sic0048]

I'm no expert, but I think your results will be very dependent on two things:

1) The processing power of your server machine.
2) The network speed - especially the upload speed for non-local streaming. Most people don't pay a lot of attention to their upload speed and tend to focus only on the download speed.

Since you experience the same relative quality both locally and non-locally, I suspect your problems lie with the server processing power. Keep in mind that the machine is having to transcode the shows in real time. When you are streaming shows from ABC for example, those are not being transcoded in real time and therefore the only limitation is the network speed.

[chirpp]

Thanks so much for the replies!

I will run some tests and see how the computer preforms. I guess that does make sense that it will be doing alot of work "on the fly".

"1) try converting the recordings using built in sage conversion before streaming to see if that helps" : By this do you mean convert them to iPhone or Apple TV format or some other format? Then import and stream that file?

[PiX64]

Originally Posted by chirpp

Thanks so much for the replies!

I will run some tests and see how the computer preforms. I guess that does make sense that it will be doing alot of work "on the fly".

"1) try converting the recordings using built in sage conversion before streaming to see if that helps" : By this do you mean convert them to iPhone or Apple TV format or some other format? Then import and stream that file?

I would personally convert to the format of the device I will be watching on.

[Naylia]

If you use Sage Conversion to pre-convert the videos before traveling, do I have to do anything differnet on playback? Or will it know to play the converted alternative of the file?

[wayner]

Have you tried other similar apps like Air Video to see if they work any better?

[ccsmoke]

I rarely use this part of web moblie interface but I thought I would add some input. I am seeing same results over wifi n with mobile devices (ipad2, hp touch pad, ipod touch 4 gen). These are hd pvr ts files at high bit-rate, which certainly take a good connection as well as power. I question though, if safari offers hardware accleration on ios is being used on anything other than HTML 5. I know apps certainly do.

As far as converting them, I convert to appletv widescreen using web moble interface, and play excellent though appletvs and the mobile devices including the hp touchpad. No lip sync issues and good picture quality. I imported them into itunes and wi-fi sync them. Keeps track where you left off if you stop a video and other io's devices can pick up where you left off.

Air video plays max real time conversion with no problems with playback (1280x720 I think). I did encounter a bug though that effects IOs 5 /itunes. This would cause home sharing in itunes to disappear as well as syncing issues. I confirmed this with the developer. Itunes run alot of services, I do believe it is an issue with bonjour, specifically icloud authentication server. The only way to pull it out of that state is to disable itunes home sharing, connect each device and disable iclould as well as wi-fi sync, restart itunes, then enable home sharing and finally plugging in each device enabling wi-fi sync and icloud. (Server reboot, router reboot will not help) Hopefully apple will patch, icloud is a little buggy.


This is on a rock solid windows 64 bit 2.66 quad core 6GB ram with nvidia 560 with 1 HDPVR on 30/5 up line. Running speedtest is 36/5 off cisco docsis 3.0 as well as through a dlink router. Moblie devices came in around 28-32/5 except hp touch pad is little slower off dlink AP. No drop packet loss. This is running sage server, itunes server, and splashtop server (have air video disabled atm) feeding 3 HD200s and 3 appletvs and work very well together other than the 2 minor issues.