alternatives to Sage to consider

[Evil_Attorney]

Originally Posted by stanger89

1080i might not be that bad, but I've still got a good bit of 480i (TV on DVD) content that will not likely ever see the light of Blu-ray, and it just can't handle that at all.



Or a Radiance

My problem is mostly animated content, I've even played with transcoding to 1080p with AVISynth/TFM and some other filters tuned to the content. It's aggressive enough settings that it runs at about 10fps on my i7 920, but even that doesn't do as well as my Radiance. I suppose I could try YADIF, but this all seems like a lot of trouble/effort to get around a limitation of a source device when I've already got hardware that can do a great job anyway.

I don't think you can ever fix that issue. I had several early seasons of Futurama on DVD that I converted over. But no matter what I did, I saw the occasional interlace artifacts. I saw these artifacts at the same locations every time, no matter what I did. I ultimately settled on a straight DVD rip to preserve quality, but I also tried just about every Handbrake deinterlace/decomb setting possible.

Finally, I sent some clips to my friend who is a video editor for NBC. He said that SD material was almost always mastered from its interlaced version and that errors can be introduced when deinterlacing and or if the telecine pattern is messed up. Whatever it is, in my Futurama discs and my ATHF discs, the errors are clearly in the source files and the artifacts can't be removed. This site has some discussion of the issues with regard to Futurama: http://www.pagetable.com/?p=484

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Too bad it (or at least OpenELEC on my i7 3770s/HD4000 machine) does an absolutely awful job deinterlacing.

I'm willing to be it is an OpenELEC/Intel driver issue. There are similar issues with AMD hardware. OpenELEC seems to prefer nVidia hardware.

[stanger89]

Honestly, with my HD300's native output switching I haven't had much interest in fiddling with it. I did try some settings but I no longer remember what they were, just that they didn't help.

Originally Posted by Evil_Attorney

I don't think you can ever fix that issue. I had several early seasons of Futurama on DVD that I converted over. But no matter what I did, I saw the occasional interlace artifacts. I saw these artifacts at the same locations every time, no matter what I did. I ultimately settled on a straight DVD rip to preserve quality, but I also tried just about every Handbrake deinterlace/decomb setting possible.

Finally, I sent some clips to my friend who is a video editor for NBC. He said that SD material was almost always mastered from its interlaced version and that errors can be introduced when deinterlacing and or if the telecine pattern is messed up. Whatever it is, in my Futurama discs and my ATHF discs, the errors are clearly in the source files and the artifacts can't be removed. This site has some discussion of the issues with regard to Futurama: http://www.pagetable.com/?p=484

Sounds like you've got a case of field blending, I've seen references to removing that via AVISynth but never tried it myself.

I've got something different, (well I've seen that too), I can handle mine (the Radiance can just fine) but getting any software to handle it has been, how should I say, futile.

Originally Posted by panteragstk

I'm willing to be it is an OpenELEC/Intel driver issue. There are similar issues with AMD hardware. OpenELEC seems to prefer nVidia hardware.

Yeah, the Intel hardware probably doesn't help.

[Skybolt]

Originally Posted by panteragstk

... OpenELEC seems to prefer nVidia hardware.

I have a Zotac mini running the nVidia build and it works real nice. I just don't use it much. But in testing it played back a direct rip to MKV of the Avengers BD perfectly. No skips, artifact etc. The chipset is ION 2nd gen.

[Evil_Attorney]

Yea, Nvidia is the way to go for Openelec. The biggest downside to AMD Fusion systems is that Openelec won't bitstream with them. Apparently AMD doesn't allow open source drivers for the bitstreaming. This is the main reason I installed Win 8 and then XBMC on my Fusion system, which does allow bitstreaming.

[Taddeusz]

Well, I ordered a Raspberry Pi Model B last night. Estimated shipping date is the 28th.

Need to figure out what to do about a remote. Whether to get a mini wireless keyboard or try to set up an IR receiver.

[LehighBri]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

Need to figure out what to do about a remote. Whether to get a mini wireless keyboard or try to set up an IR receiver.

Do you have a TV that supports HDMI CEC? If so, XBMC and rpi supports it and you could use your TV's remote to control XBMC on the rpi... (I do it on several TVs and it works great)

There's also an iOS app (and maybe Android?) that allows you to remotely control XBMC on any XBMC client, not just rpi.

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by LehighBri

Do you have a TV that supports HDMI CEC? If so, XBMC and rpi supports it and you could use your TV's remote to control XBMC on the rpi... (I do it on several TVs and it works great)

There's also an iOS app (and maybe Android?) that allows you to remotely control XBMC on any XBMC client, not just rpi.

No, the only HDMI TV we have is a cheapo Insignia that's now over 5 years old. Stupid thing also doesn't have an option to disable overscan for YUV video (vs RGB). Been a pain in my backside ever since SageTV started forcing the HD extenders to YUV mode when supported by the TV. One day we'll get a new TV. Hoping for a holiday bonus.

I was going to give both RaPlex and XBMC a try and see which one worked the best. I currently use Plex for mobile and remote access to my SageTV content. The only issue is that there is no commercial skipping.

On a PC I actually prefer Plex to Placeshifter because the latter can't ever seem to do color space conversion correctly (TV video is not in a standard RGB color space) and I always end up with a washed out picture. But that's a separate issue.

[Evil_Attorney]

Although I have WMC IR receiver for my XBMC box, I find myself frequently using the official XBMC remote app for the iPad. It's nice looking and very functional. You can send typical remote commands or just browse through movies/TV/music.

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by Evil_Attorney

Although I have WMC IR receiver for my XBMC box, I find myself frequently using the official XBMC remote app for the iPad. It's nice looking and very functional. You can send typical remote commands or just browse through movies/TV/music.

While I am fine with the remote app that won't fly with the wife or kids. Especially the wife.

[Taddeusz]

I got my Raspberry Pi on Saturday and started playing around with RasPlex only to realize I needed to buy MPEG2 and VC-1 licenses to do what I wanted. Those arrived this morning so when I got home I played some more.

Works great with progressive content but interlaced video doesn't get deinterlaced. I also seem to have issues playing my HDPVR recordings. Video plays slow and audio is out of sync. Any way to fix these issues?

Now that I have the codec licenses I'll give RaspBMC a serious try. I tried to install OpenElec but their Windows instructions are lacking and I could never get anything but the debug console to come up.

I didn't expect it to work out of the box like a Windows system. Would be nice to have something to replace the one Hauppauge extender our oldest daughter still uses.

[jrockow]

Originally Posted by nyplayer

I got this to work following this procedure. I am able to use cable card with Media Portal now.

1.Edit the settings for each CableCARD tuner (select, click "edit"...) - tick "CAM enabled and present for this card" and set "this card can decode..." to 1, then click save. For more information see -->here<--.
2.Go to the "scan" tab in the "general" section of TV Server configuration.
3.Change the SDT/VCT setting to roughly 60 seconds. You may need to increase this time if you find channels are missing or don't have proper names.
Scanning (Adding Channels)
1.Go to the scanning section for one of the CableCARD tuners. Each tuner is listed under the "TV Servers" ==> <your server name> section in the left hand pane of TV Server configuration.
2.Select "digital cable" as the tuning mode.
3.Click "scan for channels".
4.The scan may take up to 3 times as long as you set above in Configuration step 3 (SDT/VCT timeout).

I tried your suggestion but still having no luck.
Channel scan works OK, but DCR-2650 won't lock on and display any actual video. Tuner light blinks for a few seconds and then I get an "unknown error".
I'm suspecting it has to do with Comcast/DRM?
Which cable provider is working for you?

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by Wayneb

Pretty easy setup instructions for Openelec on Pi.
http://squirrelhosting.co.uk/hosting...-info.php?id=9

Ok, got that setup yesterday. Works much better than RasPlex and RaspBMC. My only problem is still deinterlacing. I've tried to do research on video deinterlacing on the Raspberry Pi and there doesn't seem to be a clear way to do it. Do I have to make sure my Pi has the latest firmware?

[LehighBri]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

Ok, got that setup yesterday. Works much better than RasPlex and RaspBMC. My only problem is still deinterlacing. I've tried to do research on video deinterlacing on the Raspberry Pi and there doesn't seem to be a clear way to do it. Do I have to make sure my Pi has the latest firmware?

You could certainly post a question in the XBMC or OpenELEC forums (or both), but while there may not be anything today, it looks like there might be some recent development activity going on here.

e.g. popcornmix is doing tons of dev on the rpi for XBMC and you can see some deinterlace activity here: https://github.com/popcornmix?tab=activity

[osx-addict]

Someone was asking (a few pages back) about peoples thoughts on NextPVR vs ArgusTV (among others).. I ran both of them about a year ago -- briefly.. At the time the XBMC was more bleeding edge and the WAF was poor so we ditched it..

However, I ran NextPVR first as the backend with XBMC as the front (as I recall) and it worked fine but we switched over to 4TheRecord (now ArgusTV) and the recording engine was top-notch -- more flexible than even Sage IMHO. I don't recall the specifics but it was really good and worked pretty well. However, I recall having issues with channel mappings at the time related to us using HdHomeRuns and SchedulesDirect (IIRC). Anyway, the issue at the time was to set a favorite it was painful using XBMC (if possible) as the front end was super new and certain features just weren't there.. I vaguely recall needing to setup recordings manually behind XBMC's back -- LOW on the WAF factor there!

Keep in mind that ArgusTV was just started about 1 year ago (late October) and seems like a great server product but the front-end is the weak link -- either mediaportal or XBMC.. As was summed up here, XBMC has good eye candy and support for watching pre-recorded shows but the live TV programming is really weak which is where MediaPortal shines I gather (never ran it myself)

[panteragstk]

So. I got board and set up the mediaportal tv server and xbmc just to see how things look. Setting up the tv server is horrid. I figured it out, but I don't like it. The XBMC interface for TV sucks. Can't say more than that. I've never really like XBMC all that much. There are just too many clicks to get to where you want. I also want to try the standard mediaportal interface, but haven't had the time yet.

[Texas-Hansen]

Was looking around for a thread to post my question and this one seemed appropriate. Have been using SageTV on my Windows Home Server (WHS version 1) for a few years now and have 2 HD200 extenders. The only thing I use Sage for is to play my movies ripped from DVDs that are stored on the WHS. The movies are all ripped to VOB. With my Sage HD200 extenders getting older and one now acting flaky, I thought I better start investigating what's out there as a good alternative. So, what is a good alternative to look at given my setup and given that I only use it for playback of ripped movies stored on the WHS?

Thanks!!!

[PiX64]

Originally Posted by Texas-Hansen

Was looking around for a thread to post my question and this one seemed appropriate. Have been using SageTV on my Windows Home Server (WHS version 1) for a few years now and have 2 HD200 extenders. The only thing I use Sage for is to play my movies ripped from DVDs that are stored on the WHS. The movies are all ripped to VOB. With my Sage HD200 extenders getting older and one now acting flaky, I thought I better start investigating what's out there as a good alternative. So, what is a good alternative to look at given my setup and given that I only use it for playback of ripped movies stored on the WHS?

Thanks!!!

What are you front end client requirements?

[Texas-Hansen]

Originally Posted by PiX64

What are you front end client requirements?

Something similar to the HD200 in terms of size and capabilities.

[stanger89]

Over in AVS's $20k+ forum there's a thread about high end media servers, and the "conensus" is that an HDI Dune player with MyMovies is about the best thing out there.