HEVC (H.265) playback possible?

[jughead]

Hi, in the past I'd encoded several DVDs of TV shows to HEVC (H.265) in MKV containers. They play perfectly in VLC but now when I try to play them in SageTV I get the following error:

sage.PlaybackException: ERROR (-4,0x80004005): There was a problem rendering the video portion of the content for playback.

Undoubtedly this is either because I don't have the correct codec installed (I don't currently have any H.265 capable codec installed) or because SageTV can't play H.265 video, or BOTH.

Is sage capable of playing H.265 video and if so, I'm trying not to junk up my system with too many codecs so does anyone know a decent one to install to get this working? Thank you!

Windows 7, SageTV V9.1.5.683

[stuckless]

If you are using the Android MiniClient, then yes. If you are using full windows client with HEVC support, then maybe (looks like no). If HDX00 then no.

[trk2]

The short answer is no, you can't currently playback HEVC content on the windows sagetv client. You can however playback HEVC content using the sagetv Android miniclient assuming the android device can decode HEVC.

[jughead]

Thank you both. I'm using SageTV Client on a Windows 7 HTPC and the full client as a service on a Win7 server.

Darn, it sounds like it's not possible. Is this something that devs are thinking about adding in the future? It's one of those things that is really becoming bothersome for me. I hate having to leave the SageTV interface for anything. I even lock/unlock my front door and turn off lights using SageTV these days

[jughead]

Originally Posted by stuckless

If you are using full windows client with HEVC support, then maybe (looks like no).

What do you mean by "HEVC support"? I'd like to look into that further if it might be do-able. Thank you!

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by jughead

What do you mean by "HEVC support"? I'd like to look into that further if it might be do-able. Thank you!

Keep in mind I know very little about windows But I suspect that you would need to have the proper codecs installed to be able to play HEVC media. (Same is true for MPEG2 support ,etc)

The other thing is that I'm not sure of, is if SageTV client does anything special to play the files... I know for the server, it just passes the stream so there was very little for it do. Maybe the client does need to more in order to support this

[Tiki]

I have not tried to get HEVC working, but I think there are a few pieces that are needed.

First, Sage has to recognize the HEVC file type. I think changes were already made in v9 for this to allow the Android mini-client to play HEVC.
Then, you need an HEVC codec installed that Sage can access (probably LAV filters would handle this).
Then, you need a splitter in Sage that knows what to do with the HEVC file.

My guess is that the built-in Sage splitter won't know what to do with an HEVC file and you would need to find and install a third party splitter. I remember there were a lot of posts about doing this to support MKVs in Sage probably 7 or 8 years ago (people wanted to use the Matroska splitter). You had to edit something in the Windows registry to do it.

[jughead]

It works!! Confirmed that HEVC/H.265 in an MKV works on SageTV Client v9 in Windows 7

Thank you VERY much, your posts gave me a lot to go on and I very much appreciate it because I barely know what I'm doing and this has been a thorn in my side for quite some time.

For anyone else having this problem:

I installed LAV Video Filters 0.70.2 and LAV Splitter on my Client machine.

I set SageTV to Always use DirectShow for non-MPEG files.

I changed the registry setting EnableSageTVStreamDemux=1 to EnableSageTVStreamDemux=0 to force SageTV to use an external splitter. (this appeared twice in my registry so change both so you don't spend an hour trying to figure out why Sage is still using it's internal splitter like I did!)

I can confirm that when I play HEVC video the LAV Filter and the LAV splitter taskbar icons both pop up and the video plays properly.

Thanks!

[Tiki]

Glad to hear you got it working!
Have you done much testing to make sure it didn't break anything else?

Of course this won't work with the HDx00 extenders. That would require someone to update Sage transcoder to use a more recent version of FFMPEG (then the server could transcode on the fly if CPU is powerful enough).

[jughead]

Well, over the past several days I updated my server and client SageTV software and many plugins, changed my EPG to Schedules Direct, remapped my channels, updated my HDHomerun firmware, and finally fixed this HEVC issue so there was certainly a decent chance of breaking things but I tried playing several different types of videos and *knocks on wood* everything seems to be working as well or better than it did before I did have to fix ac3filter and switch weather plugins after updating but that was easy.

I'm now trying to determine if using the LAV filters or the MS ones for MPEG2/H.264 is better. I haven't really noticed a difference in very limited testing. Any general preference on those?

One thing I noticed after updating sage and my plugins is that two dependencies did not get updated when I updated all of the "primary" plugins. They are:

commons-io v 2.4 (no need to download directly)
Google GSON v 1.7.1 (dependency only)

Should I just ignore them or did something not update correctly? Seeing "update available" but not clicking it is giving me nerd anxiety, haha.

[BobPhoenix]

Have you tried LiveTV? I think that used to be a problem with an external splitter and SageTV. If not that then LiveTV and MPEG4 from Plextor PVR. Basically any video affected by the setting "Enable MPEG4 timeshifting".

[jughead]

Originally Posted by BobPhoenix

Have you tried LiveTV? I think that used to be a problem with an external splitter and SageTV. If not that then LiveTV and MPEG4 from Plextor PVR. Basically any video affected by the setting "Enable MPEG4 timeshifting".

Live TV is all good, better than ever, in fact. Timeshifting is working too using the cheap HDHR (MPEG2) and a HD-PVR (h.264 i think, .ts files).

I say better than ever because tuning to a live TV channel using the HDHR is MUCH faster now. Probably 1/3 the time it used to take. It was one of the first things I noticed and am still thrilled about it. Not sure if the tuning is faster on the HD-PVR too and can't test it right now and also don't know if it was updating the HDHR firmware, the splitter, using the LAV codec for everything, or updating SageTV and my plugins but I wasn't that far behind on anything. I might do some more testing later.

I'm also not noticing the macroblocking/black screen after ff/rew that lasted a few seconds when resuming playing certain files. This only happened once in a while depending on the file but I haven't noticed it once since the changes I made. It could be that I just haven't played one of those files but it would be a LONG lucky streak at this point.

"Enable MPEG4 timeshifting" is enabled, fyi. I do remember making some tweaks to my properties file dealing with MPEG4 in the past so if you try it and it's not working, I can see what those were.

*edit* also all files are starting playing faster, just snappier to start. no delay at all now when clicking play, not that i thought there was one but now they play more instantly and it is noticeable

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by Tiki

I have not tried to get HEVC working, but I think there are a few pieces that are needed.

First, Sage has to recognize the HEVC file type. I think changes were already made in v9 for this to allow the Android mini-client to play HEVC.
Then, you need an HEVC codec installed that Sage can access (probably LAV filters would handle this).
Then, you need a splitter in Sage that knows what to do with the HEVC file.

My guess is that the built-in Sage splitter won't know what to do with an HEVC file and you would need to find and install a third party splitter. I remember there were a lot of posts about doing this to support MKVs in Sage probably 7 or 8 years ago (people wanted to use the Matroska splitter). You had to edit something in the Windows registry to do it.

Sage will try to just pass the file off to directshow, so if you have the filters available, directshow's graph generation should work fine in sage. What you won't have is the ability for Sage to force a certain decoder, since it doesn't know the codec and has not setting for it.

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

Sage will try to just pass the file off to directshow, so if you have the filters available, directshow's graph generation should work fine in sage. What you won't have is the ability for Sage to force a certain decoder, since it doesn't know the codec and has not setting for it.

So are you saying an alternate splitter isn't needed?

[Beaker]

Thanks for posting your results, jughead. Following your steps I have achieved the same results as you. Well done!

[bigbill]

Is there any way to get my HD200 to work? Ive gotten a few shows in the HEVC format and they don't play. Just get a blank screen.

Hmm. Is there a way to use FFMPEG to transcode them to something that will play? I often use ffmpeg to transcode from mpeg2 to mp4 for OTA recorded shows that I will watch "someday", but not real soon, saves a huge amount of diskspace. Now if only i could use sagetv to convert them automatically... yes I know about the job scheduler, i just don't own it.

Best Regards, Bill

[wayner]

I think you are out of luck - try to get shows in h.264 instead. Or build a SageTV client PC - if you use the right components that will also give you 4K. Even if you can transcode you could never get 4K out of an extender.

Or get an Android TV device like a Shield or MiBox.

[bigbill]

Thanks for the quick response Wayner. I don't need 4k yet so I am going with ffmpeg in a attempt to transcode it back to h.264. Will see if that works.

BTW, how is the Shield remote? My MiBox remote really sucks to scroll thru lots of videos in a folder. Its sucked so much so had to create a large directory structure to make it easier to get to something that started with a T or S....

Update I was able to use FFMPEG to transcode them from h.265 to h.264 and my sagetv HD200 successfully played them.

Here is the command structure that worked. ffmpeg -i inputfile -map 0 -c:a copy -c:s copy -c:v libx264 output.mkv

Here is the loop that changed the 10 HEVC files back to h.264

FOR %%g IN (*.mkv) DO c:\cv\ffmpeg -n -i %%g -map 0 -c:a copy -c:s copy -c:v libx264 d:\Downloaded\%%~ng.mkv

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by bigbill

BTW, how is the Shield remote? My MiBox remote really sucks to scroll thru lots of videos in a folder. Its sucked so much so had to create a large directory structure to make it easier to get to something that started with a T or S....

Got to learn to use the long presses. Long press down is page down, long press up is page up, Long press right is skip fwd 2, long press left is skip back 2, etc.

[bigbill]

Cool, I will try that when we get back on the road in January.

I just reread the manual and it doesn't mention anything about long presses for the Options Wheel, only for the volume button. Is there a write up somewhere about other remote options not listed in the manual? I have used the right and left to skip forward and back, even figured out how to change the amount of skip. But it never seemed like i was getting a page down event when holding the button all the way down even for a long time.

Thanks!! -Bill