SageTV Announcement

[mlbdude]

I noticed on the AVSForums posting that Jeff mentioned he was doing software encoding of the PCM audio to MPEG2 audio. I wonder how CPU intensive this is. Might now be good for those 600 Mhz users .

I hope this does not cause audio sync issues. I still have flashbacks of my Creative DVCR .

[stanger89]

Originally posted by mlbdude
I noticed on the AVSForums posting that Jeff mentioned he was doing software encoding of the PCM audio to MPEG2 audio. I wonder how CPU intensive this is. Might now be good for those 600 Mhz users .

DivX itself is not good for 600MHz users

[salsbst]

While CPU usage plays a role, I believe other factors like your video card play a larger role in VMR9 tearing.

For example, it makes no difference what CPU usage is on my box, I always get tearing with VMR9.

I should not have cluttered my question with all of the VMR9 information.

My real question: for similar quality levels (not bitrate levels), how do decoding of MPEG2 (with DXVA enabled), MPEG4 and DivX compare in CPU intensiveness?

My other question -- true or false: DXVA is of no use with MPEG4 and DivX.

[salsbst]

Originally posted by stanger89
DivX itself is not good for 600MHz users

In a client/server situation it might be ok. Cheap server (doing the encoding), beefy client. I have a less dramatic horsepower differential in my home, but it's there. Jeff, is there (will there be) an option to live with PCM audio and skip the software encoding?

A propos of nothing: USB2 makes me nervous, don't know why. I guess it's because I've not had the best of experiences with USB buses in the past.

[stanger89]

Originally posted by salsbst
I should not have cluttered my question with all of the VMR9 information.

My real question: for similar quality levels (not bitrate levels), how do decoding of MPEG2 (with DXVA enabled), MPEG4 and DivX compare in CPU intensiveness?

DivX is higher, probably much higher than DXVA MPEG-2 for most users.

My other question -- true or false: DXVA is of no use with MPEG4 and DivX.

Some Radeons (although only when using the DivX player IIRC), and the new Geforce 6 Series can accellerate DivX.

[jimbobuk]

This new card sounds great but the only issue for me would be that you'd no longer be able to burn DVDs of your recordings.. its very useful to get your recordings elsewhere and to give to friends who've missed a show... having said that i've been constantly dissapointed by the PQ of the PVR250 with respects to ghosting of multiple frames that are even visible on an interlaced device.. as such it drops the quality quite a lot below TRUE DVD, although most of the time it DOES look very nice on a tv..

Its a tough one that.. the space saving would be nice...

[Narflex]

jimbobuk,

There are DVD players that support playback of DivX DVDs (essentially DVD-ROM with a DivX AVI file on it). So burning is still an option.

others...

It records in interlaced format, just like with MPEG2.

Decoder selection is not supported currently since there's only one decoder for each that I'm aware of and it'll pick it by default. Deinterlacing is currently left to the decoder; the DivX decoder deinterlaces nicely but the MS MPEG4 one doesn't deinterlace that well. (and the MS MPEG4 decoder didn't want to connect to DScaler when I tried it quickly)

There will not be an option to do PCM audio. The CPU usage for MPEG audio compression is virtually unnoticable. And there are no audio/video sync problems like some will remember from the Creative card. The Plextor device hardware syncs the audio & video beforehand so this isn't an issue. Extensive testing confirms this (believe me....I was worried about nightmares of a/v sync coming back....that stuff'll really mess with your head).

And in answer to the first question...

YES, SageTV will automatically put recordings you schedule on the Plextor device if they're a Favorite or ManualRecording and DivX or MPEG4 is selected for it. There's also default quality settings on a per-encoder basis so if you've got a Hauppauge card you can set it to do MPEG 2 and then add a Plextor device to do DivX/MPEG4. Rock on.

EDIT: Oh yeah, the Plextor device uses a chip from WIS; and the same chip is on the PV-358T USB device made by Provideo which also functions with V2.1 according to my man Ian from down under.

[mightyt]

Originally posted by Narflex
YES, SageTV will automatically put recordings you schedule on the Plextor device if they're a Favorite or ManualRecording and DivX or MPEG4 is selected for it. There's also default quality settings on a per-encoder basis so if you've got a Hauppauge card you can set it to do MPEG 2 and then add a Plextor device to do DivX/MPEG4. Rock on.

That's exactly what I was after ... So, given you have both a Plextor and Hauppauge in your server, you can direct stuff you want MPEG4 or DivX to the Plextor and other MPEG2 stuff to the Hauppauge!! Very Cool ...

Thanks!, T.

[mightyt]

Originally posted by Opus4
With this property:
Almost all of the properties are listed on the SageTV Configuration page in this document: SageTV Configuration Properties.

- Andy

Not sure if that is what I was meaning ... If I have both cards and wanted to send show "A" to the Plextor and show "B" to the Happauge, could I do that???

Thanks T.

[stanger89]

Originally posted by Narflex
It records in interlaced format, just like with MPEG2.

Decoder selection is not supported currently since there's only one decoder for each that I'm aware of and it'll pick it by default. Deinterlacing is currently left to the decoder; the DivX decoder deinterlaces nicely but the MS MPEG4 one doesn't deinterlace that well. (and the MS MPEG4 decoder didn't want to connect to DScaler when I tried it quickly)

Well fortunately ffdshow registers itself as the default MPEG-4/DivX/Xvid decoder so hopefully it will work well to do the deinterlacing.

Jeff, how's the MPEG-2 compression compare to the 250?

[Opus4]

Originally posted by mightyt
Not sure if that is what I was meaning ... If I have both cards and wanted to send show "A" to the Plextor and show "B" to the Happauge, could I do that???

Don't know. From your other quote about what Jeff said, it sounds like you just specify the show to be divx. The property mentioned earlier just specifies which encoder to prefer using first if all else is equal.

We won't know other details until the new version Jeff mentioned is released.

- Andy

[mightyt]

Originally posted by mlbdude
Move is done. Hurricane Frances tore us a new one. Lost poer for 8 days .

The question of quality would come down to HD space I think. If I wanted the best quality I would go with the Hauppauge though.
Some people on AVSForums won't even use MPEG2 and still use RAW capture since MPEG2 is compressed as well.

However, I would still like to use both since on some shows that you record allot of (Simpsons, South Park) it would be nice to have smaller file sizes.

Thanks ... Hang in there; I hear for the most part Ivan is skirting you guys this time. Hope that stays true! Wow, no power for 8 days … major culture shock!

Yep, that's what I was hoping ... in my case to be able to have the best of both worlds if it's worth it. But I am also considering friends that are now considering doing Sage after talking with me about my experience ... Do I continue to recommend the Hauppauge 250, since it has worked very well for me or would I recommend the Plextor given they were going to start out with a one card server??

Thanks, T.

[mightyt]

Originally posted by Opus4
Don't know. From your other quote about what Jeff said, it sounds like you just specify the show to be divx. The property mentioned earlier just specifies which encoder to prefer using first if all else is equal.

We won't know other details until the new version Jeff mentioned is released.

- Andy

But ... But ... I wanna know now !!!

No prob ... This is interesting to me ... I know little about the DivX / MPEG4 options ... So, guess I need to go do some research somewhere ...

Thanks Andy ... T.

[stanger89]

Originally posted by mightyt
Plextor given they were going to start out with a one card server??

Thanks, T.

I'd say 250 now or wait for a few weeks to see how the Plextor goes over.

[Stobor]

Hmm never thought of this. I have a bunch of shows in sage that I'd like to keep and maintain the EPG data. Mostly cooking shows, the EPG data makes finding what I'm looking for in the recordings section fast and easy.

Could I just transcode those files to DivX to save room? I'm guessing there will be a string attached here but I can dream!

This would be very handy if so.