I have a question for everyone that I haven't really been able to find a good answer to. I have looked through the wiki and the forums but just can't find anything. It is probably staring me in the face, but I am not seeing it.
Here is what I am running:
Server (Desktop): AMD Athlon XP 2400+, 1.5GB PC2100 SDRAM, OS Drive - ATA133 40GB, Recording Drive - SATA 320GB, Windows XP Home SP2
Client (Laptop): AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processor TK-57, 2GB DDR2, SATA 160GB Drive, Windows Vista Home Premium
Network: D-Link DI-524 Wireless Router, 802.11g, Capping at ~22Mb/s actual data transfer rate
The problem that I am having has to do with streaming to the client via wireless. I am having a very bad stuttering problem. Doing a little experimentation, I found that capping at the ~22Mb/s via streaming is not enough to prevent stuttering over wireless with GBPVR (live tv and recordings). I then tried to hardwire and go over the 100 Mb/s ethernet. When streaming, I am only seeing between 8-12 Mb/s the exact same stream. I disconnected the hardwire connection and tried streaming just a captured mpeg from the server, over wireless through Windows Media Player. I was only seeing 5-6 Mb/s over the wireless network!
The question is, what is going on with GBPVR and/or my system over the wireless network that would require that much more overhead than streaming a recorded MPEG over wireless through WMP?
Thanks in advance for the help! (Hope my explanation above makes sense.)
Not a biggie, but it was certainly odd: I recorded last night's "Sarah Connor" with pvrx2. About ten-minutes after the recording stopped, I played it through pvrx2, and the time indicator showed that it was a whopping 00:01:58 long. Actually the point from which it started playback was about 49-minutes into the show and played to the end. Now, I assume that the comskip tagged the first 49-minutes as commercials. But why would the indicator show only a two-minute recording length and play roughly ten-minuts? I whould have saved the files, but after watching SC through PDVD I just was not curious enough to look at an isolated occurance....
Im not sure if this problem is solveable but its worth a shot!
Sometimes when its cloudy the reception gets a a little annoying and really disrupts the picture, now i know this is down to the aerial as apposed to the software. However, in comparison to my flatmates tv, mine seems a lot more exagerated. Is there anything that can be done, ive tried a signal booster but that had no noticeable effects.
Posted by: Hairy - 2008-02-12, 11:04 AM - Forum: Wishlist
- No Replies
While messing around with the themes I worked on, there were a couple of GUI things I thought would have been cool.
The first was an animation specifically for the task images, something like the "Fade/ZoomThrough" for the SwitchScreen animation.
The second would be having two-tone colour in the OSD timeline. An opaque to be played colour and a more solid played colour. I know thats not exactly how the TimelineAvailable, TimelineNotAvailable, TimelineNotYetAvailable are designed to work but maybe with a little bit of jiggery pokery? It would cool to be able to change the "TimelinePositionIndicator" as well.
I had problems setting up more than one channel, PVRX2 showed only one and I could not add more channels. So I uninstalled gpbvr, deleted the gbpvr directory (with the old database) and installed gbpvr again.
With that fresh install of gbpvr 1.1.5 on a Vista I have configured everything like it shoud be (i think so): capture source is set up, all channels configured. I used SQLSypLite to check if the channels are set in the gbpvr.db3 file and they are set correctly. The mapping is correct too.
But: the PVRX2 (and the GBPVR too) do show only one channel and in Manual recordings it shows only this channel too. So, it seems to me that PVRX2 does not read the database or uses an old version of it. There are no error messages in the logs.
I installed the newest drivers from vistaview, and installed the patch for the vistaview, and gbpvr says there is no compatible hardware found. If I go back to the old nativeutilities.dll, it will find the card, but when I scan the channels I get nothing. I am assuming the cable should be hooked up to the atsc tuner? Am I doing something wrong?
Sub, for the recordings plugin. Can you look at allowing the Play button on a video to start playing.
Also Ctrl-K to delete a recording?
And finally - this one may be a long shot, add a new field to the recording screen with an 'X' for not watched (i.e. nothing or 0 in the playback_position table).
It's been a while since I've done anything with ZProcess, but necessity being the mother of doing your homework...
With this release, I fixed a couple of bugs but more importantly added a couple of cool features...
[SIZE="4"]Caching[/SIZE]
I've brought back caching of files. If you watch a movie, and it finishes transcoding, (you may not have even finished watching it yet !) your show is copied into a cache that will store files for a prescribed date. (eg. You can have the last 4 days worth of shows in cache...)
What this means is that when you watch the show again, ZProcess doesn't have to Transcode it, it's already transcoded.
And because the file size isn't changing, you can skip forward and back, and audio sync stays on track.
I have also included coded so that once the file is copied into cache, it is 'quickstream' fixed by VideoRedo (if you have it). That makes the video file in really good shape. Currently this feature works with VideoRedo in the default directory)
The Cache is automatically purged of shows.
Because so many people have had trouble with Audio sync and the wish for fast forwarding, this feature is the next best thing to a real fix. This workaround, allows for someone to start a video, pause it, and do something else (not with the PVR!) and then when they come back they simply, exit, and then restart the video. You will have a fully transcoded and synced video.
(That's the best I can do with the idea of spontaneous on-the-fly transcoding...)
[SIZE="4"]Auto CPU Priority Manager[/SIZE]
Next cool feature is a CPU Priority Manager. Basically, if the transcoding Framerate falls below a set level, the CPU priority will rise, so that it has more priority, less competition and therefore, more chance of doing it's job well.
I have seen a stubborn video start at 70 fps, within the first minute fall to 25 fps and with a little help from the CPU boost, climbed out of a hole. Then when it was stable, it lowered the Priority and all is well... It was a bit of a rollercoaster, but it kind of proves that a transcode is not a smooth sail. It slows down and speeds up, and for whatever reason, may need a bit of a boost...
This comes at a price though. When the Transcode jumps into Normal or Above Normal mode, you server's Desktop is gonna be SLOW!!!. That means if your doing you email on your server, and your kids watch a particularly tough video to transcode, you better just walk away before you pick the computer and throw it out the window. It will feel like it locked up, and your mouse will be slow, typing dead, Task Manager - forget it, (to try and troubleshoot) and everything will be crazy slow.
Except the GBPVR Recording Service (and MVP server) It seems that they work quite well when ZProcess steals some cpu cycles...
[SIZE="4"]Alternate 'Sorry' Video...[/SIZE]
And another cool thing. If you transcode fails immediately or within the first few seconds, ZProcess quickly copies a prexisting movie in place of the one that was supposed to be there. GB-PVR is happy it has a file, and doesn't go to the blue screen. The video I use is a 2 Mb video I produced, that simply says, "Sorry for the inconvenience but your show will be delayed. Try again in a few minutes..."
I like this so much better than having the MVP crash...
You will need to download my video separately, or grab your own MPG and name it ZProcess-Sorry.mpg and store it in the base of the Recordings folder (as set in GB-PVR config)
[SIZE="4"]Flashing Lights and stuff[/SIZE]
Then there are things like flashing lights and hiding windows. I tweaked a lot of logging so that it doesn't tear up you hard drive, reading and writing text files...
While the transcode is in progress, you can right click the tray icon and see a history of Frames Per Second, and see if there's a trend.. Eventually I can make a graph, but hey that's it for that one right now...
The log now tells you exactly how long it takes from the moment GB-PVR calls ZProcess to the first frame of video being created. This will help you adjust the PrePlay Delay. Eg; If it takes 2.7 secs for the first frame of video to be displayed, then I would set the preplay delay to about 8 (that's 5.5 secs plus 2.5 secs)
If you super fast system is still taking more than two seconds, that's a clear indication that a competing process is preventing ZProcess and your transcoder from running quickly...
[SIZE="4"]Select your Flavour of FFmpeg or MEncoder...[/SIZE]
I've made it so you can now select different versions of ffmpeg, so you can try things out.
[SIZE="4"]Really User Proofed...[/SIZE]
Recently I had the privilege of having a true blue 'user can break anything,' tester try to crash ZProcess. And I went through a lot of revisions to make it handle the oops this and oops that...
It's still not perfect, (and I suspect that it may be related to how GB-PVR and the MVP works too) but it's pretty darn stable...
[SIZE="4"]Next...[/SIZE]
Next update, I'll be finishing the dvr-ms conversion, and Center Cut Cropping as well as Zooming and Source aspect ratio detect using comskip (man that erik is brilliant)
In trying to find out why the TV Guide search yielded no results I learned the reason was that I am still using the Access database (gbpvr.mdb). I'm now on ver. 1.1.5 (think i upgraded in Nov). I've exported my recordings, backed up recordings-dump.xml, config.xml, and the database (.mdb). I found changedatabase.exe in the gbpvr directory.
If that doesn't work (some posts indicated it might not, or might not smoothly since I'm on the latest version), I guess I should do a complete uninstall/reinstall, right???
