Client PC performance for US ATSC

[elbryyan]

I'm running fine on my 'host' pc that is set up in our living room that we use to record and watch shows for over the air ATSC broadcasts only and love it immensly. I am in the process experimenting with a client PC that is set up in our study for the fun of it and have run in to some performance problems. The specs on the client PC are as follows pentium 4 3ghz processor, 1 gb ram, nvidia 7600gs 256mb ram video, Nvidia purvideo decoder, cyberlink mux 5.0.137. The network is a 100mb wired. I know my client PC has the stuff to play the videos with no problems as it was used before when I just first started experimenting with GBPVR. I've set it up as both streming and file shareing with the file sharing having slightly better performance but the recordings will stutter about every 5 secs and live TV is unwatchable. The host pc is speced out in my signature. I've tried both when the host is idle and while watching tv/recordings. Just wondering if there are any tips on this type of setup. I wanted to see if this would work before committing to purchasing a dedicated client such as the popcorn hour. Has anybody else in the US been able to get this type of setup working? Does the host pc need to be beefier to suppor clients?

[sub]

High definition ATSC is known to not work for live tv over a client/server setup. I'll look into it for a future release.

[Deusxmachina]

What sub said is what I've been thinking of for all the "live ATSC via MVP" problems people have. I don't think it's a PC power problem at all but something else that makes the shows stop after five seconds. And now it sounds like it doesn't work even if a supercomputer was used for a client.

The host PC likely needs to be fairly beefy if the Popcorn Hour thing (never looked into one) works like an MVP where many files need to be converted on-the-fly by the host PC.

If you haven't already, you could try watching live ATSC with timeshifting enabled once you get ATSC recorded playback settled. Timeshifting nearly-live still didn't work well on my MVP, worked better than fully live, but maybe an actual computer would have better luck. I can watch recorded ATSC with the MVP, and so I'm sure you can too, but Live is the main problem.

If your recorded ATSC is stuttering, that can be fixed, somehow. I'd start by looking at the CPU usage on both when doing that, and then maybe the hard drives need defragmenting, or try a different video decoder, maybe the router has a bandwidth problem for some reason, etc.

[zed]

I watch ATSC HD recordings on a client box and it works fine. Live HD no-workie, tho, but if I want to watch live, I use the TV directly. I use file sharing over a 100M wired network. The client is fairly beefy but not excessively so...4000+ X2 with an ATI HD2600XT video card. I also use the Purevideo decoder but the MS mux (the mux only comes into play for recordings, tho, if I understand correctly). The 2600 does most of the work...cpu usage is around 15% but the gpu usage is pretty high (the ATI control center will show gpu usage). HD actually seems to work better than SD but it could be because the HD is better quality from the start. I recently upgraded the server but it was working fine with my former box that was a 3GHz P4 with a gig of ram...nothing special...I don't think it puts much of a load on the server. I think the load is more on the client...HD takes some grunt. My only advice would be to copy an HD file to the client and be sure it will play OK locally. If so, then look at the network and/or the server. For the 5 sec glitch, there may be something that hits the network every 5 sec...I believe the GB-PVR tray icon checks the server every so often...stop it and see if that helps.

[sub]

What sub said is what I've been thinking of for all the "live ATSC via MVP" problems people have.

This has never been possible of the MVP, and if anyone had ever asked about ATSC Live TV on the MVP, I've always told them the same thing. Its not possible. There never been any support for doing on the fly transcoding (to standard def MPEG2) for recordings that are still in progress (like you get with live tv).

If you want to do live tv on an MVP, the capture device you're using has to be producing a .mpg file containing standard definition MPEG2 video, with an MPEG1 Layer2 audio.

The host PC likely needs to be fairly beefy if the Popcorn Hour thing (never looked into one) works like an MVP where many files need to be converted on-the-fly by the host PC.

There is no transcoding support required for the Popcorn Hour - it plays .mpg/.avi/.mkv/.ts/etc files natively.

[Deusxmachina]

This has never been possible of the MVP, and if anyone had ever asked about ATSC Live TV on the MVP, I've always told them the same thing. Its not possible. There never been any support for doing on the fly transcoding (to standard def MPEG2) for recordings that are still in progress (live you get with live tv).

Right, but during some of the Live HD on MVP stuff there was curiosity about if it couldn't do it due to the server PC not being powerful enough or a problem with the MVP since it wasn't designed to do that anyway. This was the first I've heard of Live ATSC on a client not working regardless of what that client is.

[elbryyan]

I've done a little more testing and I've been able to get it working for .avi files that I've burned froma DVD as well as playing the dvd files from the host hard drive. The .mpg files that are recorded still are not watchable on the client and the network performance on the client was only up around 15% during that time. I'll have to do some more digging around to see if I can get better results.

[sub]

Right, but during some of the Live HD on MVP stuff there was curiosity about if it couldn't do it due to the server PC not being powerful enough or a problem with the MVP since it wasn't designed to do that anyway.

No, its not to do with how powerful the machine is.