SageTV Transcoded DVD Playback Issue

[John]

Let me start by saying, “AARRRRGGGG!!”  There.  Now that I feel slightly better, let me go back and explain the reason for my frustration…

I recently dug out my anime collection on DVD with the hopes that I could transcode it and place it on my Sage server for all in the house to view.  I fired up my trusty DVD Shrink / TMPGEnc XPress and did a quick x.264 in a AVI, copied it to the server and did a test on my Sage HD200 extender.  Now, the video played just fine except the progress bar only showed “0:01” and pressing FF or Rewind just resulted in the video re-starting from the beginning.  As I have grown fond of both the FF and Rewind “features”, I decided that this was just not adequate.

I figured I messed up a setting so I retried the transcode with various settings: MKV containers, original audio, mp3 audio, Xvid, Divx, re-sized resolution, original resolution, interlaced, de-interlaced, bla bla bla bla bla…..  Each time I got the same result.  Needless to say, I was getting quite frustrated.

I woke up the next morning and decided to try another encoding package.  “Perhaps that was my problem”, I thought.  So I bust out AutoMKV, a trial version of DVDFab 7, and AutoGK.  All generated files that exhibited the same issue.  Having shot yet another day, I was starting to wonder exactly how much time I really was saving by dumping the DVDs on the server.

Then it hit me.  Perhaps the AVIs are flawed in some way?  After some searching, I came up with DivFix++ which is supposed to scan and fix AVI issues.  No dice.  I even tried re-indexing the files and they still acted the same.

So, all of this wall of text later to say that I have no clue what is causing this issue.  I’m about a gnat’s eyelash from placing the first SageTV HD200 on the moon.  I know others have transcoded files from DVD for playback on their Sage systems, so I must be doing something fundamentally wrong.  What tool chains do you all use?  Where else might I look?

SageTV 7.0.12 on Linux w/ HD200 extender

[George L. Schmauch Jr.]

It’s probably not something as simple as this, but did you try beta 13 or 14 yet?

[John]

Not yet, although that is on my todo list.  The interesting thing is, other xvid/divx encoded avi’s work just fine, so I know the software is capable of operating properly.  I just wish I knew what was different about the 2 files.

[George L. Schmauch Jr.]

I assume you’ve tried playing the AVIs outside of SageTV and they work?

[phoneguyinpgh]

I don’t use SAGE so I’m not sure how relevant this will be to you, but I had a similar situation when ripping all my Star Trek episodes to my server for playback in MCE.  the time codes were incorrect, some showing just a few seconds, some a few min. some would play ok so long as you didn’t pause to stop the playback and try to resume.

After some googling I found a program called MPEG StreamClip.  There are several support packages that you might need to install to make the program work (this is in W7 by the way).  It fixed all the time codes perfectly (make sure you select “don’t skip any frames”).  Then I converted them to plain MPG files.  You can convert to other formats but I stuck with MPG for simplicity and speed.

Here’s is the link.  [url=http://www.squared5.com/]http://www.squared5.com/[/url]

[John]

[quote]I assume you’ve tried playing the AVIs outside of SageTV and they work?[/quote]

Yes, most of the AVI/MKV combinations that I tried played in VLC or WMP just fine including the ability to seek anywhere within the file.

[quote]After some googling I found a program called MPEG StreamClip.  There are several support packages that you might need to install to make the program work (this is in W7 by the way).  It fixed all the time codes perfectly (make sure you select “don’t skip any frames”).  Then I converted them to plain MPG files.  You can convert to other formats but I stuck with MPG for simplicity and speed. [/quote]

I will certainly give that a try.  I agree that it seems like somehow the indexing of the files are getting screwed up.

I wonder if I have a codec install issue?

[George L. Schmauch Jr.]

I think I’m on board with phoneguy, too.  If that doesn’t work and you think it’s a codec issue, PM me and I’ll run one through my SageTV V6 setup in Windows.

[John]

I tried running MPEG StreamClip (Once I saw it I recognized it from a few years ago) using the “Copy to MPG” and that played just fine in Sage.  Unfortunately, the file size is still huge.  Using the “Convert to AVI” feature resulted in another file that doesn’t work.

Today I’m going to try to transcode using my laptop.  It seems W7 must have eaten a codec or 2.  Although, it’s interesting that it would fail with both MKV and AVI containers as well as Xvid, Divx, and h.264 encodings.

What containers/codecs do people successfully use in Sagetv or do most simply use DVD ISOs/MPEG2 dumps?

[phoneguyinpgh]

[quote=”John”]
I tried running MPEG StreamClip (Once I saw it I recognized it from a few years ago) using the “Copy to MPG” and that played just fine in Sage.  Unfortunately, the file size is still huge.  Using the “Convert to AVI” feature resulted in another file that doesn’t work.
[/quote]

Glad it worked for at least MPGs.  That’s all I run for my WMC system.  I tried MPG-4 and MKV for a few files but it always resulted in artifacts that I felt were unacceptable.  I even tried a commercial version of Dvix encoder and it’s performance was less than acceptable so I stuck w/ the MPG because it works, it’s pretty much universal, decent free encoder programs and looks good (though uncompressed).  Even though the file sizes are huge I would just get another drive when one went on sale since regular HDD are getting so cheap.  If I hear of anything else I’ll try to drop it here.

[George L. Schmauch Jr.]

Due to my primarily HD content, I decided to use MKVs for everything I put on the server and it has been working quite well.  It took a while to figure out how to get everything just the way I wanted it (default flags, etc) and perfect (ha!) the process, but I’m pretty content now.

[phoneguyinpgh]

With the exception of recorded OTA TV, all my content is SD.  I haven’t been able to find an inexpensive way to rip HD discs that didn’t take forever to transcode.

[John]

I’ve had some time to try a few more things:

First, I noticed that an extender beta firmware update had been released, so I grabbed that.  Unfortunately, I still couldn’t seek properly in the transcoded files.

Second, I grabbed the latest Sagetv Beta (7.0.15) and gave that a go.  No change…

Third, I needed to refresh my Linux OS install on the server and took the opportunity to reorganize the plethora of hard drives that I seem to have acquired.  While it did fix some issues that have been nagging me for some time, the transcoded files still refused to seek properly.

On a whim, I decided to try the media browser mode of the HD200.  I’ve never used the HD200 in this mode, but I was pleasantly surprised to see it played the transcoded files without issue.  It showed the proper length and allowed full seek operations.

So, now the obvious question is; “What is different about the HD200 operating in the media browser mode vs the SageTV extender mode?”

I’m going to try clearing out the extender preferences file this evening and see if that changes anything.  I can’t imagine that it would, but I’m stating to grasp at straws.

[Anonymous]

John,
Have you submitted the suspect files to the SageTV team with a bug report?  they typically will try to address those kinds of things.

[Naylia]

Which HD200 firmware are you on? 0802 was a mess for me. It was the first time I’d had major issues with playback. The more recent 0811 solved all the issues caused by 0802.

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