Aaron Ledger
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Aaron Ledger
Since you’ll be archiving to WHS, the drive size can be extremely small. Even 500GB is more than enough. The archiving typically occurs shortly after the show has recorded.
I have had good results with Hitachi 5K3000 and WD Green drives for recording. I’d go with whatever has the lower price and better warranty.
That sounds like a great system. For the tasks you’ve listed, you won’t require the Core i5. You could get away with a Core i3 or even a Pentium or Celeron. You might want to consider something like the i3-2100t as it has a bit better power/thermal characteristic. IMO, the stock HSF in the i3-2100 and i3-2100t (the T-variant has a thinner profile HSF) are both pretty quiet and you may find that you don’t really need to splurge on the Scythe. The stock HSF on the Core-i5 2500K is not so quiet.
Have you considered going with a low-profile chassis or even mini-ITX? Or are you going for something bigger to have more storage locally?
Storage drive( s ) and operating system are missing from your build list.
Which library are you referring to?
SDV = Switched Digital Video. It is a technology used by some cable companies to allow multiple channels to share the same bandwidth since not every channel is being watched all the time everywhere in the cable system. Using SDV, the subscriber requests that a channel be sent when tuning it. Due to the nature of CableCARD, this requires a SDV adapter which the cable provider must give to CableCARD subscribers. The SDV adapter is plugged into the CableCARD device via USB.
Hopefully, you’re on a cable system that doesn’t employ SDV since it requires you to just have one more thing laying around to hook up. You might be able to determine this by looking at a list we’ve been maintaining for various cable systems here.
That’s correct regarding the quad tuner. You can record four programs simultaneously (or record three and watch a fourth live).
I would not recommend encoding 24p content to 59.94 fps. This would be “hard telecine” and is rarely a good idea. Any device today is generally more than capable of handling the telecine requirement on demand. By this, I mean that your HTPC (or other decoding device) will decode the 24p file and then perform the telecine (2:3 pulldown) on the fly.
Telecine (or pulldown) judder is definitely noticeable for those that see it. Many viewers that have watched telecined TV and movies their entire lives may have become accustomed to the judder and so it just seems “normal.”
BTW, I should point out that in the board I recommended, I am not sure that the Intel board will send audio via DVI to HDMI adapter, so if HDMI audio is a requirement for you, you are probably better off with the ASUS or step up to an Intel DH67BL.
Quad Tuner simply means four tuners in the device. In other words, the device can tune four different cable channels simultaneously. This article may be helpful to you.
RE #1: Yes. You’ve got it correct. Regarding what happens with broadcast encoding of movies, believe it or not, ATSC allows broadcasters to send 720/24p and 1080/24p though I am unaware of any that actually do. Most 24p content (this includes movies and many TV shows) just telecine the content to 720/59.94 frames/sec. or 1080i/59.94 fields/sec. Technically, the 24p could also potentially be recovered via Inverse Telecine algorithm and played back properly at 24p though it is rarely implemented. WMC is only responding to the content the way most devices out there that deal with TV broadcasts do.
As a side note, while it is well-known that BD films are always 24p, DVDs are also almost all 24p as well. Some DVDs were authored with a “hard telecine”, but most just had MPEG flags that told the player to telecine. The “progressive” DVD players actually were capable of playing the DVD back at 24p and there are some software players on the PC that will allow this as well.
RE #2: Yes. MPC-HC is one such tool. It is actually an open-source software player. You can see just about all the details of the renderer when playing back in MPC-HC.
I was not suggesting to play the content back–merely to set the desktop refresh rate to 23hz to understand if the Real Cinema option is there. If you did try that and it didn’t work, perhaps the display requires YCbCr.
As for WMC, I have not tried to use it for 24p playback as I use external players for that content. I wouldn’t be surprised if WMC prevents it as it isn’t compatible with TV standards.
2:2 pulldown is what your TV can do in Real Cinema mode. It just means that for each frame, it displays the frame twice in 1/23.976 seconds. The final refresh rate of the display ends up being ~48Hz.
From what you describe, it sounds as if your PC’s refresh rate is not being set to 23Hz or 24Hz. You can perform a quick check by simply setting your desktop display refresh rate to 23Hz and observing that the Real Cinema option is enabled.
Did you try the scheduled task option to not perform the task unless idle? This possibly may work to prevent the task from occurring during a recording.
Personally, I think the slightly less expensive DH61BE board is a better choice due to the superior LAN interface, two additional 6Gb/s SATA ports and two USB 3.0. However, you would require a DVI to HDMI adapter if you need HDMI. An additional consideration in favor of the Intel board is that if you get a newer one, it will be compatible with the next-gen Intel Ivy Bridge processors. I am not sure about the Asus.
When looking at a test bitmap image, you’ll want to see all levels from 0 – 255. When looking at video, you will only want to see levels 16 – 235.
Newer Intel and AMD processors have integrated graphics functionality so that a separate graphics chip on the motherboard is not needed.
This is a good question and the answer gets somewhat involved and murky due to variations in source content and equipment used.
The first thing to understand is that all video on Blu-ray, TV, etc. is encoded as YCbCr. Because of this, all typical video devices (BD player, cable STB, etc.) all deal in YCbCr by default. For better or worse, PCs came along and have always been RGB. Video games being developed in PC-land are also RGB which leads to devices such as PS3, Xbox, etc. to also support RGB. Thanks to HDMI, we have an interface that supports both RGB and YCbCr and has given us this wonderful choice :p
Getting back to video, the ideal case is to leave it as YCbCr and never convert it to RGB because each time a conversion is made between color spaces, there is some error. This can compound itself with each conversion. When dealing with video in the Windows PC realm, it is converted to RGB whether it is wanted or not and various other processes may happen to the video depending on the application used. If converting back to YCbCr, that is potentially another conversion error, yet there are still times where it may be best. A sampling of cases where this may be true are the following:
1. You have a display calibrated to YCbCr video source and when feeding an RGB source, the decoding doesn’t match the YCbCr decoding. In other words, the display has some error inherent to the processing of the RGB space or treats RGB differently in some negative ways compared to YCbCr.
2. The display converts to YCbCr anyway for internal processing so it may be better to do this at the source. This is most likely impossible to know unless there is some inside knowledge to what is going on in the display.
3. Some AVRs may only play nice with YCbCr (or limited-range RGB) and truncate full-range RGB.
The major disadvantage to using YCbCr would be that full-range RGB source content (e.g. video games and bitmap photos) will be re-quantized to a smaller dynamic range (0-255 to 16-235). The same can be said for limited-range RGB. The other disadvantage would be when dealing with video in a case where a display will not convert RGB to YCbCr.
In the end, the major focus should be making sure that black/white levels are correct through some basic calibration. Try full-range RGB and YCbCr, calibrating for each and see what looks best to your eyes and works best with your other home theater equipment and source content. Look for things such as banding (non-smooth color and grayscale ramps). You obviously don’t want to see crushed blacks or washed out blacks which the simple calibration patterns can reveal. I know I haven’t given you a single answer to what is the best practice and that’s because I don’t believe there is a single answer to the question as “it depends.”
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