Recorder Market Is Unsettled Everywhere, Not Just USA/Canada Anymore - Page 5

As I noted above, I'm not really a fan of transcoding MPEG-2 into H.264. It takes way too much time. I would rather leave it like it is and burn to BluRay. On top of that, I leave the bitrate high. At the most I'll set the H.24 bit rate to be 70% of the MPEG-2 bitrate -- I don't want any loss in PQ. So that does not result in a huge savings of disk space. Not enough to justify the time.

I'll find out tomorrow what the file size difference is. If it's a considerable difference I might queue up a few shows at a time and let it run over night. I'm running out of disc space while waiting for HDD prices to come down again.

Make sure you play the encode and see what you think of the PQ for the bitrate you used. I tend to stay around 70% of the original MPEG-2 bitrate. For an SP recording on a DVDR that would be around 3000Kbps.

Overnight may not be enough time. My old PC I use as a media-PC has a 2.4GHz P-4 and 1 GB ram. I set up multiAVCHD to H.264/AVC encode 4 episodes of a TV series from the commercial disk to AVCHD. The bitrate was ~3200Kbps and was enough for the 4 episodes to fit on a DVD-R. It took 30 hr to run.

Feel free to suggest any other products to add to this chart, or other features. I picked the features that were important to me.

	Hauppauge	Hauppauge	AverMedia	AverMedia	AverMedia
	Colossus	1212 PVR	Game Capture C281	DarkCrystal HD C874	HD Capture Card C027
Type	PCIe	Ext USB	Standalone	Ext USB	PCIe
HDMI input	yes	no	no	no	yes
Component Input	shared*	yes	yes	yes	yes
Component Passthru	yes	yes	yes	yes	no
Composite/SVideo Input	shared* / no	yes / yes	no	yes / yes	yes /yes
Optical audio input/passthru	yes	yes	no	no	no
Bitrates	1Mb - 20Mb	1Mb - 13.5Mb	3Mb - 15Mb (3 settings)	6Mb - 10Mb	? Adjustable
Resolutions	480i 480p 720p 1080i	480i 480p 720p 1080i	480i 480p 720p 1080i	480i 480p 720p 1080i	480i 480p 720p 1080i
HD Encoding Formats	H.264	H.264	H.264	H.264	H.264 / MPEG2
SD Encoding Formats	H.264	H.264	H.264	H.264	H.264 / MPEG2
File Container Formats	avchd/.ts m2ts avi	avchd/ts m2ts avi	avi	avchd/.ts	.ts avi wmv mpg
Audio Encoding Format	ac3 2.0 5.1	ac3 2.0 5.1	mp3 2.0	?	?
Hardware/Software Encoding	hardware	hardware	hardware	hardware	software
Storage / Burning	PC / AVCHD DVD	PC / AVCHD DVD	INT/EXT HDD	PC / AVCHD DVD	PC / MPEG DVD
IR blaster	yes	yes	no	yes	no
Remote	yes	yes	yes	no	no

*shared means that in order to connect composite video cable, you must use the blue component input

Very nice table! Thanks for the work.

Please consider adding (BOLD Blue) Manufacturer Product LINKs to Line #2, as in my example below:

	Hauppauge	Hauppauge	AverMedia	AverMedia	AverMedia
	Colossus	1212 PVR	Game Capture C281	DarkCrystal HD C874	HD Capture Card C027
Type	PCIe	Ext USB	Standalone	Ext USB	PCIe

Thanks!

Here is the Hauppauge chart I referred to previously. For more detail on a particular board, go to the Hauppauge website.
There are just so many options and it's all modular. I'm sure it can get really confusing. You just have to sit down and define what you want to do. Then you can go searching for a device that does it. Decide to add more capability later and just pop in another device.

I had no problems whatsoever...everything was done in Excel first, and I just copied and pasted the cells directly into the table tags.

I forgot what you said in Post #56 and felt the need to apologize for my confusion, especially considering the length of your reply.


Is it going to be convenient having a desktop PC next to the Motorola DCX3400 STB?


+1


I started out with a Lifetime ($300) Philips 14 hour TiVo Series 1 ($125) back in the late 90s. I did SO MUCH research before I bought it that I imaged the 20GB HDD and replaced it with 2 80GB HDDs (200 hours! *AND* ~$400 IIRC) before I ever turned it on and let it connect to the Mother Ship. Then in ~2005, RadioShack was clearing out Lifetime ($300) ReplayTV 5040s (?$?) for $150. I bought one for me and one for my Dad. But, dear old Dad never saw it. Once I learned that they could network with one another *AND* a PC with multiple HDDs running the DVArchive app, I was in heaven.

Like Kelson and his ripped DVDs and BRs stored on PC HDDs and playable anywhere there's an Ethernet connection and TV, I was the same with regular TV shows. DVArchive has a Task Scheduler that can automatically d/l shows after a certain number of days. So, if I have a show set to keep 2 episodes, just before the 3rd airs, DVArchive will d/l the 1st (if I haven't already watched and deleted it). Until I needed ATSC/QAM tuners, I never would have seriously looked at DVDRs. I bought my Panasonic DMR-EZ-17 'Open Box' at Target for ~$100 just to 'Experiment'.

[Disclaimer: I *DID* buy a RadioShack Presidian DVD Recorder (no HDD) with NTSC-tuner on sale for ~$30 to transfer ~300-400 VHS tapes to DVD. Only did 2 so far. It must be a Funai product because the screens are the same as the 2160A! The 2160As with their HDDs are going to be much better suited to the task.]

A side note is recently my EZ-17 is getting a LOT of use using FR to put two 90 minute PBS episodes (Downton Abbey and Sherlock) onto one DVD while retaining full screen resolution (thanks to jjeff for that knowledge). One 'sad point' is that off-loading SD from the FiOS PVR has bars on the sides, so I recently got the 'Bright Idea' to record PBS @ HQ directly to the 2160A instead and then, after editing out the commercials, transfer that to the EZ-17 @ FR. Fantastic improvement!

Honestly, without a built-in program guide, I can't see how so many of you began AND continue to manually schedule shows by channel and time, like the old VCR days. I'm currently working on building a custom IR Blaster file for the ReplayTV 5XXX to allow it to change channels on my 2160A. The S-Video OUT from the 2160A records as FULL screen 16x9 Anamorphic on the 5XXXs and upping my recording speed from BASIC to MED keeps the SD quality.

Plus, the FAT+ and PBO can playback the MPG files from the DVArchive Server (they can't see the ReplayTV HDDs) - although they don't automatically 'Skip Commercials' like the 5XXXs.

Yep, Kelson does all the 'Legwork / Research' and then I buy the products when they go on sale.

'Clotting-Edge Technology' - LOW $$$ (vs 'Bleeding-Edge' - HIGH $$$) is a term I coined for how I approach it.

BTW, regarding this 'Nero Re-Encoding', have you done it yet? See Ken.F's current 'Experiment' and Kelson's post stating 30 hours on a P4 2.4GHz.

It was a 4 hour program and took 6 hours to complete. It ended up being 3:03 after the commercials were cut. I used the default settings in VideoReDo so I'm not sure what the bitrate was. I was still half asleep when I closed the stat screen first thing this morning. I should have written it all down before closing it. The video looks very good in Media Player. I'll see how it looks on my TV with Media Center tonight.

The MPEG-2 file is 19.8 GB and the H.264 file is 13.5 GB. Both files are the same length and have the commercials removed.

That's about a 30% size reduction, which I tend towards when I encode H.264. I recode SD MPEG-2 to H.264 for fun and to learn but not for keepers. I keep the compilations small so I can do the recode in a reasonable amount of time and burn the result to DVD-RW to test in players. I use a number of the highly-rated open-source encoders like ffmpeg and handbrake and just play with settings to see the resulting PQ. You can specify bitrate, encoding "speed" and 1-pass or 2-pass. All these effect the PQ. To be honest, I have not been pleased with the PQ of any 1-pass SD encodes so I'm pretty much done with them. When I play them back to back with the original SD MPEG-2 they clearly look inferior and I get a lot of A/V synch problems. I use my old XP machine for this instead of my i7 box because I have the XP box set up as multiple XP partitions for experimenting. I can blow away a partition and reload a fresh OS image any time I clutter it up with installing multiple tools for testing. The downside is that the XP box is much slower at encoding.

I'm about to set up multiAVCHD to do some single title encodes (one 40 min episode) from the commercial DVD where I use the highest-quality, 2-pass mode available (lowest speed) and just vary the bitrate. The bitrate of the original SD MPEG-2 is ~6000Kbps. I'm going to start H.264 encoding at 6000Kbps and work my way down to 4200Kbps (70%) in steps of 600Kbps. I expect these 4 encodes will take the weekend on that XP box.

If I still don't see picture quality that is equal to the original SD MPEG-2 on my 50" plasma, then I'm pretty much done with the notion of recoding SD MPEG-2 to H.264 and I'll just keep doing what I have been doing which is burning the SD MPEG-2 to BD-R and just being happy with ability to put 5xDVD-R on one disk. I absolutely refuse to compromise PQ on any keepers -- if I can notice it, it's unacceptable.

Then the next experiments will be recoding of HD MPEG-2 to H.264. I'll use a TiVo recording for that. Those files are 5GB for a 1 hr show with original bitrates of ~15Mbps. Recoding one of those may take days on my XP box.

30% makes sense. I just checked the default setting in VideoReDo. It is set at 70% for MPEG-2 > H.264 .wtv so that's what it must have been for this recode.

The H.264 recording looks just as good as the original MPEG-2 on my 32" Samsung. I don't have a long enough HDMI cable to connect the PC to my 50" plasma.

I'm recoding the same program right now at 70% and keeping it MPEG-2. That might help save some space without taking all night.

Edit: It only took 23 minutes to recode this time but the file size is the same 19.8 GB.

Did you steal my post? Because those sound like the words directly out of my mouth. +1000

The lack of a useful, clickable, searchable guide system I believe is the main reason that HDD/DVD recorders did not take much of a foothold here in the US. We are a lazy group, and any perceived lack of convenience will be dismissed out of hand.

That said, I am actively keeping up with the technology trends (as evidenced in this thread and the other sticky thread) on the outside chance that I need to switch paradigms in a hurry.

I just may have to download the trial version of the H.264 version of Video Redo and give it a try if these 2-pass encodes are not satisfying.

I would not say a lack, but rather manufacturers inability to implement one properly -- other than Panasonic. I gave up my VCR and bought my Panasonic E85 in early 2005 for OTA and loved the TVGOS feature for scheduling. I never set manual timers. It worked like a swiss watch -- the time was never wrong, I always had 7 days and scheduling was a click-n-go breeze. I had some issues with missed recordings after a year, but that was traced to a failing HDD in the E85. After I replaced it the unit ran like a clock until I retired it for a TiVo. From the E85 on, Panasonic HDD recorders all had excellent implementations of TVGOS -- until the music stopped.

Not at least until the second quarter when the supply has re-established and the prices are projected to come back to normal. I have an empty multi-bay enclosure just sitting and waiting for some 2TB drives. They have a ways to go before they get back down to $80.

I re-coded quite a few. Keepers and time shifters of broadcasts I find on the net.
Two points I need to make very clear.

1) So far I've only been experimenting with SD to SD conversions.

2) I re-code my stuff backwards from the other guys here discussing re-coding. I recode from MPEG-4 to MPEG-2 DVD-Video so my videos stay compatible with any DVD player that does on the fly PAL-NTSC conversions.

I find concerts that were broadcast outside of North America. Someone always records them and uploads them. This is just an extension of archiving broadcasts from my North American TV channels.

I find that the countries that are most likely to air concerts that I like are
1) UK
2) Germany
3) Brazil
4) Japan
5) Netherlands

If they originally aired with reasonable quality, meaning a reasonable broadcast bit-rate and a reasonable source and they get uploaded by some hobbyist in MPEG-4 DivX or MPEG-4 XviD formats at 1.4 gig per hour (2-h concert @ 2.8 gig) I re-code them back to MPEG-2 DVD-Video using a 2-pass VBR using a 4.7 gig DVDr - they look as good as if I recorded the concert from cable using my stand-alone RDR-HX780. More folks overseas tend to upload the concerts using only 700 megs per hour and even those concerts look reasonable but not as good of course.

Oh, the time it takes to recode MPEG-4 to MPEG-2 Standard Def using my dual core AMD 2.7GHZ per core - using 2-pass VBR (the slower better quality) takes about real-time for the recode not including the burn. One-pass VBR takes about half as long as real-time. I thought this was very slow but listening to Kelson recoding HD from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 I see takes a lot longer.

I don't own a laptop so even if I get the Hauppauge 1212, it will need to be connected to a desktop.

+1

"Lack" works when I also used the "useful" adjective. Lack, as in lacking usefulness (regardless of reason), not lack as in missing.

I always set my timers manually as nothing I own has a guide at all so never missed it. Even when I was using CWEPG I would just download the schedule about once a week then look over the listing and manually add the ones it picked from my favorites and override the mistakes or ones I hadn't seen yet that were reruns.
Using the MCE interface is pretty nice so I've been letting it do the work and just check that it appears all my season passes and one offs are actually getting scheduled and recorded.
It kinda sounds like the jokes about young people not knowing what to do with a rotary dial phone when they see one
I don't have a problem setting anything manually but if I find a reliable automatic way to do it I'm going to happily use it and save myself some time. The other nice thing is most of the scheduler programs actually pick up on it when they play the lets start early or end late crap so you don't miss part of you favorite show because you set your timer to do weekly without any padding, which many times you can't do with only 1 tuner and back to back shows on different channels.

My wife reminds me "Liars don't go to heaven." You are not the only one who hated TVGOS. It got in my way; had to go to extra effort to get rid of it. Maybe I just never learned to use it. Manual entry worked, including PRENAME (Magnavox finally caught on) and REFRESH (E100H). My recording is our own production of the weekly church service plus seasonal specials, OTA Public Television, Sky Angel and now GloryStar satellite. I don't know, maybe these offer TVGOS; I've just never bothered to learn to use it.

I also loved the precision and predictability of DOS. With these new GUI',s I never know when it's going to jump in and "help" me out. I must confess though, Windows has brought uniformity to the user interface. Under DOS, every programmer chose his own.

Well I certainly don't agree that TVGOS lacked usefulness. I loved it, at the time. It made my DVD recorder so much more useful than the VCRs it replaced and made it an integral part of our TV viewing experience. Don't confuse a bad implementation on certain hardware platforms with a lack of utility of the whole service. Panasonic did it right. Whether other manufacturers did or didn't is irrelevant to the utility of TVGOS. If you owned a Panasonic DVDR you got a well integrated EPG. One button push and the 7-day guide comes up showing me the line-up and what I have scheduled to record. Highlight and click to set a recording; another click to specify frequency; recordings automatically dated and titled -- what's not to like. The disappearance of analog TVGOS from OTA when the DTV switchover was triggered caused me to spend 6 months recording through a CECB and having to schedule all recordings manually and with no automatic titling. After 5 yr of TVGOS EPG scheduling, 6 months of manual was about all I could tolerate and was one of the reasons I put my E85 on the shelf and bought a TiVo instead of a digital-tuner funai without an EPG. Of course, TiVo takes guide scheduling to a whole new level of usefulness. So while people are wondering today what to do when DVD recorders are soon discontinued, I guess I crossed that bridge 3 yr ago with the overnight demise of TVGOS enabled recorders.

Of course for some people this is just one area of change that they resist and just want a box that functions as a digital VCR. For those people the funai recorders are perfect.

Toshiba did it right, too. The TVGOS on my pair of RD-XS35s still works flawlessly to this day, off an analog cable feed (Videotron).

Sadly, I hardly ever watch SD anymore, and now I record through my HTPC's WMC EPG in HD.

Yeah, I would imagine with you being as big a Pioneer fan as you are that those disaster models with TVGOS didn't sit well with you. I remember those days here in AVS-land where just about every other post was from someone with a TVGOS/Pioneer screaming how much it sucked. They kept trying to blame TVGOS for the problems, but then the Panasonic guys would chime in with "it works fine for us, now as it always has". Those were some bad times on the board.

Just ran across this on the Avermedia website, looks interesting:
http://www.avermedia.com/Product/Pro...d=563&device=4

Looks like it was just announced it so am curious when it will be available (or even if it will here in the states) and cost.

Be careful of what you wish for. Setting up MediaPortal could turn into a career for someone. It is definitely not what I would call an easy option for someone moving from a stand-alone DVDR who expects the same convenience -- even if they are technically astute with software.

The problem with most open-source software is that it is written by geeks, for geeks. Documentation for setup is almost always lacking in basic details because geeks would already know this stuff. This is very problematic because so much open-source software builds upon other OSS tools that have to be installed separately -- but most geeks already have them installed so they take it for granted. Starting from a clean Win-XP SP-3 partition, I spent 4 evenings trying to get MediaPortal to work with the HD Homerun and just flat-out failed. I searched through the wiki and forums after I installed it looking for "what other" pieces I was missing. You never find them all at once, you get them bits at a time -- i.e. most people don't realize Win-XP doesn't have a codec for DD/5.1 because some software they install down the line has one and does the job. When you start with a clean partition you have nothing and have to go looking for what you need -- assuming you know what you need.

That's one of the reasons to buy the DVR software. You are paying someone else to package everything you need into a single install package and it is their business to make it work for you. If SnapStream BeyondTV wasn't $100 I would have jumped on it immediately after flushing the MediaPortal partition. As it was, I gave Next-PVR a shot before going to BeyondTV.

Next-PVR distinguishes itself in that it is simpler than MediaPortal and has a decent wiki for configuration and use -- although it is simple enough that playing with it is more than enough to learn it's use. But of course it doesn't "work" after you install it on a clean partition because you don't have everything else you need -- surprise. Once you search around the forum you find a nice support post with links to fixes that need to be installed and you get a link to a codec pack that someone has put together with all the codecs needed. You also find there is little information on setting it up with the HD Homerun (or any TV card for that matter) but in that small reservoir you discover you need to punch holes in the Windows firewall for certain Next-PVR modules and some non-obvious settings for the HD Homerun configuration app. This one only took me a day and a half to get up and running, but it does work.

The HD Homerun pulls in 37 ATSC channels which is way more than I remember the last time I did a channel scan on a piece of equipment about 2-3 yr ago. Apparently more channels have popped up. Next-PVR uses PSIP for a basic free guide which is not too bad in the Philly area -- I get about 18 hr of info. If you want a better guide you have to pay for it. It has direct support for a Schedules Direct guide for $25/yr; you can also get a 2 month sub for only $6 to try it out. For now I'll stick with PSIP until I know I want to stick with Next-PVR. Scheduling a recording was pretty easy, just the usual point and click in the guide. As far as I can tell, it uses name-based recording, has provision for setting season-pass style recurring recordings, can skip repeats and has a search function. Have not played with all these yet to put it through the paces. Of course it has provision for watching/pausing live TV and recordings DVR style and can be controlled by a standard WMC remote -- but that was never my intended purpose so I won't be playing with any of that.

I scheduled and successfully recorded 5 programs last night from both tuners on the HD Homerun. The recording format is just what I expected -- it spools the DTV .ts transport stream. You can do just about anything with .ts files. For the optical disk-burners you can pull .ts files into multiAVCHD and author/burn them to a BluRay disk or an AVCHD formatted DVD-R/DL. For the networked media people, .ts files are directly playable on most media players including the WD Live players. I downloaded a couple open-source apps to play with that convert .ts to .mpg and clip out commercials if desired. Personally, I want to see if my TiVo will play a .ts file. If not I'll convert to .mpg and see if that works (TiVo plays .mpg made from it's own recordings so I'm hopeful). Last option is just store it on the NAS and use the WD Live for playback. I should mention here that everything is in the original MPEG-2 encoding just as it comes to you OTA -- there is no re-encoding to H.264 involved during recording; I prefer that. And of course, these recording are all HD/5.1.

After I've played with Next-PVR for a bit, I'm going to install Snapstream BeyondTV on a separate clean XP partition and see how they do. Unless something about it knocks my socks off, I probably won't buy it myself since it appears Next-PVR will satisfy my intended need (as an overflow recorder to supplement my TiVo). I'm curious to see how good a job SnapStream does with the install and setup to get the more mainstream user functional. After I get fully comfortable with Next-PVR and have some usage time under my belt, I'll probably start a thread for it here.

Bottom line is setting up a media-PC is not for the faint of heart or those seeking the "plug it in and use it" convenience of a video appliance like a stand-alone DVDR. By the time you add up all the hardware/software costs and the time you'll spend learning about things you shouldn't need to care about, you might be better off just buying a lifetime-TiVo.

Yep. in my case I already have everything I need to at least now call my box a media PC so I went the route I did. If I had to buy everything from scratch I think I'd be out at least 500 bucks just to build a workable HTPC, then there's the cost of whatever tuner you decide on if you need something special like cable card support.
I'm not sure how portable the files a Tivo makes are but from what I'm hearing it's not as locked down as I thought so the main obstacle is paying for a unit and lifetime sub.
For me the Prime is great as I don't have the money to plunk down on a Tivo and lifetime for now but I did have enough to buy a prime and get a card and get everything setup for my cable and system already in place.
Think about your needs and wants, and the upfront cost, before you jump in or you could be going nuts AND spending a bunch of extra money you hadn't counted on.

Software is often over looked. Good editing/authoring software is not free. I was in a similar boat. I had a spare old PC on hand after I bought a new one so I decided to play at making it a media-PC for just the cost of the HD Homerun (thanks again for making me aware of it). No way would I do this for my primary unit, it is strictly for secondary or overflow recording.

As far as TiVo, anything OTA or not copy-protected by the cable company can be transferred over the network to a PC as a standard HD/5.1 MPEG-2 .mpg file. You can author and burn as you wish.

For others reading this, the reason I went with the HD Homerun and not a Hauppauge TV tuner card is because the location of my media-PC is nowhere near an antenna outlet. The HD Homerun is a really small box that sits out of the way in the back of my equipment rack in the family room. It pulls an antenna tap from the powered splitter that feeds the TV, TiVo and AVR and plugs into the ethernet switch to connect to the house network.

Thanks for sharing, Kelson. I agree NextPVR is pretty good (and free). I've got it installed and it's relatively easy to understand.

I also have WinTV v.7, a free program from Hauppauge. I'd say it's a bit better even than NPVR, so you might want to give it a try. I use it with a Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1800 tuner card, so I can't vouch for how it works with non-Hauppauge devices.

In truth, I rarely use either of these programs, since WMC serves me just fine as an HD PVR with EPG.

Thank you, Kelson, for taking the plunge and reporting back your results!