The Official R5000-HD Technical Status Discussion - Page 81

Michael,

Thanks for the compliment as well as the thorough information. Many users have commented on how well and reliably the Sage box works in the environment you have described.

I made the comment about playing back H.264 to Glimmie because I too have been frustrated with the various models that concentrated on the multitudes of formats becoming popular elsewhere but not so much for the US market. For once I was quite pleased with the "out of the box" experience so soon after introduction after the last several years of testing and playing with media players, I guess my enthusiasm got the best of me. I've not been a SageTV user, in fact I really dislike Media Center so my appreciation for that backend component was lacking.

I've been spending quite a bit of time on the eye candy aspect of the player with the user interface art and layout which gets a little closer to a DVD server market. After watching some movies ripped and converted down from Blu-Ray in what I consider low resolution (often 1280x720/24p or even lower) and ridiculous file sizes you can get these down to (some are as small as 4-8GB for the full movie) that simply blew away the quality of movies on Dish, I'm starting to rethink how to optimize my video library, but obviously this is not the right venue for that discussion.

IMO, the R5000 1080i H.264 film based files have been somewhat problematic to decode. AFAIK, the R5000 recordings are telecined from a 24p source, while Blu-Ray films are encoded for 1080 24p. For me, software decoding the 1080i R5000 files suffers in terms of PQ, but a good hardware decoder, like the HD200 or possibly the M6600N works much better with those files.

I think the comments about Dish HD quality compared to Blu-ray are 100% correct which is why my desire to archive much content these days has significantly decreased. That is not a knock against Dish its just the reality image quality of DBS/cable vs. blu-ray. That being said, there are still things that I occasionally record and like having the option of archiving. Currently, I am able to playback all of my Dish R5000 recordings with the PS3. While no where as complete as an option as the Tvix for supported formats or HD200 for integration into SageTV for scheduling, the PS3 does work well for R5000 Dish recordings.

Sorry, I haven't been getting informed of replies. Usually at the beginning, but not always. Soemtimes it gives device failure warnings, or halt detected. One thing is that the messages seem to be off by an hour. In other words, the sys msg comes up at 8 referring to a sow that failed to record at 7. This is only happening to my port 6969 device, other one seems to be okay. The box itself is working just fine, not sleeping or anything, sage/r5000 just won;t talk to it, no channel changes, etc.

The r5000 app on the defective one does show the buffering overflows at 11, and the meter is full. Can that have something to do with it? Again, the other box is just fine, as a matter of fact successfully recording right now, verified on my hd100 extender.

Are you getting perfect, split-second start/stop recording accuracy with 100% reliability on your R5000s that dont use port 6969? The non-6969 one never misses any recordings? Getting the buffer overflows should definitely not happen; especially of all your R5000s record the same kind of material and channels. Is the problematic R5000 exactly 60 minutes off when it's off? Does this happen in other times of the day too?

Bottom line, you need to see what's different between the unit that doesnt work right and the ones that does and what other things happen on that machine that affect that device only.

You might also want to compare your setup to someone else that has a rock solid setup. Maybe something I mention below might possibly help; or, give hope to people who may not have a completely solid setup yet.

I have 12 different highly active digital tuners powered by sageTV (4 of them are R5000s). The R000's are no different than any of my other tuners, they just work. With the latest driver update 3.1D under Vista 32, R5000 channel changes are so quick now, I can actually flip through the channels and channel surf (about a second or less delay). I could never do that before. What blows me away is I use this machine as my primary workstation; On an average day, I can easily have 6-7 recordings in the background while playing a fullscreen 3D intensive game with 5.1Dolby digital sound with a Skype VOIP webcam session in the background using my Bluetooth earpiece to my PC. The only time I reboot is for Critical MS updates. This machine has a full time we server too serving web-based ASP.NET pages using IIS 7 as well as SSH (which I use every day from work). With my 12mbit upstream speed, on my lunch break at work I use my Internet sageTV client to stream my R5000s for stuff like on-demand movies.

While I consider myself extremely lucky (knock on wood, I cant believe it myself), it's not by accident that everything just works. Well thought out segregated high performance disk subsystems and extremely popular Intel chipsets, and a Intel quadcore CPU are used (stuff like, 256GB Corsair SSD disk (with 128k cache) dedicated for OS/pagefile/temp/apps for insane read speeds - no heat or noise (Windows Vista SP2 loads in 11 seconds), multiple disks Raid 0 Samsung Spinpoint "Raid class" disks for TV recordings only; another separate disk subsystem for multimedia files (music, video collection, documents, faxes, voicemails, email, etc). Lately, I manipulated process priorities; which makes sense for a setup like this. Some people may strongly disagree with this (for stability concerns), but Ive been running all my network encoders with realtime priority (R5000HD.exe, DVBDream). sageTV/sageTVservice/explorer.exe at high priority and firefox at aboveaverage.

I'm kind of of superstitious, I just hope I didnt jinx myself! I just had to mentioned this to show people Vista32 SP2 + R5000 DVR app 3.1D can work just as good as the R000 developer(s) hoped on the right setup; maybe, even exceeding their expectations.

PS: I mentioned this before, but sometimes get the halt warning messages in sageTV, but for my tuners, the messagees are completely benign since all recordings start on time and end on time right no the dot.

Well, I just tore all the r5000 stuff out, including deleting the driver files from system32 and reinstalled. Now running 3.1d, drivers show version 6.0.0.110 4/9/09. Is that the latest driver version?

Yes. You also want to pay attention to the drivers on the same machine for other devices too; as, they can easily adversely affect your R5000 drivers/software. I would use the latest WHQL tested drivers from each device driver; making sure you dont have remnants of another other drivers (just like you did with the R5000).

Good luck!

To satisfy my curiosity, what data rates/file sizes do you see recording HD on Shaw Direct? Also, are these rates with/without null stripping? Thanks!

DSR Series

-Can we still use the satellites DVR capabilities of recording to the internal drive or are all recordings going to be sent out via the USB connection?

-Having a dual tuner box, are we still able to watch one channel and record another or does the R5000 have to change the viewing channel to record?

Thanks for any info...

I loaded 3.1d recently as well. Everything is working better than ever. very nice.

I have this issue now with FIOS on my two Motorola DCT2000 cable box R5000HDs where the cable boxes turn themselves off. This results in no channel changes when recordings start and wrong thing gets recorded. They used to stay on permanently. Is this a known software update by FIOS to the cable boxes perhaps?

It may shut itself off when there might be some sort of a firmware upgrade send by Fios, because I have seen this on a few occasions. However, 99% of the time, my DCT2000 stays on and I have no problems making my scheduled recordings. I'm using the Sage interface.

guho,

Have you tried using a precode? If you're using a version earlier than 3.1, you set it up in the config file. In 3.1 you do it through the GUI. You can see all the available codes you can send in the command line section of the support docs:

http://www.nextcomwireless.com/R5000/support.htm

R5000 support gave me the answer: if the outlet of the box is configured to switch along with the power state of the box, the software detects whether the box is on before a channel change. If not it will power on the box automatically.

Sorry I have been away on business. I am using compressed (no filler pkts).

AFter reading the above posts, I am starting to think I have a defective R5000. I cannot get my system to record properly for more than a couple days. It seems to start off fine when I power cycle my stb but then within a couple of days it is getting overflows and doing multi-part recordings and often doing that 35 times during a 30 minute show.

I also purchased a standalone USB card using the NEC chipset. I can't even get the driver to recognize the device when I hook it up to the USB card. It just hangs my entire system.

Greg

Satellite receivers appear to be much more demanding on the R5000/PC than cable boxes. I'm only speculating, but I wouldn't be surprised if the entire sat transponder is sent down the USB cable. That means your PC has to process all the channels on the transponder, not just the one you are recording. I've gotten three R5000s to work with Dish Network and 4DTV on the same machine with OTA and FTA tuners, but it has been quite a lot of hair pulling and much of what you describe. So your R5000 may be fine.

A few things that might help me help:

1. When you record the "best" HD channel, how many GB/hr does a typical program consume?

2. What does the R5000 window show in the "Rate (KB/s)" box when you are recording HD?

3. What other USB peripherals are connected to your machine?

4. What cluster size is set on your hard drive used for recording?

5. Do you have remuxer logging turned on? If so do you mind posting one with recording failures or sending me a copy?

6. What OS and revision level are you running?

7. What are the motherboard, CPU and memory configurations?

I've noticed lately that all the programs I've recorded off the Motorola DSR-922 via the R5000 and SageTV start very late. SageTV shows a red section on the record line for anywhere between 1 and 5 minutes, followed by the actual recording (which begins late). I watched the process this morning, and the problem appears to be the R5000 not changing channels and/or sending the data to SageTV. In this case, the recording was supposed to start at 8:00. At exactly 8:00, the record indicator on SageTV came on, and about 30 seconds later, the R5000 turned on the DSR922. It was not on the correct channel however, and it stayed on that (incorrect) channel for a couple of minutes. At 8:03, the R5000 sent the command to the DSR-922 to change channels, and the recording proceeded as it should have (albeit late).

The problem appears to be that the R5000 waits for a period of time before sending the channel change commands to the DSR-922, which causes the first several minutes of the recording to be missed. All settings are as recommended in the R5000 manual, and I'm running version 3.1c, SageTV 6.6.2.218.

Any ideas what the problem could be and how I could fix it?

- Ken

The other reason I am thinking my R5000 might be defective is that when I power on the STB, it takes over 5 minutes to become available. While the 5 minutes is happening, the lights on the front keep cycling. At first I thought it was because it was downloading a firmware update from StarChoice, but it does it every single time. The box also starts recording much better after doing that.


I am recording the movie network HD channel right now. I normally run with compression on, but I turned it off and told it to write 23 Mb/s. The Rate field as it is recording is showing 4911 KB/s. Basically, the resulting files are between 4 and 5 GB/hr.


See above: 4911 KB/s fairly consistently for HD shows. I should mention that I have the worst luck with SD recordings. HD recordings work most of the time and SD recordings work about 20% of the time.

I just tried to tune an SD channel, while I was watching Live TV of an HD channel and it failed to tune the channel. The Rate window is now showing 3400ish KB/s but it can't find the program.

This got me thinking and I am going to do a further test in a bit. I am wondering if the R5000 can only record and SD show if it hasn't already recorded an HD show. It seems that once it records an HD show, it can no longer tune an SD show. I will test that later today and get back to the group.



The only other USB device is a USB-UIRT. This machine is a fileserver / SageTV server and nothing else. I do have an Hauppauge PVR250 in the PCI slot, but that is the only other peripheral.



64k on both drives that might be recorded to.



I used to have it turned on but I can't figure out how to turn it on in the latest 3.1d version. Do you know how?

BTW, I did look at the recording log and it shows two parts of a recording and for both of them it shows no errors what so ever. It shows a duration of 47s, no failed transfers and no buffer overflows. For the second part of the show it shows 1m25s again no failures.


I am running windows xp sp3 all up to date according to windows update.


I am running a core i5, the Gigabyte P55-UD4P motherboard with 4 GB of ram. I am recording to one of two 500 GB SATA drives Seagate 7200.10 drives that are operating under SATA 3Gb/s mode.

The system should be able to handle the load. The CPU doesn't break a sweat when doing recording and I have done successful recording of two streams while streaming two streams to HD extenders. I often have 3 streams being played over GbE.

Any ideas are welcomed.

Greg

Greg, based on what youre saying, it definitely doesnt sound like your bitrate load (even with the null packets not stripped) isnt the issue. I know you probably dont want to hear this; since it's a PITA, but I have a feeling you most likely have a defective box. I have Comcast Cable; and, although not necessary, I still strip off the null packets using the "compressed" option in the DVR app. Average bitrate for me is 4-9mbps with the empty packets stripped off; which sounds like might be somewhat similar for other cableTV providers.

I had the same/similar issue with waiting 5 minutes or so for one of my old STBs to completely turn on after I had it modded with the R5000. I would either see a dash symbol "-" or a "D -" (something like that). If I remember right, I tried applying a force reset and force download; which didnt really help. I could still tune into channels; but had misc unreliability issues. I finally moved over the R5000 interface to a newer Motorola box and the problem went away. Currently, all my "unlike" R5000-based cable STB boxes behave the same way hooked up to the same PC.

Good luck, maybe someone else here might have other/further ideas.

I agree with Mike. A STB shouldn't take 5 mins to boot from a cold start. I gather this behavior is new right?

Has anyone been interested in reverse engineering the R5000 or more specifically figuring out how it works?

Greg - I'm inclined to agree with the others that your STB/dish may have issues outside the R5000 domain. The way R5000s are wired in makes them extremely unlikely to cause the power on problems you are experiencing.

That doesn't exclude the R5000 from causing other problems, but a malfunctioning STB and/or something wrong in your reception path could result in a transport stream with a lot of errors. From personal experience I can say satellite STBs are designed to cope with this condition and do a fine job concealing it. Something like the R5000 is far more vulnerable.

What is very curious is you are having more problems with SD than HD, to the point that the R5000 software cannot find the channel's stream. I don't have Shaw Direct (Dish Network for the moment), but I have wondered about subscribing to it. My understanding is most of Shaw's SD channels are on 107.3W, while 111.1 has primarily HD channels. If all your problems result from the 107.3W bird, that suggests you may have a defective LNB, switch or dish alignment depending on the configuration that was installed. It is possible there is a receiver fault making it harder to lock to one LNB vs. the other.

The aggregate data rates you are seeing are fairly similar to what I have on Dish, and lower than for those who have R5000s in cable boxes. R5000s are sensitive to these rates, but the mechanisms have never been certain to me. In our cases the R5000s have to suck in an entire satellite transponder with all of its channels to extract the one it wants in software. For SD you are seeing 27 Mbps of load on USB to get maybe a single 1-2 Mbps channel. On HD there is 39 Mbps coming in for a 9 Mbps channel. USB 2.0 should be able to handle this on your hardware, but that doesn't mean it's a walk in the park. There is a lot of overhead involved and it's not that hard to bring USB to its knees with rates in this neighborhood.

Even a USB IR receiver can be a problem. A number of PCs I've looked at seem to have internal hubs for pairs of ports. I happen to have a USB IR receiver that was flooding the bus and causing R5000 recording failures. I moved it to another port and the problems magically disappeared. I don't think this is your critical problem, but sometimes a few small problems can compound. We tend to want to see one problem that explains everything.

In terms of 3.1d, I would hesitate to run that with R5000s connected in satellite STBs. When I tried it, I had a beef about it streaming data even when there was no recording going on. Over a period of a few days I gathered plenty of proof that it was far less reliable than the older software versions, at least for my HW/SW configuration. People with R5000s in cable boxes seem to be doing a lot better, partly because they don't have to live with streaming an entire satellite transponder over USB. It might be worth trying the previous, non-streaming version. The remuxer logs are available in the new version, but they are more difficult to access and they seemed to get lost fairly frequently when I tried out 3.1.

I hope there is something here that helps get your problems resolved. Good luck and keep us posted.

I didn't reverse engineer it, but it's pretty obvious how it works if you've ever done a DIY install. All it's doing is grabbing the entire transport stream at a point in the circuit where it is readily available. STBs that do not have these access points cannot be modified. The R5000 grabs three serial signals: the transport data stream, its clock and a packet strobe. I expect all of the packets are passed back to the software for PID extraction and remuxing. Other than that, there is one other line to sample the STB's power on state, and one line to trick the STB's IR receiver into thinking it is getting remote control requests. Most of the smarts are in the R5000 software.

question . . .


when using R5000 for channel changes, does the default dish network overlay with channel and program information pop-up on the screen in media center?

thanks .

No, as all R5000 compatible devices I'm aware of, the whole point is to access the original mpeg2/mpeg4 streams (before the video format is converted to a video signal such as DVI/HDMI/Component signal with the OSD overlay included. All the media center app would do is accept the H.264 or Mpeg2 streams. The media center app is concerned about getting just the video and audio streams to manipulate them as they want; adding a media center overlay of it's own if/when necessary. So, now dont worry.

Do you have 4 ComCast STB's or can you use multiple R5000 in one box?

thank you for the answer.

It's only one R-5000 per box. I'm pretty sure he's got 4 of the same box, each with an R-5000 mod installed, all hooked up to his sage server via USB.

I actually have 2 Motorola DCP-501's and 2 DTC-6200's.

I would love to just have all four DCP-501's, but unfortunately, I found out that they dont support HD On Demand (only SD On Demand) which I use for the custom SageTV On Demand turnkey solution I integrated into SageTV. I use Comcast On Demand PPV a lot; and, me nor my wife couldnt deal with losing that capability. The whole point is to gain functionality and flexibility, not lose it.

Dont get me wrong, the DCP-501 are great for HD encrypted channels; and, is an ideal/easy solution for pretty much everyone with cableTV. The Nextcomwireless folks told me the reason HD On Demand doesnt work is due to the missing on board HD decoder that's needed for handling HD On Demand.

PS: As a courtesy to me and others, I ask to please not ask/post here how the 6200's got modded; especially after you realize they have an onboard component that Nextcom Wireless will refuse to touch. There are other newer motorola boxes that fit in this category too; but, nextcom wireless isn't the place to ask them to mod those. You can PM me if you have specific questions.

I would appreciate someone telling me the make and model of a USB cable known to successfully connect the Dish VIP211 R5000HD to a computer. The USB 2.0 cable with Type A male connectors at both ends which I have been using does not enable the connection. I want to buy a cable known to work before I try other problem solving techniques. I do not have the USB cable that was provided with the converted receiver. (The Dish receiver works when I connect the receiver directly to the monitor and bypass the R5000HD)