AutumnWave / OnAir USB HDTV Tuners - Page 15

I don't think it's the cable's problem. I used several cables that I did confirm worked with my TV and they just didn't work with the OnAir tuner. While it was searching for DTV channels, I saw the db were around 10 or so. No channels were found. For ATV just a couple of grainy channels.

For you, did you just simply connect the cable to the wall to the same jack that the antenna was connected to and did a channel search?

Thanks : )

yeah, I just hooked up the cable( I don't have an antenna here, I'm too far to get anything over the air) and did a scan, it picked up all my cable channels, 2-99 on ATV(C) and it found tons of channels on the DTV(C)(most were scrambled, but it found what I was looking for) I don't really know how the db's will show up on a scan, but I do believe you need close to 30 or better to get a good signal, I think Ryan suggested 32 or better, mine averages from 29.5 to 32, but I don't really have any problems with it. 10 db is too low I'm sure, but since it's scanning it might not be a realistic number.

OK Thanks for the info. I will try it at a different place to see if it will work there. If not, then I'm not sure if it's worth keeping for just OTA, but maybe because the quality is great

Wow!
This is my exact experience with trying to have the scheduler wake up my system from S3 (suspend) mode too. The workaround is to have the normal Windows Task Scheduler start the OnAir GT Program a few minutes before your recording is scheduled to start. It's double work, but it works perfectly.

Ryan, instead of re-creating the wheel... can you suggest to the software guys just add the "wakeup call" to start the OnAir GT Program (one min before recording is scheduled to start) to the normal Windows Task Scheduler and let the OnAir GT Program scheduler do the channel changing/recording chores once it's up and running?
Instead of the System Off button (which is buggy) on the Scheduler how about a Wake-up via Windows task scheduler button which just automatically adds the wake-up call the Windows Task Scheduler?
Even if your computer happens to be awake when the Windows Task Scheduler kicks in and opens the OnAir GT Program and then the OnAir GT Program scheduler does its thing and tries to open the OnAir GT Program again, it's not a problem as only one instance of OnAir GT Program seems to open even though two requests have been made.

Resume from suspend mode is important for a HTPC especially where automated recordings are concerned. The current one in the OnAir GT scheduler is pretty fubar'd. A working resume from suspend recording feature would be greatly appreciated

Thanks.... replayrob

Oh, PS... The GT has performed better than I could have ever imagined. I was even able to return ($108 refund) my Hauppauge PVR-150 card because of the S-Video capture feature of the GT!

...what he said...

I've found another interesting bug/glitch during playback mode. Frequently when I FF during playback (skipping commercials) playback will sometimes render a slowmo display, maybe a continual 4 or 5 frame advance would be a more accurate discription. Considering the prior acknowledged bug of FF being disabled bug by opening the Options tab suggests the remote driver need some work ;-)

This is not a fatal flaw, pressing 'Play" and then 'FF' when the slowmo bug hits brings things back to status quo...

/Grey

replayrob wrote:

While I understand this is an important feature for those who frequently 'sleep' their 'puters I don't understand why desktop owners are infatuated with this option. I understand a laptop's need to conserve power but continually spinning down hard drives in a desktop puts undue wear on all the spun down drives. You're better off if you just let your drives run continually, the number of times an electrical motor (be it a hard drive, pump or turbine) is shut down is directly proportional to it's lifespan. 'Sleep' is overrated ;-)

/Grey

A 0.00 is a bad sign. I think you just might have a bad GT - I refer you to Mr Pertusio - but personally I'd ask for an exchange from the Retailer.


I have the opposite experience, and the opposite feature request.

Regardless of the options I set in OnAir, the recordings are interlaced - I can step through them in VLC or VirtualDubMod and see the interlacings. I can pass you some videos I've recorded if you like. This is over digital and analog.

However, what is deinterlaced is the output on the screen, in the OnAir software - and this can be toggled in the options you mentioned.

It's possible the "jaggies" you refer to are aliasing artifacts and not interlacing/deinterlacing. The OnAir uses a Nearest-Neighbor scaling method, which results in pixelation except when the scaled resolution is 1:1 (not scaled).

My feature request is to offer an option to deinterlace the video as it's recorded, ironically. All of the videos written to the hard drive by the OnAir using 2.99P3 are interlaced.

It's possible that the OnAir Creator I have has drivers that leave it interlaced, and the GT ones you have deinterlace it - I wonder. Could you post a small video you feel is deinterlaced by the OnAir GT?


Heat matters too - spinning up isn't all there is to it - and more importantly, those magnetic platters care more about heat than dealing with spinning down twice a day. The first thing to go on a system that's left on all day every day is the hard drive, because the continuous heat harms it before anything else. Many disks also suffer in long-term usage because the bearings overheat and cause undesired effects like rippling, harming the platters further.

1080i material would be recorded as interlaced. Analog material is 480i, so that would be recorded as interlaced. Makes perfect sense. With deinterlacing disabled in VLC when playing back a 720p TRP, you see "interlacings"? Really?

I ran my Fox recording of the Saints game through VideoReDo and this is the stream info:


File Name: D:\\OnAirStuff\\Videos\\Y2006M10\\1015_H12M25_CH32-1_NFL Football.trp
File Size: 155330300 ( 0.14 GB )
Program Duration: 00:01:27.17
File Type: TS Stream
Encoding: MPEG 2
Video stream Id: 49 (x31)
Encoding Dimensions: 1280 x 720
Display Size: 1280 x 720
Aspect Ratio: 16/9
Frame Rate: 59.94 FPS
Bit Rate: 19.000 Mbps
VBV_Buffer: 976 KB
Profile: Main/High
Progressive: Progressive Only
Chroma: 4:2:0
Audio Format: 5.1
Audio Stream Id: AC3: 52 (x34)
Audio Bit Rate: 448 Kbps
Audio Sampling Rate: 48000 Hz


BTW, setting my OnAir window size to exactly 1280x720 (according to the white numbers that pop up when scaling the OnAir window), still results in the "scaling"/"interlacing"/"jaggie white lines" problem with 720p material - so it seems that adjusting to a 1:1 window size is not a fix.

My only problem is when I change to a 720p station(ABC or ESPN) the picture in the OnAir Viewer is out of proportion, I'm pretty sure it's the same as displaying it in 4:3 mode. I have to resize the screen to get it squared away, this only happens on the 720p stations. It happens religiously when I change to a 720p station from any other station unless I'm changing between 720p stations.

Sometimes if there is a glitch in the stream the picture will get out of whack also(it's like it's stretched in the bottom 20% of the screen, not sure how to even descriibe it, this only happens on the 1280x720 stations though.

For a workplace environment, I agree- suspend mode may impractical due to frequent periods of unscheduled activity. But for a HTPC a working suspend mode is very practical.

I hooked up my Kill-a-Watt meter to my HTPC over the weekend and here's what I found:
HTPC with normal activity: 73-75 Watts
HTPC at idle w/hard drive spinning: 60 Watts
HTPC in S1 (hard drive powered down) Suspend mode: 45 Watts
HTPC in S3 (processor almost fully down, all fans off, hard drive off) Suspend mode: 6 Watts

Normal HTPC usage for me:
4hrs/day active, 20hrs/day sleep mode

Without working Suspend mode:
20 hrs idle @ 60 Watts/hr = 1200 Watts
4 hrs active @ 75 Watts/hr = 300 Watts
30 days electricity at above consumption (1500 W/day) = 45'000 watts
45'000 Watts @ $0.25/Kw HR = $11.25 per Month
$11.25/month X 12 months = $135/ year electricity cost for the HTPC


With working Suspend mode:
20 hrs idle @ 6 Watts/hr = 120 Watts
4 hrs active @ 75 Watts/hr = 300 Watts
30 days electricity at above consumption (420 W/day) = 12'600 watts
12'600 Watts @ $0.25/Kw HR = $3.15 per Month
$3.15/month X 12 months = $37.80/ year electricity cost for the HTPC


With a functional S3 suspend mode, I'll save about $100/year just in electricity, not including the lower heat output from the PC not running at full power state that I don't have to use air condition to cool during the summer. In addition to less wear and tear on the PC's power supply and hard drive. Hard drive & processor only kick in when a recording is scheduled, so no multiple start/stops during the day to stress the components.

PS... I live on Long Island- LIPA gets about $0.25/kw-hr after all the surcharges, add-ons, fees, etc, etc, etc......

replayrob,
Good breakdown of the electricity savings. This is something I always monitor myself, as we pay about $0.30 here in Hawai'i. The Kill-a-Watt is a great little device.

replayrob--

Yes, it's not only expensive and wearing on HDD to run HTPCs 24/7, but it's also bad for our air.

Your arithmetic is good but your equations' units need some fixing. A watt is already a power (being 1 joule/second). So power consumption (energy per unit time) is measured in watts, not "watts/hour", and energy consumption (joules) is expressed in watt-seconds or (more typically for utility bills) kilowatt-hours (kWh).

Oh, and if you use S4 (hibernate) instead of S3, you cut the sleeping power level to less than 1 watt.

Hard to imagine I got straight "A's" in college physics... hehehe. But that was some time ago Thanks.

I haven't been successful with apps actually waking my HTPC from S4 mode.
I may play with S4 some more though. I have S3 working really well, as a matter of fact- I can wake and access my HTPC from my office via RealVNC (freeware app). I just did a ASR backup of my HTPC this morning from work while on break

Nope. In fact, I think there's maybe 1 channel I even get that's Progressive (why when offered the chance to do away with this archaic interlacing did broadcasters stick with it...?) - and if I do record it, I of course do away with any interlacing relevancy. But anything that comes in interlaced, remains interlaced in the recording - regardless of the options I set.


So - as you mentioned, 720p material isn't coming in interlaced, and it's certainly not being artificially interlaced and stored - so what you're seeing must be... something other than interlacing. Now I'd really like to see an example video.

Ryan,
Where are the device drivers for other operating systems,
e.g. FreeBSD, OS-X, Plan-9, Linux, ...?

Do you guys convert your .trp files to any other file type after recording. I'm just wondering if there's a way to use another way to record so the file size is not 100 MB per minute but the recording quality is still awesome

thanks

Nope.... we just get bigger hard drives

LOL OK :P .. I ordered a 400 GB Seagate so it should last for a bit

I used to scratch my head in wonder at the guys talking about terabyte file servers for their HTPC's... then I started recording HD on 2 computers... the light bulb went off!

I'm with you nuck! I've only got about 30gb to spare for things so I've got to cut out my favorite clips and compress them.

I use HDTVtoMPEG2 to dump the .trp file to .mpg. Then I open that in VirtualDubMod, and cut clips out of it. I save the clips to DivX (codec download) if it will take - but DivX's encoder is very fussy, so sometimes I go with the less efficient Xvid, which is closer to MPEG than DivX. Both are much more efficient than MPEG2 though - your file sizes will be between 50% and 10% of the original .trp file.

Be aware that VirtualDubMod does not decode MPEGs well; it mis-times the sound very badly. Short clips need the audio shifted to line up; long clips need the audio converted, and another issue with VirtualDubMod is it has trouble decoding MPEG sound, so it tends to not let you do that conversion. So far I've been forced to break an hour and a half of HDTV into 5 audio-shifted clips to get a somewhat good audio sync on each.

SoopahMan wrote:

I agree, heat can be dibilitating for ANY 'puter components but if you have an adequate cooling system, it's a non-issue. My core, video card and HD temperatures have never exceeded 90°F and average between 75°F and 85°f.

replayrob wrote:

I agree with your premise if the only use your 'puter an an HTPC. I use my machine constantly. When I'm not online, gaming, recording HDTV or just goofing off my machine is number crunching for SETI@Home. I have a local utility that supplies gas and electric service and the last time I checked the KWH cost was about 15¢.

/Grey

I don't have these issues at all, I use autogk, and I do use xvid, I'm not sure why you consider divx superior to xvid, but autogk, will take the ts file(I don't see any reason to convert to mpeg at all) that is created from the hdtv2mpeg2 file directly, it will do the job in one lick, I have never had any sync problems with it either. I usually create the xvid at 624 width, and 350Meg(for an hour long show, which is usually around 45 minutes actual, and 700 Meg for the 2 hr show with commercials cut out) on the size of the file, it's not hd quality for sure, but it's a very good looking video and I have no real problems with it at all, and you can load up all the ts projects you want and let it create your xvids while you sleep.

Edit: I also do all the cutting of commercials in hdtv2mpeg, then the resulting ts file is ready to be dropped directly into autogk. If you have any dangling snips of commercials, it's very easy to drop that in virtualdubmod and cut them out and do a direct stream out.

Edit one more time: I also in autogk, set the audio to 128 Kbit at CBR, I don't like the VBR, I don't think the extra meg or two you might save with the VBR is worth that much and virtualdubmod doesn't complain about it, maybe that helps me with the sync problem. It may be because I cut the size down to 350 Meg that I don't have sync problems too, I've never really tried to create an xvid at the original size though.

Clips compressed to .divx from VirtualDubMod are 40-90% the filesize of the same video as .xvid.


Because VirtualDubMod needs a clean MPEG file, not a .trp. And it's not being converted to MPEG - the MPEG is being stripped of its stream details. That's cool AutoGK will open the .ts file, and even cooler that it opens the MPEG reliably. I'm stumbling my way into video editing, and it was down to VirtualDubMod or AutoGK (Jakasha wasted a lot of my time...). VirtualDubMod's got me most of the way - but AutoGK's my next install now, thanks for the info.


Why this width specifically? Is this related to the native size for SDTV?


Ah... perhaps this is why AutoGK and I didn't spend more time together - you can't clip them out in GK? Yet another program to jockey things around through... sigh. That's what I get for doing this for free I guess.


Reducing the audio to 128kbps CBR is probably what's doing it for you. Note that VirtualDubMod can't even perform such a conversion; it complains that it lacks a decoder, which given it's an MPEG2 file I believe that's an MPEG Layer 3 audio track it's complaining about - it can't decode an MP3? Are you kidding me?

It may be obvious from my earlier post that this is driving me crazy, but if not - this was driving me crazy. The best explanation I could find is that incoming streams of real-time data tend to state they're encoded at 48000Hz, when they really are encoding at something a little off - 48021, 47973. The result is that a simple decoder gets audio out of sync - a decoder that goes above and beyond will notice the discrepancy and realign accordingly. It seems AutoGK goes above and beyond; VirtualDubMod appears to be able to do the same if only I could tell it how to decode MP3s, which I continue to find stunning it can't do.
...with some Googling it appears installing this will fix VirtualDubMod:
http://www.free-codecs.com/download/LAME_ACM_Codec.htm
We'll see - I'd sure like one program to be a one stop shop.

Back to the OnAir - I'd just like to mention that it's impressive how much the OnAir can do given the software comes with the hardware for free. It's not perfect, but it does an awful lot.

If you buy the tuner from Walmart will this not qualify?

Also, I have a question for those of you who compress the .trp files. Do you lose any quality or does it still look great?

Thanks

I could't tell which products get what rebate amount. Some of the links on the start up page just return to the start up page.
I assume that since any tunner is Ok, that an analog tunner card will qualify a person for the rebate. How about a satellite TV tunner card?
John

That's your decision - when you compress it you can specify a LOT of different quality options to your liking. You can compress it with no visual quality loss and cut the filesize in half, or resize it, set compression high, and reduce the sound to Mono and a lower bitrate to get it to less than 10% of the original size.

At this point, it's time for you to try it yourself ;o)

VirtualDubMod and the LAME Decoder
I gave the above Codec a shot, and it's improved VirtualDubMod considerably - it can now fully recompress Audio (the "Full Processing option" in the Stream List panel now works, rather than causing Save to fail). Very cool. However VirtualDubMod still reads the MPEGs in out of synch, which is tedious. It does make VirtualDubMod that much closer to being a one stop shop though so it's hard to give up on it - maybe I need a newer MPEG2 decoder... .