Things to do with the new TV engine (1 Viewer)

[Buzzard]

the only good thing about the firmware that came with my tuner is that it just droped the transport stream to the hard drive, I think that is where the new engine is going. If they have different channels on the one stream it easlly records them all. Shut the recording engine down encode the hd stream at hd resolution. Good but the time it takes.

Maybe in the future there will be duel core optimization, so you could hand off the encoding to one core. I'm not sure though if the new cpu's are capable of this yet anyway, maybe the AMD ones are, I think the new Intel "Core" sound promising.

 

[ASiDiE]

Infinityloop, Let me explain a little bit more what I mean. I work for a company that has a product called ImageSilo. We are an online document management system and we host people's documents. We have 10 import servers. We have 10 servers that are constantly looking for new data. Each server runs a service.

So lets say you have your main PC, a media server (stores your movies and houses your capture cards) and the actually stand alone HTPC that you run Media portal on. This means for the most part, each computer is actually doing very little. If you could install the service on each computer to allow it use it's processing power for different jobs. Instead of 1 CPU with 100% use, you now have 3 CPUS's at 300%.

Lets say you have recorded 4 new shows and now you want to compress them all at night. Instead of 1 CPU running all 4 jobs, it would see that you have a total of 3 CPUS that can do the job. Things would get done a lot quicker. The downside to this, is you would be transferring the data over the network. This is usually not a problem unless you are using a slower wireless.

I am just totally throwing this out there. In MediaPortals case, it might not even work that well. There might not be any advantage to this if the network is slowing everything down, but I think it's a cool idea.

 

[mzemina]

* Ability to record in different formats (Divx, Xvid, WMV)

if you have ever tried to convert a movie into one of these formats you should know how slow that could be (or how fast the CPU has to be).
so recording in an other format than the stream is, may not be a good idea

*Maybe have an option to install just the service on PC's on the network.

erm... thats exactly the new client - server system

But if the ability to send a video feed to another machine to perform the conversion was availble as part of the client/server architecture, that would off-load (or distribute) the workload to not tax any one computer!

 

[bear]

Why not do your conversions at the same time you record, most of the time the cpu is under utilised anyway, MP takes about 10% and my recording service uses about 8% with three DTV cards recording.(2.6GP4)
I wrote a converter some time ago that converts my TS recordings to mpg format with 60% size reduction that ran at low priority concurrently with the recording, outputting to another directory, and was able to watch it over the lan at the same time. As well as watching it on the same PC with 40% of cpu to spare. Hence my question about other than mpg format encoders.

 

[mzemina]

Why not do your conversions at the same time you record, most of the time the cpu is under utilised anyway, MP takes about 10% and my recording service uses about 8% with three DTV cards recording.(2.6GP4)
I wrote a converter some time ago that converts my TS recordings to mpg format with 60% size reduction that ran at low priority concurrently with the recording, outputting to another directory, and was able to watch it over the lan at the same time. As well as watching it on the same PC with 40% of cpu to spare. Hence my question about other than mpg format encoders.

Bear - Maybe frodo will allow for plugins to the new video engine and you could port your converter?

 

[bear]

hi mzemina,

Maybe frodo will allow for plugins to the new video engine and you could port your converter?

Maybe if I had the know how and the .net build enviroment. I think frodo does not go for seperate converter graphs, he may have better ideas but most of the components required are already in MP anyway, just need the Quantizer filter. The direction that conversions seem to be heading of late is towards Xvid so I'm keen to play with some DS Xvid encoders to see how they perform in a concurrent enviroment.

 

[mzemina]

Maybe if I had the know how and the .net build enviroment. I think frodo does not go for seperate converter graphs, he may have better ideas but most of the components required are already in MP anyway, just need the Quantizer filter. The direction that conversions seem to be heading of late is towards Xvid so I'm keen to play with some DS Xvid encoders to see how they perform in a concurrent enviroment.

Bear - I say - start playing. Sometimes that provides the best environment to produce the best code!

Mike

 

[Frodo]

hrmm me wonders if bear is the same bear as i met on the dvbforums?

Anyway if you want a .net build environment, you can download visual studio c# express freely from microsoft.

About having plugins, this sounds great and we will surely look at it
but for now my plan is to have a 'basic' release first which has all the functionality i described. When thats done, we can look at all the nice suggestions and feature requests

Frodo

 

[samuel337]

I'm not sure if this is on the cards yet, but I thought I'd give some insight on how mythTV works in this respect (I've defected a bit recently, but quickly returned when I realised how many more features MP has :lol: ).

mythTV has what's called a master backend and slave backends. The master backend controls all the slave backends, and the frontends connect to the master backend. It is assumed that each slave backend has one or more tv cards attached to it. When a TV show is required to be recorded, the master backend locates a free TV card and tells it to record. The file is then stored locally on that computer (I think) and it is then responsible for com-skipping and transcoding of that file. The master backend is designed so that these tasks are spread out over the various backends and that they are only undertaken during idle times.

This is my understanding of it anyway, and while it may not be the best setup, it might give people some ideas to work with. I have a single master backend and frontend system so I can't comment extensively on how the whole slave backend system works.

Sam

 

[bear]

hi frodo,

hrmm me wonders if bear is the same bear as i met on the dvbforums?

I have popped in from time to time.

Anyway if you want a .net build environment, you can download visual studio c# express freely from microsoft.

Yes, I have that already, just a bit scared to install it with my current VC projects still in progress.