ATSC SD Tuner Capture

[Mike DiBella]

I'm looking to add ATSC tuner to my BTV system and I'm a little confused about HW requirements and capabilities.

I'm only interested in being able to record and playback standard definition digital broadcast television, not HDTV.

Is there a way for be to specify within BTV (or using a Hauppauge utility) that the capture from the Hauppauge HVR-1600 be stored in a downconverted quality suitable for playback on SD sets? If so, can I assume that playback of the downconverted file will be no more taxing of the CPU that the content currently captured by my PVR-500?

Is there a different tuner compatible with BTV better suited to this application?

Since I will not be rendering this content on a HD set, reasons for downconverting the content include a desire to economize on CPU utilization during playback on the viewscape, minimize disk usage, and retain compatibility with MediaMVP.

[enigma9o7]

You're in luck. Just use showsqueeze. I have a crappy video card right now, and can't play 1080i video without stutter (however 780p and 480p play fine). Either way, once converted to divx with showsqueeze, they playback fine.

[Mike DiBella]

Thanks. Your experience is inconsistant with the 4.6.1 help file:

Recorded Shows
Each recording created by HDTV tuner cards is recorded as an MPEG-2 Transport Stream. This is a different format than standard MPEG-2, and at this time is ineligible for ShowSqueeze and SmartSkip features.

Are the ShowSqeeze options different for HDTV recordings? If so, what are the options?

After ShowSqueezing, have you tried viewing the resulting file in Windows Media Player?

[enigma9o7]

Yeah that makes no sense.... the "recording" is definately an MPEG-2 transport stream, copied straight from the antenna, so you can't change the 'recording' format. All HD recordings, whteher 480p or 1080i or whqatever, they come out as 9.6GB/hour MPEG-2 transport streams. If its 1080, I can't play it well... but most definately you can showsqueeze after 'recording', I've been doing it forever.... you can't set btv to automatically showsqueeze all hd files without doing something more complicated (there's threads here that explain how to, but I've never bothered) so dunno what that help file means. I use the default settings 'intelligent quality' which converts a 9GB 1-hour recording into about 700MB.... you can deifnately set individual shows to showsqueeze tho, even tho you cant set it as the default for all shows for hd (w/o the more complicated setting)... there are ways to make it better (or worse) quality but I just go with the default... so I can't help answer you about the settings, but I'm pretty sure there's lotsa option.... and smartskip works too, you can dfeinately set that for all recordings by default... so yeah that quote makes no sense... I've been doing this since version 4.0 as far as I remember... 3.8 probably too.. so yeah dunno what that help file thing is all about

And I'm sure I'm not the only one who showsqueezes HD, so anyone else feel free to chime in and tell him this is totally possible... not sure why the help thing syas no.

[Fonceur]

While the showsqueeze HD material is disabled by default, it's mostly because it can take a long time. To enable it, you simply have to shut down BTV, edit the settings.xml file and change a value from false to true.

[Empyrean5]

When BTV 4.0(?) was first released it didn't support HD showsqueeze or smartchapters, but a later release did. I think they must have forgotten to update the Help file.

At any rate, they both definitely work well today, although about 10% of the time, the SmartChapter Generator will fail, which will cause the transcoder (recompressor) to abort for that file (you can then manually start the re-compressor without the SmartChapter generator.)

And, transcoding takes lots of CPU cycles, so if you cannot watch the TS file due to hardware constraints, you'll have to get used to watching HD shows about a day after they're recorded. I tend to record shows in both analog and HD so that I can have the option of watching HD on one of my Link machines, or NTSC on my MVP .. which is distributed throughout my house.

[Mike DiBella]

Empyrean5: Are you using two different tuners for this purpose? Is the SD content coming over-the-air via a digital (ATSC) broadcast? Or are you just recording the same show from both an OTA DTV source and a cable/satellite/NTSC source?

I also have MediaMVP boxes for remote playback and I'm looking for a way to distribute recorded DTV content to these boxes.

If I'm reading this thread right, I can record a show from an OTA ATSC source as an MPEG stream, then showsqueeze it (overnight).

I'd much prefer to ShowSqueeze it into an MPEG-2, not DiVX format, becuase I can then use HW decode on the MediaMVP and not have to transcode using the MVP's host.

Possible?

[Empyrean5]

Yes - two different tuners. Digital content is OTA/ATSC through the AVerTVHD card (I just ordered an HDHomeRun yesterday too), and analog cable TV through an Hauppauge tuner.

Recording an ATSC source results in a "Transport Stream" file. One thing different about this file from a standard mpeg is that the .TS file can have multiple video streams embedded in it -- subchannels. You can "StreamSnip" the .TS file to remove the subchannels (reducing file size) -- this is relatively quick -- you end up with a smaller .TS file.

You can showsqueeze the .TS file to mpeg/DVIX or AVI in a wide-variety of formats/qualities.

Yes, my experience is that MVP works best with MPEG-2, so that's what I record the analog cable to. I haven't tried recording a digital program and transcoding to MPEG-2, but I see no reason why that wouldn't work.

Eric

[Mike DiBella]

First, a quick thanks to those that responded to this thread.

I thought I'd post a follow-up with details on how I'd solved this problem in the event others out there might be facing a similar challange.

What I've put in place seems to work reasonably well for me.

I've connected an RJTech RJ1000-ATSC set top box to the SVideo port on a PVR-500 and use the USB-UIRT with a "learned" IR configuration for channel changing.

Using the EXE Tuner plugin initially, I determined that the lineup physical channel is sent to the tuner interface, not the major/minor combination. When the physical channel is tuned on the RJ1000, the first stream is selected from the mapped virtual channel.

Next, I created a Ditial TV lineup in Snapstream.net and downloaded the lineup to BTV. In the web interface, I cloned the lineup and hid all the channels from the lineup except for the first stream for each physical channel.

Using the setup wizard, I began the process of adding a new video source, but only to "learn" the remote codes for the RJ1000. Once the remote codes were learning, saved to a new .RMT file, and tested in the wizard, I Cancelled the setup wizard.

Back in the web interface, created a new audio/video source and configured the source as a TV tuner, Analog TV, SVideo In. I assigned the previous cloned Digital TV lineup to this source (it is only possible to do this in the web inferface, not the setup wizard), and selected USB-UIRT as the tuner interface, and selected the previously created .RMT file as the STB model.

I now can record Standard Definition ATSC video directly in MPEG format. Although I am limited to selecting only the first ATSC stream from each broadcast, in my area, the first stream is always the broadcasters digital equivelant to the analog/NTSC feed.

The RJ1000 also supports unencrypted QAM, so it may be possible to use this device to record unscrambled digital cable broadcasts in standard definition, however, I suspect that a custom lineup would have to be created.

[myktek]

http://snapstream.helpserve.com/inde...articleid=1471

You can probably use the custom lineup wizard from this to setup your lineup.