Streaming HD channels to an XBox360

[becje01]

Hello there

I was hoping if you could "sanity check" the following for me...I've got an XBox 360 configured as an Extender, and am hoping to use it to watch HD digital TV.

I currently have a "server" in my study with 850GB RAID5 storage, hosting movies, photos and music - (Pentium 4 2.5Ghz w/512MB RAM, has been running FreeNAS). I've swapped out the FreeNAS OS, and replaced it with an 80GB drive on which I've installed Vista Ultimate (I need Remote Desktop, as this will be a headless box). WMP11 is providing library sharing.

I'm toying with the idea of adding a DVB-t card to my "server" (hopefully a TinyTwin from DigitalNow), and using the XBox 360 (and it's HDMI output) to watch glorious hi-def TV on the Plasma in the family room.

Has anyone any comment on whether my P4 has enough grunt to be able to stream/send the HD signal to the Xbox? What sort od spec box do others use to send HD signals to Xbox extenders?

WAF is OK at the moment (Xbox 360 gives much nicere looking DVD playback than the old KiSS player), but probably won't extend to additional expenditure

Cheers

Jeff

[Mysteron]

You could probably get away with an underpowered CPU (as I think you have) if you had a videocard that offloaded the HD work from the CPU. The new Nvidia and ATI cards do this very well. Unfortunately they are mostly PCIe so may not be compatable with your P4 motherboard, you are also going to have to get some more RAM as Vista really needs about 2Gig to run well. Again Ram for your MB may be more expensive than for newer ones.
I think more expense is needed, Can you see where I'm headed . Personally I'd be looking at a new cheap dual core rig. Something with Pentium dual core 2180 would do paired with a cheap ATI 2400 or 2600 series card. The experience would be much better in the long term. Good luck with the WAF

[heli0s]

Originally Posted by becje01

...
Has anyone any comment on whether my P4 has enough grunt to be able to stream/send the HD signal to the Xbox? What sort od spec box do others use to send HD signals to Xbox extenders?
...
Cheers

Jeff

<Inhales through teeth>

Don't like your chances.

My MC (sits next to my xbox) is Vista, 2.4Ghz P4, 1.5GB RAM.

Just for ****s and giggles, I have done the extender thing between them... Can't even handle SD TV suitably, forget about HD.

The user interface itself runs really nicely, but fire up some TV and CPU hits 100%, and everything stops responding. I dont have a beasty gfx card, am hopefully getting a 2600PRO in the next few weeks, and may try again then (main reason for it is my setup struggles with HD video on its own, let alone via the 360).

Sorry

[becje01]

Thanks Mysteron and Heli0n...I was thinking as much - guess I was hoping the whole Client / Server architecture would allow me to scrimp on the server side...

Well, to further complicate matters I also have a Dell SFF Optiplex desktop (P4 3Ghz with 2GB RAM and a PCI-E graphics slot) - but I can't fit the 4 x HDDs for my RAID array in the SFF box. I'll do some research to see how easy it is to transplant the innards into a case with more room (don't like my chances)...otherwise I'm probably looking at new motherboard, RAM and CPU for the "server".

Might have to get the USB tuner first, demonstrate the server's lack of capacity, that might help the business case for the upgrade

[logifuse]

Hang on a tick.

I've run a low end PC that couldn't do HD on it's own (Athlon 1700+ with 768MB of RAM & an FX5200 video card) to serve an Xbox 360 extender & the extender was 100% fine with HD channels. I found that the PC was still very responsive even when the Xbox 360 was using the tuners. The complication is that the PC had MCE2005 on it, but even still, the video card in the PC has NOTHING to do with streaming to the 360 as the 360 does it's own decoding.

Get the tuner & try it out - there's no loss if it doesn't work.

BTW Jeff, you are aware that you're limited to watching the HD channels @ 60Hz on the Xbox 360? Depending on how your TV handles the 50Hz/60Hz shudder & how discerning you are, you may end up being very disappointed.

Justin

[becje01]

Justin

I'm aware of a 50Hz/60Hz issue, but I haven't spent any time in trying to understand it

My Plasma is a 3 year old Samsung, the 2 Component Inputs state they take 720p and 1080i, it also has DVI and VGA inputs (VGA appears to prefer 1280x1024 - i.e. non square pixels?). DVI takes a 1080i input from ny HD STB, but I'm sure that there is scaling happening somewhere...

So I'm basically on a suck it and see expedition

Jeff

[logifuse]

Hopefully the Xbox 360 will eventually be updated for HD 50Hz. The plasma will be fine displaying whatever you put in to it, but you may not find it watchable.

As simple an explaination of the 50Hz/60Hz issue as I can come up with:

When you watch 50Hz content at 50Hz, the screen displays 50 frames per second (can be progressive or interlaced, but that's not relevant here). When you try to watch 50Hz content at 60Hz, the processing has to somehow take the 50FPS & turn it in to 60FPS.

One way would be to speed up the video 20% - not an option for live TV & not a good result anyway as movement wouldn't be natural & voices would be much higher pitched.

The way it's actually done is to show 5 orignal frames & then double up the 5th frame on the 6th frame, so instead of 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-etc, you get 1-2-3-4-5-5-6-7-8-9-10-10-11-etc. The effect on fairly static images is hardly noticeable, but as soon as their is any lateral movement (such as the camera panning) it becomes very obvious. The result is panning shots that seem to stop & start instead of smoothly panning.

My experience with MCE2005 (where you supply the decoder) at 60Hz is that combos of the same based decoder & card smooth this out better than anything (e.g. Nvidia card with PureVideo decoder or ATI card with Avivo decoder). My experience with the Xbox 360 @ 60Hz was unwatchable, but others have reported that it's barely noticeable with their TVs. I used the 360 on the SD setting @ 50Hz & it's actually pretty good, but I would have preferred HD, so now I've retired it & gone with a VMC for viewing.

Don't know if that helps or hinders, but I'm a firm believer that more info is better.

Justin

[jsbbs]

If you're lucky enough to be still looking to buy your plasma/lcd TV, read the specifications carefully.

Some, like the Panasonic's Vieras, accept PAL at 60Hz. I've got the Panasonic VIERA TH-42PV60A and stream HD (as you're looking to do) without any stuttering issues (so far )

[becje01]

A quick update....

I was having problems with VMC (TinyTwin drivers installed OK, but Vista kept sh!tting itself whenever I tried to scan channels)...so I went back to MCE 2005, and all is OK so far.

So I can confirm the following...

1) MCE2005 and the TinyTwin tuner can do HD on my old piece of sh!t P4 (ATI 9700 Pro video card). Didn't have any speakers plugged in, so can't comment about audio stuttering etc, but it seemed OK

2) A brief unscientific test seems to show that I can simultaneously record 2 HD channels (Seven HD and Nine HD in my 10 minute test) whilst watching a HD recording (Ten HD) - remember, this is using the XBox as the extender with the P4 "Server" doing the recording & hosting the fles for playback. BTW CPU usage seemed to peak around 40%, RAM usage around 300MB, so I can attest to logifuse's experience of low end hardware and MCE2005 supporting HD to the XBox.

So, next up is to Ghost the current setup , then add Free*EPG, WMP11 for Divx/XVid via the Xbox media blade (I think trying transcoding on my equipment is going a tad too far), AV software (with some drive exceptions!, this box is doing double duty as my Home Server), Deltacopy for rsync (used to backup data etc from the various PCs in use), then add a couple of other programs which will be doing network activity of an unspecified nature and see if it all hangs together...then I get to embark on the arduous process of wading through all the cr@p stored on the old 800GB FreeNAS RAID5 array and move it from UFS to NTFS.

Oh, and I haven't encountered the 50Hz issue yet (my test last night was all dramas, The Closer, Law & Order something or other and Criminal Minds) - bring on the preseason Footy games to really test out the jerkiness...

Thanks for the tips, advice and suggestions so far...I'll keep reporting in so that other cheapskates can also benefit from my meanderings...

Cheers

Jeff