SAGETV HD THEATRE 300 WINDOWS
High-definition clips recorded using Windows Media Center’s ‘best’ quality setting were the worst, briefly freezing every few seconds. I also wasn’t able to play back DVR-MS files in a glitch-free fashion. After only a few minutes’ worth of watching a program sourced from PlayOn, the stream would disconnect and both the PlayOn and Windows Media Player UPnP entries would subsequently disappear from the Filesystems menu list until I power-cycled the STP-HD200. This situation ironically occurred in spite of the fact that, after entering my Windows Workgroup name in the STP-HD200 settings, I was consistently able to access its directory structure from other LAN clients.Įven with the ReadyNAS shut off, the STP-HD200 exhibited some noteworthy anomalies. The next time I installed the add-in, the situation flip-flopped UPnP servers magically reappeared, but SMB access was disabled. The first time I installed it, I gained sustained SMB access from the STP-HD200 but lost access to UPnP servers (including PlayOn). I tried experimenting with the ReadyNAS ToggleMasterBrowser add-in, unfortunately without success.
Yet keeping the ReadyNAS permanently shut off wasn’t a tenable option. On a hunch, I shut down the ReadyNAS, and after the Dell laptop subsequently took over SMB master browser responsibilities on my peer-to-peer Windows Workgroup, the STP-HD200 was able to browse the network without problems. The SMB master browser implementation on the ReadyNAS, however, seems from my experience to be flawed, particularly with respect to LAN clients (like the STP-HD200) based on Unix and Unix-derivative (i.e. As this page indicates:īy default, the ReadyNAS will become the SMB master browser on your network, unless you have a Windows NT/2K/2K3 server on the network. I bring this all up because several times in the past, I’d run into SMB-related problems when my ReadyNAS X6 was operational on the network. I’d initially thought that SMB/CIFS support came from Samba, but SageTV representative Mike Machado indicated that the STP-HD200 runs an open-source derivative called jcifs. And, as this screenshot I took from a telnet session between one of my Macs and the STP-HD200 indicates: Unfortunately, I was unable to browse the network, receiving an ‘Invalid directory’ error message each time I tried to do so.Ī quick aside this product review includes a teardown indicating that the processing core of the STP-HD200 is Sigma Design’s SMP 8635 LF, running at 300 MHz. DVR-MS in my case represents a trans-code (at a user-configurable quality vs bitrate tradeoff) of the incoming ATSC stream, still based on MPEG-2 video and either MPEG-2 or AC-3 audio, but using an ASF ‘wrapper’ instead of the original transport stream container. I next tried to access the DVR-MS recordings made by the Dell laptop’s Media Center application. Problem one was extremely sluggish menu navigation performance, which upgrading to the latest beta firmware release went a long way towards resolving. An encouraging start…but from there, things unfortunately went downhill. That’s last Friday night’s episode of Dollhouse, streaming from Hulu via PlayOn.
SAGETV HD THEATRE 300 CODE
And when I accessed the ‘Filesystems’ menu option (after first plugging my zip code into the ‘Weather’ menu option settings), a UPnP icon came up for PlayOn running on the Dell laptop, along with UPnP icons for Windows Media Player’s built-in server on that same system, and for TwonkyMedia running on my NETGEAR ReadyNAS X6 and Linksys NAS200 NASs:
SAGETV HD THEATRE 300 720P
Although in retrospect I realized I could have fixed this glitch via the overscan settings in the STP-HD200 options menus, I alternatively (albeit slightly more softly) resolved it by defining 720p as the maximum output resolution. The STP-HD200 GUI came up crisp and clear with a 16:9 aspect ratio at 1080p, although the left side of the user interface ‘fell’ off the side of the screen (whose native resolution is 1440×900 pixels). I was happy to see that, unlike with my prior DMA2100 experiment, the STP-HD200 drove the HDfury adapter just fine (and therefore would presumably also handle the LCD’s DVI input, though I didn’t test this configuration). My Viewsonic LCD monitor’s VGA input was unpopulated, so I decided to mate the STP-HD200’s HDMI output with it via a HDfury Gamer Edition I also connected the STP-HD200’s two-channel analog audio outputs to the Viewsonic’s analog audio input via a dual RCA-to-TSR 1/8″ plug cable adapter. Continued from ‘ SageTV’s HD Theater: Interoperability (Versus Proprietary) May Be Better, But It Isn’t Easier‘…
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