EnF70
01-04-09, 14:41
Have you ever considered watching TV on your laptop in the comfort of your bed?
While this is fine for SD channels and VLC does a good job of playing the content from your receiver, trying to do the same for HD channels poses a couple of problems.
These problems reside in the complexity and the high bitrate of the H.264 encoded stream which require a lot of processing power and a fair share of network bandwidth to be decoded in real-time for a smooth playback.
If your laptop/PC is equipped with a modern graphics chipset that can decode a H.264 stream in hardware and take the pain away from the CPU, such as a NVidia series 8/9 chipset or newer, an ATI/AMD Radeon HD or a recent Intel GMA with H.264 decoding support then you might consider yourself lucky.
All you need is a player capable of using these features. VLC, despite being a very good streaming player, doesn't seem to be able to use them, at least not yet.
An open-source player that can do H.264 in hardware on Windows Vista through DXVA2 is "Media Player Classic - Home Cinema". Throw in a Fast-Ethernet wired connection or a 802.11n Wi-Fi connection and you are good to go.
Here are a couple of screenshots from a laptop equipped with an Intel Dual-Core @ 2.26GHz, an ATI Radeon HD 3470 graphics chipset and an Intel Wi-Fi Link 5100 AGN (802.11n).
The source is a Kathrein UFS-910 HD satellite receiver running Enigma2 and streaming live HD over HTTP.
Also, I've used a custom version for the "MPEG PS/TS/PVA source filter" (available on request) as the one bundled with MPC-HC v1.2.908 has a problem with the HD video stream detection.
1 (http://sateliti-upload.info//index.php?action=view&filename=hdstream1.jpg&directory=Kathrein/Kathrein%20UFS-910%20Hd/Settings) 2 (http://sateliti-upload.info//index.php?action=view&filename=hdstream2.jpg&directory=Kathrein/Kathrein%20UFS-910%20Hd/Settings) 3 (http://sateliti-upload.info//index.php?action=view&filename=hdstream3.jpg&directory=Kathrein/Kathrein%20UFS-910%20Hd/Settings) 4 (http://sateliti-upload.info//index.php?action=view&filename=hdstream4.jpg&directory=Kathrein/Kathrein%20UFS-910%20Hd/Settings) 5 (http://sateliti-upload.info//index.php?action=view&filename=hdstream5.jpg&directory=Kathrein/Kathrein%20UFS-910%20Hd/Settings)
While this is fine for SD channels and VLC does a good job of playing the content from your receiver, trying to do the same for HD channels poses a couple of problems.
These problems reside in the complexity and the high bitrate of the H.264 encoded stream which require a lot of processing power and a fair share of network bandwidth to be decoded in real-time for a smooth playback.
If your laptop/PC is equipped with a modern graphics chipset that can decode a H.264 stream in hardware and take the pain away from the CPU, such as a NVidia series 8/9 chipset or newer, an ATI/AMD Radeon HD or a recent Intel GMA with H.264 decoding support then you might consider yourself lucky.
All you need is a player capable of using these features. VLC, despite being a very good streaming player, doesn't seem to be able to use them, at least not yet.
An open-source player that can do H.264 in hardware on Windows Vista through DXVA2 is "Media Player Classic - Home Cinema". Throw in a Fast-Ethernet wired connection or a 802.11n Wi-Fi connection and you are good to go.
Here are a couple of screenshots from a laptop equipped with an Intel Dual-Core @ 2.26GHz, an ATI Radeon HD 3470 graphics chipset and an Intel Wi-Fi Link 5100 AGN (802.11n).
The source is a Kathrein UFS-910 HD satellite receiver running Enigma2 and streaming live HD over HTTP.
Also, I've used a custom version for the "MPEG PS/TS/PVA source filter" (available on request) as the one bundled with MPC-HC v1.2.908 has a problem with the HD video stream detection.
1 (http://sateliti-upload.info//index.php?action=view&filename=hdstream1.jpg&directory=Kathrein/Kathrein%20UFS-910%20Hd/Settings) 2 (http://sateliti-upload.info//index.php?action=view&filename=hdstream2.jpg&directory=Kathrein/Kathrein%20UFS-910%20Hd/Settings) 3 (http://sateliti-upload.info//index.php?action=view&filename=hdstream3.jpg&directory=Kathrein/Kathrein%20UFS-910%20Hd/Settings) 4 (http://sateliti-upload.info//index.php?action=view&filename=hdstream4.jpg&directory=Kathrein/Kathrein%20UFS-910%20Hd/Settings) 5 (http://sateliti-upload.info//index.php?action=view&filename=hdstream5.jpg&directory=Kathrein/Kathrein%20UFS-910%20Hd/Settings)