Or convert the videos into flv files, put them on the web for progressive streaming, and link to them from their facebook site while they aren't looking - not that I'd ever do a horrible thing like that of course
Great idea - I could add a potty-training link to impress their college friends.
Bob, I do hope the Foxsat HDR will be able to store my years of family camcorder clips one day. How else will I be able to embarrass my children for the Christmases to come?
I think Bob Cat confirmed that no codecs could be added, so only h.264 or MPEG2 encoded material would work.
They may also be strictly compliant H.264 and MPEG2 that are intolerant of some sources that stray outside the spec. This might cause problems for some home produced material. It would be consistant with Humax's policy of implementing a strictly compliant version of HDMI which seems to cause problems with some TVs that work happily enough with other HDMI sources.
Well, if it is indeed the Broadcom 7403 chip inside the PVR as I'm lead to believe, then there is actually slightly wider support in the chipset than just H.264 and MPEG2.
However, of course, to make that usable, you also have to tweak the firmware - it's not as complex perhaps as adding a whole extra codec, since those are on the chip, but it does raise all sorts of issues.
For example, do you allow other formats to be played via the main 'Media' screen; what file extensions do you support; how do you handle variants of those formats that the chipset might not cope with; how do you flag stuff in the UI so people can see which formats things are in; how do you handle the fact that these files don't have the metadata that comes with recordings - does it mean it's best off with a different browser for them, for example.
All those are mostly UI-related things that I think of off the top of my head. Then you've got to put in the hooks to tell the chipset what to expect when you feed it a stream.
While none of those is a show-stopper in terms of feasibility, I can quite see why making all those changes is likely to put it fairly low down the list in terms of tasks to allocate to the team. iPlayer and the ethernet port, for example, are probably much higher up, and more likely to be used by more people.
They may also be strictly compliant H.264 and MPEG2 that are intolerant of some sources that stray outside the spec. This might cause problems for some home produced material. It would be consistant with Humax's policy of implementing a strictly compliant version of HDMI which seems to cause problems with some TVs that work happily enough with other HDMI sources.
Is this such a problem - I would be quite happy to transcode my videos for viewing on the Humax if required - theres is loads of software on the internet which would do that.
The network port seems a little pointless without this ability (to me) - I am likely to never want to archive video off of the Humax.
Is this such a problem - I would be quite happy to transcode my videos for viewing on the Humax if required - theres is loads of software on the internet which would do that.
Don't know. The HDR will be designed to play out ts files streamed off air. It will depend on how compliant the software is with DVB standards and how tolerant the HDR codec, and the software interface with it, is of files that don't meet that standard.
I think you'll find that very few boxes (STBs, DVD recorders/players,etc) have such features. I suspect that the reason for this is part due to there being so many different flavours of MPEG2 in particular that manufactures prefer not to offer the feature. If they did so, it could lead to no end of complaints and support calls due to incompatibility.
Edit: I should add that, although you may transcode with software that meets the appropriate standards, there are many people who would think that a file should play just because it has a MPEG extension.
Bob_Cat stated the reason why they did not implement this feature is that they found that they tried some videos, presumably in a codec they thought the box should be able to play, but many didn't play correctly or worse, they crashed the box. If the chip relies on hardware decoding only (as opposed to using a CPU + software) I can well imagine that many problems are encountered as many videos that are not encoded correctly will not play with hardware decoding on a PC. So, you can understand why they didn't implement the feature as they were concerned people would end up crashing their boxes by trying to play incorrectly encoded files and then bombard Humax with complaints about it.
Comments
If you've got kids you 'must' have a PS3
That'll do the job
They may also be strictly compliant H.264 and MPEG2 that are intolerant of some sources that stray outside the spec. This might cause problems for some home produced material. It would be consistant with Humax's policy of implementing a strictly compliant version of HDMI which seems to cause problems with some TVs that work happily enough with other HDMI sources.
However, of course, to make that usable, you also have to tweak the firmware - it's not as complex perhaps as adding a whole extra codec, since those are on the chip, but it does raise all sorts of issues.
For example, do you allow other formats to be played via the main 'Media' screen; what file extensions do you support; how do you handle variants of those formats that the chipset might not cope with; how do you flag stuff in the UI so people can see which formats things are in; how do you handle the fact that these files don't have the metadata that comes with recordings - does it mean it's best off with a different browser for them, for example.
All those are mostly UI-related things that I think of off the top of my head. Then you've got to put in the hooks to tell the chipset what to expect when you feed it a stream.
While none of those is a show-stopper in terms of feasibility, I can quite see why making all those changes is likely to put it fairly low down the list in terms of tasks to allocate to the team. iPlayer and the ethernet port, for example, are probably much higher up, and more likely to be used by more people.
Is this such a problem - I would be quite happy to transcode my videos for viewing on the Humax if required - theres is loads of software on the internet which would do that.
The network port seems a little pointless without this ability (to me) - I am likely to never want to archive video off of the Humax.
Don't know. The HDR will be designed to play out ts files streamed off air. It will depend on how compliant the software is with DVB standards and how tolerant the HDR codec, and the software interface with it, is of files that don't meet that standard.
I think you'll find that very few boxes (STBs, DVD recorders/players,etc) have such features. I suspect that the reason for this is part due to there being so many different flavours of MPEG2 in particular that manufactures prefer not to offer the feature. If they did so, it could lead to no end of complaints and support calls due to incompatibility.
Edit: I should add that, although you may transcode with software that meets the appropriate standards, there are many people who would think that a file should play just because it has a MPEG extension.