We don't have an ETA on supporting online HD videos. The main issue is that the majority of our customers do not have PC's that can handle the realtime transcoding of such high resolution videos. This is of course slowly changing over time, so it is becoming a higher priority for us. We will be adding it, but we can't promise any dates yet.
This would be a HUGE addition. If it is mainly a concern over PC capabilities that it preventing this from being a high priority I would suggest that you add asap, but disable it by default. PlayOn barely registers at all on my setup (Intel Q9450 @ 3.2GHz w/ 4GB DDR3).
We understand the demand. Believe us. But the market share of folks who have PC's that can handle HD transcoding is quite small, and the amount of work required to add this functionality in PlayOn is nontrivial. So, we absolutely intend to add this feature, but it's unfortunately lower priority at the moment, as it would benefit too few people, and consume a lot of our resources. Sorry we don't have a more satisfying answer at the moment!
Do you know the majority of your customers do not have PC's that can handle the realtime transcoding of such high resolution videos.
It is simple. Your high end customer is waiting for your HD. They have high end computer. They are rich and they want HD only. You can relase HD version with 100US price tag.
Thanks for your feedback and suggestions. As you know, we do intend to add HD support. But we've already done an extensive market analysis, and the percentage of potential users we would get from adding HD support is quite small at the moment. Most folks just can't afford the cost of a brand new quad-core machine. Until the economics make sense for us, it's unlikely we'll spend a lot of development time on this. The date when HD support makes sense is approaching for sure, though!
You can have a quad core machine for ~$600-700. I'd venture to guess that most people paid way more than that for their current machine. That's less than 1 year's worth of cable and probably a couple of months on that expensive iphone...
We agree that it's not impossible for many users to purchase a new quad-core machine. But our market analysis so far points to folks wanting to rather spend their money elsewhere, and forgo HD support in PlayOn for the time-being. The demand has been minimal so far, and most of our users just don't have the means (yet).
I am sorry I have to disagree with the admin as well. What your company does is absolutely in my area of expertise, and I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that you need to rethink not only the capabilities of your "target market" but as well the requirements to stream HD. I have been able to do so with windows media center and Tversity for over 3 years with only a dual core, 2gig laptop. And this is still far beyond the requirements. I was handling HD streaming prior to that with a p4 3.2 gig machine as well. I am actually a late adopter at this point as far as PlayOn is concerned and every single person that has it has owned at least 1 decent pc and a PS3 or WII neither of which tends to scream " Laggards" or even "Late Majority." You should take this as a compliment when I say that this product is ready for "mass-market" appeal and if you over look a feature that was built into the first Xbox 360 its guaranteed someone will take advantage of you wonderfully open community reap all your benefits and rewards by offering this feature and letting the user decide whether or not they have the processing power to run it. Of course I am just some random no faced passer through so I am sure my comment will be simply glossed over if not scoffed at. Great product guys, honestly! Don't stifle your innovation with outdated marketing facts.
Rest assured: we are getting very close to adding HD support in PlayOn. It has been bubbling up in priority since day one.
When you used TVersity for HD videos, were you realtime transcoding them, or were you just serving existing HD videos from your PC to your device/game console directly?
I am sorry I have to disagree with the admin as well. What your company does is absolutely in my area of expertise, and I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that you need to rethink not only the capabilities of your "target market" but as well the requirements to stream HD. I have been able to do so with windows media center and Tversity for over 3 years with only a dual core, 2gig laptop. And this is still far beyond the requirements. I was handling HD streaming prior to that with a p4 3.2 gig machine as well. I am actually a late adopter at this point as far as PlayOn is concerned and every single person that has it has owned at least 1 decent pc and a PS3 or WII neither of which tends to scream " Laggards" or even "Late Majority." You should take this as a compliment when I say that this product is ready for "mass-market" appeal and if you over look a feature that was built into the first Xbox 360 its guaranteed someone will take advantage of you wonderfully open community reap all your benefits and rewards by offering this feature and letting the user decide whether or not they have the processing power to run it. Of course I am just some random no faced passer through so I am sure my comment will be simply glossed over if not scoffed at. Great product guys, honestly! Don't stifle your innovation with outdated marketing facts.
I use Tversity as well. Please provide a link to the HD video you are streaming from the internet. Then the admin and rest of us can test this. Please don't link to a YouTube HD file or similar which are crap. At a minimum you should be able to provide the stream specs to provide a frame of reference.
I have a dual core 2.8 Gz and it works hard to recode a 1080i file without CUDA support. Obviously, CUDA helps.
Rest assured: we are getting very close to adding HD support in PlayOn. It has been bubbling up in priority since day one.
When you used TVersity for HD videos, were you realtime transcoding them, or were you just serving existing HD videos from your PC to your device/game console directly?
I can verify that it is possible to stream a .ts file IF IT IS NATIVE TO THE DEVICE without transcoding.
The vast majority of what is called hd on the net is dvd quality at best and users drool for no reason. Perhaps all of these users should provide links to what they think should be streamed.
It has been a while, since my xbox kicked the bucket a few months back I have been using my ps3 as only a game system and blu-ray player.
My process was to have my movies stored in a shared folder on a server located far from my home, in whatever encoding they were downloaded as.
I then enter the links to the movies on my laptop, my gateway cx210x laptop would then do all the heavy lifting of transcoding the movies and streaming to the xbox.
And as I was typing this I was about to type "all using tversity" but then I realized it was using transcode360 and windows media center. I did use Tvesrsity for a while in this process, but I will admit its stability left a lot to look for else where. Which is why I switched to transcode360 and windows media center. I have yet to try streaming HD movies to my PS3 although I will have to say linux does a fantastic job with that.
I might be able to provide a link to one of the HD movies, if it would be helpful but I need to check on the security implications of that seeing how its a private server.
It sounds like you were pre-transcoding your HD videos, and then serving them to your PS3 later. This topic is more about providing access to online HD streams, from those content providers who have it. To do this requires a beefy PC to handle the realtime transcoding.
I don't understand the excuse that HD streaming needs a Quad Core processor.
I'm on a 2.9GHz dual core machine and can watch HD from netflix just fine in-browser on the PC.
Likewise, Roku's box supports HD (because I have one of those also) and:
"Roku Spokesperson Tim Twerdahl said that the Player runs Linux on an NXP system-on-chip processor. The device has 256MB of RAM, and 64MB of Flash."
Linux on an embedded processor? Something tells me that thing's not quad core. And PlayOn's got just a *tad* bit more than 256MB of RAM to work with on, i'd venture to say, 99.9% of all PCs it's running on.
It sounds like you were pre-transcoding your HD videos, and then serving them to your PS3 later. This topic is more about providing access to online HD streams, from those content providers who have it. To do this requires a beefy PC to handle the realtime transcoding.
Did you even read my post?
No I was transcoding all of the files on my Cx210x tablet pc. Its a fairly low power laptop. My files on the server are MKV, MP4, AVIs of All types, and even a few flv. There was no transcoding happening on the server, in this function it is merely a file server. And this was done on the fly, I was not storing a copy of the file to my laptops very limited hard disk drive.
I don't understand the excuse that HD streaming needs a Quad Core processor.
We have never stipulated that HD streaming per se requires a quad core processor. We are stating that realtime transcoding of HD content (which is being streamed off the net) requires a fairly powerful machine. The Roku device is natively playing HD content, without any transcoding in between, so the minimum requirements are significantly lower. Realtime transcoding is a fairly CPU intensive operation. Sorry for any confusion!
brokenflipside wrote:
No I was transcoding all of the files on my Cx210x tablet pc. Its a fairly low power laptop. My files on the server are MKV, MP4, AVIs of All types, and even a few flv. There was no transcoding happening on the server, in this function it is merely a file server. And this was done on the fly, I was not storing a copy of the file to my laptops very limited hard disk drive.
Our apologies for not understanding your original setup. We misread what you had been doing with Transcode 360. Was most of the content that you did this with true HD? And your PC did just fine with realtime transcoding? According to Passmark (www.cpubenchmark.net) your CPU rates at 857, which is a decent mid-range processor. We'd be curious (and a bit pleasantly surprised!) to know if Transcode 360 was able to convert a full HD video in faster than realtime.
They were absolutely true HD, when you spend as much time working with the adobe master collection as I do, you need to know your resolutions, bitrate, dpi, etc...
thanks for the hard work. Seems to me the more I have read in the past 24 hours is that some had taken the position it wasn't that important and it wouldn't be supported anytime soon, your answer now is very reassuring for any "on the fence" customer, as the #1 concern for all customers dumping any money on online programs like this is extensibility. How long is this going to work for me? Is this another $30 wasted for a one time use?
Thanks again, I really look forward to what you guys have cooked up for us next.
I don't understand the excuse that HD streaming needs a Quad Core processor.
We have never stipulated that HD streaming per se requires a quad core processor. We are stating that realtime transcoding of HD content (which is being streamed off the net) requires a fairly powerful machine. The Roku device is natively playing HD content, without any transcoding in between, so the minimum requirements are significantly lower. Realtime transcoding is a fairly CPU intensive operation. Sorry for any confusion!
Do you mean avoid transcoding? This is essentially impossible, because no DLNA devices on the market (today) can handle the native codecs for online dynamic streaming.
We can absolutely realtime transcode these streams, however. But the issue at hand is that the majority of our customers don't have PC's that are powerful enough to do this. We intend to add this functionality soon anyway.
I don't understand the excuse that HD streaming needs a Quad Core processor.
I'm on a 2.9GHz dual core machine and can watch HD from netflix just fine in-browser on the PC.
Likewise, Roku's box supports HD (because I have one of those also) and:
"Roku Spokesperson Tim Twerdahl said that the Player runs Linux on an NXP system-on-chip processor. The device has 256MB of RAM, and 64MB of Flash."
Linux on an embedded processor? Something tells me that thing's not quad core. And PlayOn's got just a *tad* bit more than 256MB of RAM to work with on, i'd venture to say, 99.9% of all PCs it's running on.
Quad core is not a requirement for HD anything.
Uhmmmm ..... you are aware that a DSP and PC are two entirely different chip types? You're comparing apples to oranges.
They were absolutely true HD, when you spend as much time working with the adobe master collection as I do, you need to know your resolutions, bitrate, dpi, etc...
Excellent. So what were the compression type, bitrates and resolution of the source file and output file? And what was your cpu load and do you use CUDA or any other gpu assistance?
Admin, when you say "The Roku device is natively playing HD content, without any transcoding in between" how could it do that? I mean, and I don't have a Roku, that I assume it's connected to the Internet and getting content from the Internet. Further I assume that that content is not playable as it stands. I further assume that the Roku is connected to your monitor directly and what goes out of the Roku is, for lack of a better word, "TV signals" that are native to the monitor.
Therefore isn't some sort of transformation happening at the Roku box? Otherwise why have a Roku box at all? Just hook the Internet up directly to the TV!
I assume therefore that the job of the Roku is to take the Internet content and convert it to TV signals that the monitor can consume by a process of transforming it - sorta like transcoding - but this is all done in hardware?
The Roku device has an integrated solution with Netflix, using proprietary API's that Netflix has shared with the device manufacturer. This is a Netflix-specific service available on the Roku. The device is able to natively play the specific media file codecs and file formats that are served to it by Netflix. There is no transcoding involved. Just native codec support. The actual image is of course rendered through the video output of the device to reach the TV screen, but this isn't "transcoding" per se, and is in no way CPU intensive.
Thanks for the explanation. Would having these proprietary Netflix API's help Playon in any way? If so then what would it take for MediaMall to license them from Netflix?
Admin, just want to start off by saying that I do appreciate your willingness to communicate with the community on this topic.
On to more technical matters. As far as I can gather, most of the people in this thread, when speaking of steaming HD content, are talking about the main services you offer (Hulu, Netflix, etc). I totally understand the amount of horsepower required to transcode an HD stream on the fly. While I would like to see an option for those whose machines CAN handle this, my specific question is about streaming HD media that is on my local machine. I understand that this aspect of PlayOn is still in beta, but I figured it was still worth asking about. When I'm streaming an HD video (.mkv file), it doesn't seem like it is streaming to my PS3 in it's full native resolution. Or if it is, the quality seems sub-par compared to playing the file on my PC. Can you elaborate on what resolution it is streaming at and if there are any plans to fully support streaming an HD file at its native resolution and quality?
Thanks for reading. I love the software so far and can't wait to see where it will be going next.
-Tom
EDIT: Part of why I'm asking this is because I can't seem to get .mkv files to natively stream to the PS3 via Windows Media Player. If PlayOn could transcode the file at its native resolution, that would eliminate the problem of incompatibility. Thanks!
Local media is being transcoded always, even if the device could potentially handle the native file. This will be fixed sometime in the future, to avoid unnecessary transcoding. Our transcoding for local files will cap a maximum size, so in the case of HD content, it will be downsized. We will potentially change this as well. Keep an eye out on the release notes over time!
Thanks for the feedback. I really do think a lot of people would definitely love to see transcoded media at HD resolutions. Keep up the good work PlayOn team!
Ditto to the NEED HD reguests. Don't think that just because a lot of your customers dusted off an old pc to run PLAYON(me included) that they are not willing to upgrade/swap it for good HD. HOWEVER, I also run TVERSITY on the same machine...why? Well, The overall support for local files including streaming HD etc. makes it worth it...the only thing they miss is NETFLIX! I would look at TVERSITY as a model for how to handle streaming local HD files.
I still find it interesting that your software says my pc is "medium" cpu power. Before a certain update (several updates ago) my cpu was listed as "high". Once that changed, my streaming quality degraded when coming from PlayOn.
I have always been able to 'stream' HD hulu and netflix directly to the pc and have had no issues. I use the PS3 Media Server software as well and am able to stream HD without issue.
jacktwist, we've seen the opposite here. Always used to measure as Medium. Now it measures as High. Streaming quality is decent. Dual Core AMD Athlon 1.8GHz laptop.
The performance check takes two things into consideration: your CPU as benchmarked by services such as www.passmark.com, and whether or not you've run a CPU test in PlayOn Settings. The latter overrules the former. Either way, you can manually choose the performance setting in PlayOn Settings and experiment to see what kinds of results you get. Choosing "Max" will guarantee the best video quality, but if playback is choppy and your CPU is pegged, it means your PC is not fast enough (which could be due to hardware, or security software).
I have read through the thread and can understand the economics involved in spending development money on a feature which may only be used by a small subset of individuals.
I hope this bit of news helps in altering the feature priority in favor of supporting HD. Adbobe has released its a beta of Flash 10.1 which contains GPU acceleration for GeForce 9600 and above video cards which includes the ION chipset.
I tried PlayOn on my quad core PC and it worked well but I really wanted it to work on my ION 330 HTPC but currently it does not meet your CPU requirements. I have tested Flash 10.1 on my HTPC and I can run HD YouTube videos on my HTPC at a decent framerate with this beta whereas previously it was unwatchable.
I'd like to hear about this as well. Trying to make some decisions on getting rid of cable, and having HD access is a big thing.
We don't have an ETA on supporting online HD videos. The main issue is that the majority of our customers do not have PC's that can handle the realtime transcoding of such high resolution videos. This is of course slowly changing over time, so it is becoming a higher priority for us. We will be adding it, but we can't promise any dates yet.
PlayOn Administrator
This would be a HUGE addition. If it is mainly a concern over PC capabilities that it preventing this from being a high priority I would suggest that you add asap, but disable it by default. PlayOn barely registers at all on my setup (Intel Q9450 @ 3.2GHz w/ 4GB DDR3).
We understand the demand. Believe us. But the market share of folks who have PC's that can handle HD transcoding is quite small, and the amount of work required to add this functionality in PlayOn is nontrivial. So, we absolutely intend to add this feature, but it's unfortunately lower priority at the moment, as it would benefit too few people, and consume a lot of our resources. Sorry we don't have a more satisfying answer at the moment!
PlayOn Administrator
Do you know the majority of your customers do not have PC's that can handle the realtime transcoding of such high resolution videos.
It is simple. Your high end customer is waiting for your HD. They have high end computer. They are rich and they want HD only. You can relase HD version with 100US price tag.
Thanks
Thanks for your feedback and suggestions. As you know, we do intend to add HD support. But we've already done an extensive market analysis, and the percentage of potential users we would get from adding HD support is quite small at the moment. Most folks just can't afford the cost of a brand new quad-core machine. Until the economics make sense for us, it's unlikely we'll spend a lot of development time on this. The date when HD support makes sense is approaching for sure, though!
PlayOn Administrator
You can have a quad core machine for ~$600-700. I'd venture to guess that most people paid way more than that for their current machine. That's less than 1 year's worth of cable and probably a couple of months on that expensive iphone...
We agree that it's not impossible for many users to purchase a new quad-core machine. But our market analysis so far points to folks wanting to rather spend their money elsewhere, and forgo HD support in PlayOn for the time-being. The demand has been minimal so far, and most of our users just don't have the means (yet).
PlayOn Administrator
HD would be nice - at the beginning it does not have to be 1080p
I am sorry I have to disagree with the admin as well. What your company does is absolutely in my area of expertise, and I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that you need to rethink not only the capabilities of your "target market" but as well the requirements to stream HD. I have been able to do so with windows media center and Tversity for over 3 years with only a dual core, 2gig laptop. And this is still far beyond the requirements. I was handling HD streaming prior to that with a p4 3.2 gig machine as well. I am actually a late adopter at this point as far as PlayOn is concerned and every single person that has it has owned at least 1 decent pc and a PS3 or WII neither of which tends to scream " Laggards" or even "Late Majority." You should take this as a compliment when I say that this product is ready for "mass-market" appeal and if you over look a feature that was built into the first Xbox 360 its guaranteed someone will take advantage of you wonderfully open community reap all your benefits and rewards by offering this feature and letting the user decide whether or not they have the processing power to run it. Of course I am just some random no faced passer through so I am sure my comment will be simply glossed over if not scoffed at. Great product guys, honestly! Don't stifle your innovation with outdated marketing facts.
Rest assured: we are getting very close to adding HD support in PlayOn. It has been bubbling up in priority since day one.
When you used TVersity for HD videos, were you realtime transcoding them, or were you just serving existing HD videos from your PC to your device/game console directly?
PlayOn Administrator
I use Tversity as well. Please provide a link to the HD video you are streaming from the internet. Then the admin and rest of us can test this. Please don't link to a YouTube HD file or similar which are crap. At a minimum you should be able to provide the stream specs to provide a frame of reference.
I have a dual core 2.8 Gz and it works hard to recode a 1080i file without CUDA support. Obviously, CUDA helps.
When you used TVersity for HD videos, were you realtime transcoding them, or were you just serving existing HD videos from your PC to your device/game console directly?
I can verify that it is possible to stream a .ts file IF IT IS NATIVE TO THE DEVICE without transcoding.
The vast majority of what is called hd on the net is dvd quality at best and users drool for no reason. Perhaps all of these users should provide links to what they think should be streamed.
It has been a while, since my xbox kicked the bucket a few months back I have been using my ps3 as only a game system and blu-ray player.
My process was to have my movies stored in a shared folder on a server located far from my home, in whatever encoding they were downloaded as.
I then enter the links to the movies on my laptop, my gateway cx210x laptop would then do all the heavy lifting of transcoding the movies and streaming to the xbox.
And as I was typing this I was about to type "all using tversity" but then I realized it was using transcode360 and windows media center. I did use Tvesrsity for a while in this process, but I will admit its stability left a lot to look for else where. Which is why I switched to transcode360 and windows media center. I have yet to try streaming HD movies to my PS3 although I will have to say linux does a fantastic job with that.
I might be able to provide a link to one of the HD movies, if it would be helpful but I need to check on the security implications of that seeing how its a private server.
It sounds like you were pre-transcoding your HD videos, and then serving them to your PS3 later. This topic is more about providing access to online HD streams, from those content providers who have it. To do this requires a beefy PC to handle the realtime transcoding.
PlayOn Administrator
I don't understand the excuse that HD streaming needs a Quad Core processor.
I'm on a 2.9GHz dual core machine and can watch HD from netflix just fine in-browser on the PC.
Likewise, Roku's box supports HD (because I have one of those also) and:
"Roku Spokesperson Tim Twerdahl said that the Player runs Linux on an NXP system-on-chip processor. The device has 256MB of RAM, and 64MB of Flash."
Linux on an embedded processor? Something tells me that thing's not quad core. And PlayOn's got just a *tad* bit more than 256MB of RAM to work with on, i'd venture to say, 99.9% of all PCs it's running on.
Quad core is not a requirement for HD anything.
Did you even read my post?
No I was transcoding all of the files on my Cx210x tablet pc. Its a fairly low power laptop. My files on the server are MKV, MP4, AVIs of All types, and even a few flv. There was no transcoding happening on the server, in this function it is merely a file server. And this was done on the fly, I was not storing a copy of the file to my laptops very limited hard disk drive.
We have never stipulated that HD streaming per se requires a quad core processor. We are stating that realtime transcoding of HD content (which is being streamed off the net) requires a fairly powerful machine. The Roku device is natively playing HD content, without any transcoding in between, so the minimum requirements are significantly lower. Realtime transcoding is a fairly CPU intensive operation. Sorry for any confusion!
Our apologies for not understanding your original setup. We misread what you had been doing with Transcode 360. Was most of the content that you did this with true HD? And your PC did just fine with realtime transcoding? According to Passmark (www.cpubenchmark.net) your CPU rates at 857, which is a decent mid-range processor. We'd be curious (and a bit pleasantly surprised!) to know if Transcode 360 was able to convert a full HD video in faster than realtime.
PlayOn Administrator
They were absolutely true HD, when you spend as much time working with the adobe master collection as I do, you need to know your resolutions, bitrate, dpi, etc...
Good to hear. In any case, we are soon adding support for online HD streams. It has become a bigger priority for us with each passing day.
PlayOn Administrator
thanks for the hard work. Seems to me the more I have read in the past 24 hours is that some had taken the position it wasn't that important and it wouldn't be supported anytime soon, your answer now is very reassuring for any "on the fence" customer, as the #1 concern for all customers dumping any money on online programs like this is extensibility. How long is this going to work for me? Is this another $30 wasted for a one time use?
Thanks again, I really look forward to what you guys have cooked up for us next.
We have never stipulated that HD streaming per se requires a quad core processor. We are stating that realtime transcoding of HD content (which is being streamed off the net) requires a fairly powerful machine. The Roku device is natively playing HD content, without any transcoding in between, so the minimum requirements are significantly lower. Realtime transcoding is a fairly CPU intensive operation. Sorry for any confusion!
Do you mean avoid transcoding? This is essentially impossible, because no DLNA devices on the market (today) can handle the native codecs for online dynamic streaming.
We can absolutely realtime transcode these streams, however. But the issue at hand is that the majority of our customers don't have PC's that are powerful enough to do this. We intend to add this functionality soon anyway.
PlayOn Administrator
I'm on a 2.9GHz dual core machine and can watch HD from netflix just fine in-browser on the PC.
Likewise, Roku's box supports HD (because I have one of those also) and:
"Roku Spokesperson Tim Twerdahl said that the Player runs Linux on an NXP system-on-chip processor. The device has 256MB of RAM, and 64MB of Flash."
Linux on an embedded processor? Something tells me that thing's not quad core. And PlayOn's got just a *tad* bit more than 256MB of RAM to work with on, i'd venture to say, 99.9% of all PCs it's running on.
Quad core is not a requirement for HD anything.
Uhmmmm ..... you are aware that a DSP and PC are two entirely different chip types? You're comparing apples to oranges.
Excellent. So what were the compression type, bitrates and resolution of the source file and output file? And what was your cpu load and do you use CUDA or any other gpu assistance?
Admin, when you say "The Roku device is natively playing HD content, without any transcoding in between" how could it do that? I mean, and I don't have a Roku, that I assume it's connected to the Internet and getting content from the Internet. Further I assume that that content is not playable as it stands. I further assume that the Roku is connected to your monitor directly and what goes out of the Roku is, for lack of a better word, "TV signals" that are native to the monitor.
Therefore isn't some sort of transformation happening at the Roku box? Otherwise why have a Roku box at all? Just hook the Internet up directly to the TV!
I assume therefore that the job of the Roku is to take the Internet content and convert it to TV signals that the monitor can consume by a process of transforming it - sorta like transcoding - but this is all done in hardware?
The Roku device has an integrated solution with Netflix, using proprietary API's that Netflix has shared with the device manufacturer. This is a Netflix-specific service available on the Roku. The device is able to natively play the specific media file codecs and file formats that are served to it by Netflix. There is no transcoding involved. Just native codec support. The actual image is of course rendered through the video output of the device to reach the TV screen, but this isn't "transcoding" per se, and is in no way CPU intensive.
PlayOn Administrator
Thanks for the explanation. Would having these proprietary Netflix API's help Playon in any way? If so then what would it take for MediaMall to license them from Netflix?
We are of course always trying to work with content providers. Until those deals are public, the details unfortunately remain confidential.
PlayOn Administrator
From that response I can guess that yes these proprietary API's would be helpful (you could have said that). Good luck in getting the deals then...
Admin, just want to start off by saying that I do appreciate your willingness to communicate with the community on this topic.
On to more technical matters. As far as I can gather, most of the people in this thread, when speaking of steaming HD content, are talking about the main services you offer (Hulu, Netflix, etc). I totally understand the amount of horsepower required to transcode an HD stream on the fly. While I would like to see an option for those whose machines CAN handle this, my specific question is about streaming HD media that is on my local machine. I understand that this aspect of PlayOn is still in beta, but I figured it was still worth asking about. When I'm streaming an HD video (.mkv file), it doesn't seem like it is streaming to my PS3 in it's full native resolution. Or if it is, the quality seems sub-par compared to playing the file on my PC. Can you elaborate on what resolution it is streaming at and if there are any plans to fully support streaming an HD file at its native resolution and quality?
Thanks for reading. I love the software so far and can't wait to see where it will be going next.
-Tom
EDIT: Part of why I'm asking this is because I can't seem to get .mkv files to natively stream to the PS3 via Windows Media Player. If PlayOn could transcode the file at its native resolution, that would eliminate the problem of incompatibility. Thanks!
Local media is being transcoded always, even if the device could potentially handle the native file. This will be fixed sometime in the future, to avoid unnecessary transcoding. Our transcoding for local files will cap a maximum size, so in the case of HD content, it will be downsized. We will potentially change this as well. Keep an eye out on the release notes over time!
PlayOn Administrator
Thanks for the feedback. I really do think a lot of people would definitely love to see transcoded media at HD resolutions. Keep up the good work PlayOn team!
Ditto to the NEED HD reguests. Don't think that just because a lot of your customers dusted off an old pc to run PLAYON(me included) that they are not willing to upgrade/swap it for good HD. HOWEVER, I also run TVERSITY on the same machine...why? Well, The overall support for local files including streaming HD etc. makes it worth it...the only thing they miss is NETFLIX! I would look at TVERSITY as a model for how to handle streaming local HD files.
Until HD is offered I have discontinued your Service and here Stopped informing people of it.-I hope others don't follow suit. Best of Luck.
I still find it interesting that your software says my pc is "medium" cpu power. Before a certain update (several updates ago) my cpu was listed as "high". Once that changed, my streaming quality degraded when coming from PlayOn.
I have always been able to 'stream' HD hulu and netflix directly to the pc and have had no issues. I use the PS3 Media Server software as well and am able to stream HD without issue.
jacktwist, we've seen the opposite here. Always used to measure as Medium. Now it measures as High. Streaming quality is decent. Dual Core AMD Athlon 1.8GHz laptop.
The performance check takes two things into consideration: your CPU as benchmarked by services such as www.passmark.com, and whether or not you've run a CPU test in PlayOn Settings. The latter overrules the former. Either way, you can manually choose the performance setting in PlayOn Settings and experiment to see what kinds of results you get. Choosing "Max" will guarantee the best video quality, but if playback is choppy and your CPU is pegged, it means your PC is not fast enough (which could be due to hardware, or security software).
PlayOn Administrator
I have read through the thread and can understand the economics involved in spending development money on a feature which may only be used by a small subset of individuals.
I hope this bit of news helps in altering the feature priority in favor of supporting HD. Adbobe has released its a beta of Flash 10.1 which contains GPU acceleration for GeForce 9600 and above video cards which includes the ION chipset.
I tried PlayOn on my quad core PC and it worked well but I really wanted it to work on my ION 330 HTPC but currently it does not meet your CPU requirements. I have tested Flash 10.1 on my HTPC and I can run HD YouTube videos on my HTPC at a decent framerate with this beta whereas previously it was unwatchable.
You can download the beta from here.
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/
Regards,
Mel
AnandTech has just tested Flash Beta 10.1 on my PC and you can see impressive results with Hulu and YouTube with GPU-accelleration
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3678&p=2