Pushing the Limits

[fidget]

I'm an Engineer, by trade, so am use to pushing the limits of a system. This is just to find out what is, and is not, possible with SageTV.

SageTV works with multiple tuners in a single PC chasis, but what about integrating multiple chasis? If I had two PCs, each with multiple tuner cards, could I have a Sage Client that treats them both as one large SageTV server? Can I have the second PC be a client to the first?

The best, practical, exampe of this would be if your recorder PC were a bit loud so that you stored it in another room and used a micro-ATX PC with a PVR-350 to display the image to the TV. Could the PVR-350 be used to record shows in conjunction with the main recorder PC? Or, if you were addicted to TV, could you have two PCs, each with 4 tuners, linked together as one large one and have a SageTV client display shows from both PCs?

To what extreme could I take this? Would the limit be the number of remote recorder PCs? Would it be a tuner limit? Would it scare small children? Would it be the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)?

Like I said, I tend to push the envelope. I don't plan on building something like this, but I would like to know what my options may be in the future (yes, my recorder PC is rather loud, but I can live with it).

- Jonathan

p.s., I can actually see some people doing this if they were wiring a new house. Have the multimedia station in the basement with a computer running all the cable/satellite inputs. From there, running Cat 5e to all the rooms and ship the programming up from the servers. At even high quality, were only talking 8 Mbps per stream.

[JasonJoel]

The short answer is YES.

Because SageTV supports network encoders through the use of SageTV + Sage Recorder you could easily have two machines with 4 tuners in each that act as one large system. You do this by having SageTV on one machine (with as many tuners as you can support machine and disk throughput-wise), and then putting Sage Recorder on the other machine with more TV tuners. You then map the Sage ecorder tuners into the first machines Sage TV configuration (there is documentation on how to do this). At that point the machine running Sage TV can controll ALL of the tuners, even the ones in the other machine! Then you could simply connect the Sage Client directly to the one box running SageTV and have access to all of the shows both machines recorded.

Very easy, very built in, has been done before (although maybe not w/4 tuners in each machine).

What you can't really do is have two completely independant servers which both run SageTV and then have Sage Client automatically know that there are two servers. Sage Client can only connect to one server at a time (which is why the way I described it in the last paragraph works even though you have two encoding machines).

So while it isn't a complete distributed TV recording system, through the network encoder support you can do almost exactly what you are asking with TODAYs versions of the software (not months down the road in some 'future' version).

As far as the ultimate limit, I'll have to let Jeff answer that... I have never seen him say what the technical limit for the number of network encoders is...

Jason

Originally posted by fidget
I'm an Engineer, by trade, so am use to pushing the limits of a system. This is just to find out what is, and is not, possible with SageTV.

SageTV works with multiple tuners in a single PC chasis, but what about integrating multiple chasis? If I had two PCs, each with multiple tuner cards, could I have a Sage Client that treats them both as one large SageTV server? Can I have the second PC be a client to the first?

The best, practical, exampe of this would be if your recorder PC were a bit loud so that you stored it in another room and used a micro-ATX PC with a PVR-350 to display the image to the TV. Could the PVR-350 be used to record shows in conjunction with the main recorder PC? Or, if you were addicted to TV, could you have two PCs, each with 4 tuners, linked together as one large one and have a SageTV client display shows from both PCs?

To what extreme could I take this? Would the limit be the number of remote recorder PCs? Would it be a tuner limit? Would it scare small children? Would it be the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)?

Like I said, I tend to push the envelope. I don't plan on building something like this, but I would like to know what my options may be in the future (yes, my recorder PC is rather loud, but I can live with it).

- Jonathan

p.s., I can actually see some people doing this if they were wiring a new house. Have the multimedia station in the basement with a computer running all the cable/satellite inputs. From there, running Cat 5e to all the rooms and ship the programming up from the servers. At even high quality, were only talking 8 Mbps per stream.

[Narflex]

Limit?? Not sure what it is...there's no specific limit anywhere in the software...most I've heard of yet is 5. Anyone topped that yet?

[fidget]

Originally posted by Narflex
Limit?? Not sure what it is...there's no specific limit anywhere in the software...most I've heard of yet is 5. Anyone topped that yet?

You do realize that you may force me to try it out! If I do, it will be all your fault.