Best HD card for Sage?

[GeoffQ]

Hi all,
For those of you who have more than one HD card in your systems, or have used more than one of them. Which one is the best in Sage? I think there are three that will work with Sage, AverMedia, Fusion, and the ATI HDTV Wonder, am I correct?
Thanks,
GeoffQ

[karljayne]

I've tried Fusion 5 Lite, Avermedia A180 and a Cat's Eye 151. I've tested them in 2 different boxes and with a signal amplifying HDTV antenna and have had little success with any of them.

karl

[GeoffQ]

I have a myHD and had VOOM and have no problems with recieving signal, I just want to know which of the supported cards are best.
Thanks,
GeoffQ

[bhyman1]

My Fusion5 Lite works perfectly. I got the latest drivers from the site, installed it, and Sage picked it right up. Programming info also works like a champ.

[lovingHDTV]

I use an A180 and it works very well with Sage. No problems at all.

[teknubic]

Other than reception, my vBox 151s work great with Sage. I'm working on sourcing a better antenna. Once done, it should clear up my signal quality problems.

[dfitz43]

I have three cards in my Sage server, one each of:

Fusion 5 Lite
Aver A180
DTA (Cat's Eye) 151

They all work pretty well with Sage for recording and streaming to client. I will say that I had an issue trying to get two A180's to work together, despite having the dual-tuner driver.

I did have an issue with lockup writing 3 simultaneous ATSC streams, but I think that's resolved now.

cheers,
Dave

[jptaz]

Dave,

What kind of hard drive(s) do you have in your system that you are able to handle 3 streams simultaneously? My newest drive is 300GB Seagate IDE.

John

[mangriotis]

Do any of these cards have the capability of taking an HD feed from a digital cable STB (such as through firewire) and encoding an HDTV Sage-playable file?

I would like some way to timeshift ESPNHD and HBOHD in addition to OTA HD... is this possible (I started reading that impossibly long IEEE thread but just couldn't get through it all)?

[paulbeers]

Couple of things:

1. I love my Fusion5 Lite. I have said this in several posts. Works great and is low profile so in my old sage box I only had 2 regular pci and 1 low profile so I have 2 Avermedia M150's and my sage Lite and it handles 3 feeds just fine.

2. Hard drives...correct me if I am wrong. HDTV is approx 9 gigs per hour of hard drive space, so 9 x 1024 = 9216 Mb per hour \ 60 minutes \ 60 seconds = 2.56mb per second per card. So any hard drive SHOULD be able to handle 3 hdtv cards

3. I am not aware of any hd cards that can do cable HDTV other than broadcast channels over cable (which doesn't work with sage anyway). Cable HDTV is encrypted. Now I know you want to run it thru Firewire, well that doesn't require an HDTV card (but I don't think you can record hdtv channels via firewire anyway).

[dfitz43]

As pointed out above, shouldn't be any problem writing three ATSC simultaneously to disk. I have 3x 200 GB SATA drives being controlled by two PCI controllers.

My math:

19.4 Mb/s/ATSC stream * 3 streams / 8 bits/byte = 7.3 MB/s required transfer speed for 3 streams.

SATA I transfer rate is 150 MB/s, so even with three streams, we're talking about 7.3/150 = around 5% of total transfer rate.

Antenna quality is key, as someone referenced. I have a CM 4228 with CM 7777 preamp mounted in my attic (yes, outside is better, but attic is easier) and it has made _all_ the difference.

Dave

[GeoffQ]

Originally Posted by dfitz43

I have three cards in my Sage server, one each of:

Fusion 5 Lite
Aver A180
DTA (Cat's Eye) 151

They all work pretty well with Sage for recording and streaming to client. I will say that I had an issue trying to get two A180's to work together, despite having the dual-tuner driver.

I did have an issue with lockup writing 3 simultaneous ATSC streams, but I think that's resolved now.

cheers,
Dave

Do you see any noticable difference in the live feed or the recorded programs between the three?
Thanks,
Geoff

[salsbst]

The MyHD will be able to record digital cable "in" SageTV soon: http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13798

[cineburk]

Can someone outline how HD recording works in SageTV?

I currently have a 150, and would like to add HD capability, probably with the Fusion5 Lite.

I'm assuming I'll have cable going to the 150, and antenna going to my HD card.

How does SageTV know when to record using the HD card? Will it automatically record HD shows using it, and cable shows using the 150? What if two shows are on in HD? How does it choose which one?

I currently use a P4 2.4Ghz with 1Gb RAM and an Nvidia FX 5200 card. Can I just pop in the HD card and configure it in SageTV?

I use Showanalyzer with dirmon. Can it also process HD files? Are HD files saved as .mpg files as well?

[lovingHDTV]

You will add another line-up for the HD card, under your city and local broadcast. Then you need to play with the encoder_merit to try and get the tuner to be used. This does not work all the time, so I had to change my favorites to record on a given channel, thus forcing Sage to use the HD tuner.

SA will not process HD files at this time. Jere says it is coming soon.

[jptaz]

Not that I am picking a fight...but 150 MB/s is the max capability of SATA interface...hard drives fall short of this in real world usage...also the 7.3 MB /s is all random writes...Worst case scenario for a hard disk...now with 3 different drives the odds are you are only writing one stream per drive or maybe too at most of the time on my system only 2 shows are being written to one drive at a time most of the time at worst...back 3 years ago with WinTVCap I actually forced all writes to be sequential by only allowing one recording per drive and defragging a lot...I never saw dropped frames and editing files and burning to DVD was fast..considering slow 80 GB drives.

Many drives can achieve high burst sequential writes, but once you are asking the disk to write a block of data in one spot then move to a different location and never just stream the data to disk it is far from ideal...my 300GB Seagate IDE drive can handle Burst writes up 89 MB/s( Theorical max through put of IDE is 133MB/s and yes the drive is in UDMA 6 mode)...but it can only handle around 10 MB/s of Random Write performance. Now also I am asking the hard drive to Randomly Read at the same time and it gets worse...SATA NCQ improves this situation from what I have heard as it takes out of order reads and write based on physical read/write location like SCSI. Also at the same time sometimes we will be playing back up to 5 Videos so it can impact performance.

If you run IOMeter you can get a better idea of what your actual Disk Performance is....simple math has no place in dealing with Hard disk performance...We have servers at work that are Ultra SCSI 320MB/s drives but we get crappy performance...again disk itself is the limitation not the interface and also the fact that we are asking it to do tones of random writes.

With my 5 tuner system and streaming a lot of video I have an occasionally noticed dropped frames in the recordings when I am writing 3 or 5 shows at once...especially since I have 3 old 80 GB drives that are not very fast and most of my drives are full so I am writing at the end of the drive which means access is slower.

Having said that I am guessing that if I go to HD I should break down and finally ditch my three 3 year old 80 GB IDE drives and just get a new Fast SATA drive and just make those video import directories for stuff I want to keep around for a while...Maybe even consider RAID 5 so I don't have to worry about losing a drive....I have ben lucky so far and only lost one video drive in the last 3 years...but now I think it would annoy me to lose TV shows.

Rambling done.

John

[buck1952]

My not be the best HD card but the old OTA Fusion II works great with Sage 4.0.
Manually added sub-channels that weren't loaded in the program guide.

[paulbeers]

John -

I realise we have "simplified" the math on hard drives. yes obviously out of order read and write's will slow the sustained read and writes, but I will tell you with today's hard drives it not nearly as big of a deal. The other night I was recording HDTV and 2 SDTV shows at once and no problem, and yes okay so not AS much bandwith as 3 HDTV, but the point here is that recording to three different locations with a WD 7200 IDE Special Edition drive with 8 mbs of cache had no problem in an old box with an IDE controller that only works at 66 MB/s (yes we all know that really 66 MB/s is still really hard drive limited rather than controller limited). I am a little surprised that you drop frames with only 3 SDTV recordings. There are people who have upwards of 6 tuners and no problems.

Just some thoughts....

[jptaz]

Paul

That pretty much just confirms to me that I need to ditch the 3 old 80GB Drives since they can not at times handle the through put requirements...I only dropped frames occasionally...but it is annoying and confirms that adding even one HD recording to my system will cause problems....just clarify I only have the problem when I am recording and watching a number of shows at once...recording 3 to 5 while watch 2 or 3 shows.

I am thinking that I will do a RAID 5 Array with WD Raid Edition Drives...I have heard they are very good for RAID configs.

John

[valnar]

I would stick with Seagates or Hitachi's, and definitely do not get Western Digitals or anything above 7200rpm. First, you don't need it. Most modern 7200rpm drives outperform their older siblings in spades at the same speed due to a higher density.

In my experience, Seagates and Hitachi's are the quietest drives I've used. (There may be others). Western Digital is hands down the loudest during seeking. Unless your HTPC is in a different room, I'd get the Seagates.

Robert


PS. Unless you are capturing 3-4 streams of high-def, you shouldn't need RAID 5. But since I am not doing that myself, I can't confirm. YMMV.