Will my PC handle it? Adding WinTV PVR-500 in addition to the 150

[reebokman]

I already have a system with WinTV PVR-150 w/ IR Blaster and FireFly remote. I'm planning on adding a PVR-500 which will use two splits (amplified) from my cable line in order to record basic cable. So the 150 will be dedicated to the STB which has digital cable and the 500 will have two basic cable lines. I'm thinking about extending this to other rooms with MVP as well, but I'll save that for a later time.

Anyway, will the following system be able to handle the addition of the dual pvrs? Any thoughts?

PC Specs (Gateway PC, got a while back):
- P4 2.3 Ghz
- XP Home
- 1GB RAM PC2100
- nVidia 6200 128MB
- WinTV PVR-150
- 60 GB and 140 GB HDs
- WinTV PVR-150

Thanks in advance.

[jquinlan]

Yes you should be fine. I have 2 PVR-250 and 1 PVR-150 on an AMD 2.2G with 512Megs RAM and 2 Media Extender MVP's. My CPU average never goes over 50% with everything recording and watching recordings.
Although I do have XP Pro, I feel the networking in Pro is stronger, but give it a try and see if you have any problems, then upgrade.

[Kanati]

That should be fine... It's not something I'd want to play with HD on, but you should be fine with the tuners. Most of the encoding happens on the card. Your only bottleneck would possibly be the hard drive but that shouldn't be too much problem either as long as all three aren't running at 12mb/sec quality at once.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by reebokman

I already have a system with WinTV PVR-150 w/ IR Blaster and FireFly remote. I'm planning on adding a PVR-500

You may lose access to the 150's blaster; see my post here.

- Andy

[reebokman]

Theoretically though, if the PC is always on, and you get the PVR150 to start up first and be recognized first by the remote blaster app, you could then enable the pvr 500 and be on your way?

Also, how would STV handle everything? What if I have a few shows that require STB to be used and several shows that use basic. Would I be able to prioritize so that the PVR for the STB is the last one to be used so that it can be held for digital recordings?

Thanks.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by reebokman

Theoretically though, if the PC is always on, and you get the PVR150 to start up first and be recognized first by the remote blaster app, you could then enable the pvr 500 and be on your way?

Yes & I resplit the threads, so the info for the problem w/the remote is still in the other one, here.

Also, how would STV handle everything? What if I have a few shows that require STB to be used and several shows that use basic. Would I be able to prioritize so that the PVR for the STB is the last one to be used so that it can be held for digital recordings?

SageTV will automatically handle using the correct channels for the correct tuner. To prioritize the tuners, look into the mmc/encoders/<some number>/encoder_merit property; higher value = higher priotiry. But, that value is not gauranteed to take precedence.

- Andy