MVP Question

[rmbu]

I am thinking of buying a MVP. Right now I have one PC that is running Sage TV 4.1 this PC is a low end with a PIII 900 MHZ CPU 256 MB ram. I am using a PVR 350 with the TV out this PC only does PVR function.

If I understand correctly I can buy a MVP hook it to my home network and watch recorded material on my living room TV.

Can the sage server be a low end PC like I have?

[Opus4]

It should be OK, since the MVP has a hardware encoder & renders its own UI -- the MVP does not use a lot of resources on the server.

The thing that might need a more powerful server is when the talked-about transcoding stuff (DivX, for example) gets released.

- Andy

[pvrpenguin]

Originally Posted by rmbu

Can the sage server be a low end PC like I have?

My Sage server is an old 900MHz machine with 512MB RAM running Windows 2003 Server. The MVP is the only client I have connecting to the Sage server at the moment. My server also has an FTP server, Web server and Slim Server running and the CPU never gets close to maxing out.

I haven't experienced any performance problems due to my server limitations.

[MrD]

If your server is not running a client, there is very little CPU required. The 350 does all of the work.

What is required is good I/O. The server will be streaming data to hard drive and out the network interface constantly.

Eliminate I/O bottlenecks for the best performance.

- dedicated master ide disk or scsi disk for video
- make sure LAN is off PCI bus (i.e. Hyperchannel or Intel CSA arch)
- use bus master drivers

Unfortunately, your PC most likely will have everything on one PCI bus which does 132MB/s. It should be enough assuming all of your devices (network, capture card, and ide device) can bus master, but a gigalan card could saturate the PCI bus.

-MrD