Need help with a complex setup.

[zhulick]

I just moved into a new house and looking to run a combination of sagetv/link/extenders to service all three of my current and two tv's that i'm about to add. After reading these and other forums for a while now, i think that i've come up with a solution, but it seems rather complicated. Before i begin my work i just want to make sure that there is no fatal flaw in my approach that will derail my project half-way.

As of now i have 3 tv's, two are old-school sony sdtv's and one brand spanking new hdtv projection unit.

For sagetv server i "frankensteined" my old workstation to act as a server. It has a not so old msi board sitting in a huge and very airy antec server (500w ps). I'm a professional photographer and this was one of my workhorse boxes about a year and change back. Quick hw specs are:
MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum
1gb of Corsair cas2 ram
athlon xp64 3200
ati radeon 9800 pro 128mb agp video card
a mix of 7 160gb hd's of various makes and speeds (two pairs each and a mix of others), plus room on the mb and case to hook up an additional two sata drives. oh yeah there's a dvdrw drive attached as wel..
the mb has 4 pci slots empty (one has an ata/133 controller on it).

this is a big and by now ugly tower that will sit in my office, so all the tv's in the house will have to be connected via clients or media extenders. the good news about this monster tower/board combo is that i can pretty much stuff it up with drives and cards, and the processor/memory combo are by no way slouchy. my house is cat5e wired (one of the advantages of overseeing a renovation), so i was thinking of doing the following:

setup two dual tuner hp-500 cards on the server, and run media extenders on the two sdtv's, then build a cheap pc client to run the hdtv in the living room. the specs for hdtv client should be very unimpressive, and i was thinking that a small m/atx board with an onboard 6150 chipset running some low end of prescott cpu and a cheap stick of 512mb ram should do the trick. Since this will strictly be a client and will not have to actually do the encoding/decoding of video, on board video should be enough to run the 1080i on my hdtv, and i do have an few extra 80gb ata 133 hd's lying around, one of which should be fine since it's just the os.

this is where i begin to run into problems. to take advantage of this system i will need to install 4 cable boxes in my office next to the server. my cable company does not provide an analog feed (very bad), but at least they don't charge extra for hd (very good), so all my boxes will be hd boxes. There's no way to interface with these via serial or firewire connections, so the channels will need to be changed with blasters. my questions are:

1:) How does sage handle multiple drives, especially considering that i may end up with up to 9 of them

2:) How does sage handle multiple boxes, will i be able to tune 4 boxes to four different channels via ir blasters. How will this play out when watching live tv, if i'm watching a show live, and my kid decides to change the channel in his room, will my channel change? is it possible to assign which client uses which tuner/box/blaster combo for live tv?

3:) are my server specs capable of handling this setup, and have enough juice for two more tv's/media extenders i will need to add in the next couple of months?

4:) and finally, is this setup workable, or better yet is it feasible? will this be something that will run smooth, or will i constantly have "issues"? What are the possible pittfalls in this setup?

Like i said, before i begin, i'd like to know if anyone more experienced than me (and at this point it's just about everyone), sees a potential "major flaw" with this project. I would hate to get half way done, just to discover that there is a feature that this requires that is not yet supported/buggy/not realistic before i begin.

Thank you for you help, in advance, and sorry for such a long post.

[blade]

Unless I'm mistaken the 6150 is an AMD chipset not an Intel one.

The client actually requires more power than the server unless you're planning to do transcoding. If you're running MVPs then having a fairly powerful server will probably end up being useful at some point because you may use transcoding.

Encoding on the server doesn't require much power. The hardware capture cards will handle all of that. I have 4 capture cards in my server and it's only a celeron 366.

The client decodes the video, not the server. For SDTV it's more video card and mpeg decoder dependent than cpu. My XP-3200 uses roughly 10-20% of the cpu. For HDTV you do need a powerful cpu. It requires a pretty good cpu and video card.

You can't capture HDTV from the cable company through a capture card. It can be done through firewire, but I've never tried it.

[Opus4]

A couple quick comments: multiple hard drives are used easily by having multiple Video Recording Directories.

Each tuner can use its own converter box via an IR blaster -- a multi-zone USB-UIRT is useful for that. If the boxes can use serial control, that would be another option to consider insted of IR. But, you do not assign a particular tuner to a specific client. You just watch TV or set up a recording; if a tuner is available, it will proceed.

- Andy

[zhulick]

thank you for your help guys...

so for round two of questions.

how would i be able to capture multiple hd streams. (two recordings at the same time from two boxes?

my typical sunday night scenario is this - wife wants to record desperate housewifes in hd, i want sopranos in hd and family guy (sd), plus let's not forget the big basketball or later on sunday night football game that i would probably be watching in hd all at the same time. is my server setup capable of recording two hd + one sd streams, streaming one live hd program to a client? what happens when my wife and kid both decided to fire up their mvp's to watch something that recorder before at the time all of this is happening, will my system be able to handle it?

how would the same two recordings (d housewifes and sopranos) play via an mvp on my sdtv's? would we be able to watch them on my old tv's (downsample?).

with two open pci slots remaining, would sticking a hardware dvd decoder card in one of them make a difference in server performance?

what are the limitations on capturing hdtv streams from a cable box? is there a limitation on the box itself or is it the tuner cards? what dual tuner cards are capable of capturing an hdtv signal?

thanks again.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by zhulick

Ithe specs for hdtv client should be very unimpressive, and i was thinking that a small m/atx board with an onboard 6150 chipset running some low end of prescott cpu and a cheap stick of 512mb ram should do the trick. Since this will strictly be a client and will not have to actually do the encoding/decoding of video, on board video should be enough to run the 1080i on my hdtv, and i do have an few extra 80gb ata 133 hd's lying around, one of which should be fine since it's just the os.

That's not quite right, all decoding in handled by the client. Encoding is handled by the PVR-500s.

For an HDTV I'd strongly recommend something better than a 6150, I'd go with at least a 6600GT, or if you can do it, a 7300/7600.

Also, if noise is a concern, consider a laptop HDD for the client, they are much quieter than "normal" hard drives.

[zhulick]

understood... after reading this and avs forums, i think i will bypass the building of an hdtv client for now... it seems that capturing hdtv streams is still a rather painful proposition...

for the time being it looks like i'll just setup my sdtv's with mvp's and run 4 sdtv feeds off the server... the big new hdtv will have to stick around with the cable company's dvr...

it looks like things will improve on hdtv front soon, so i'll wait a bit...

i do have a spare ati 9600 pro with 256mb, so if i do decide to build an hdtv client i should be ok, at least for now...

thanks..

[digitalgm]

Originally Posted by zhulick

1) How does sage handle multiple drives, especially considering that i may end up with up to 9 of them

Sage handles this very well. Basically all you do is setup different directories on the drives to hold the video e.g. d:\video, E:\video, etc. Then, in Sage you can configure the recording directories that you have access to and how much Sage should store in these directories.

Originally Posted by zhulick

2) How does sage handle multiple boxes, will i be able to tune 4 boxes to four different channels via ir blasters. How will this play out when watching live tv, if i'm watching a show live, and my kid decides to change the channel in his room, will my channel change? is it possible to assign which client uses which tuner/box/blaster combo for live tv?

Again, Sage does a great job handling multiple boxes with IR blasters. In my old setup (2+ years ago), I had 2 cable boxes controlled by IR (USB-UIRT) fed into 2 PVR-250's. This worked very well for me. Now, in a situation where you are recording something and watching something (for example), and someone else tries to record or watch some TV, I believe Sage will tell you that you do not have enough encoders. I remember in my setup that it would never force a channel change on TV that was recording or being watched live. Someone else will have to chime in on that one though.

Originally Posted by zhulick

4) and finally, is this setup workable, or better yet is it feasible? will this be something that will run smooth, or will i constantly have "issues"? What are the possible pittfalls in this setup?

As with any setup, I believe that you are going to have some investment in time up front. You have to remember that this is not a TiVo and everyone has different hardware, software installed, setups, etc. This is something that can make diagnosing a problem a headache but can also be very rewarding as you can basically turn SageTV into whatever you want given enough time. To give you a better idea, it took me a week or so (longer than average) to get a totally rock-solid system w/ 4 tuners and 3 clients. This involved a lot of custom configuring of remotes, skin changing and adding of features. However, once I got the setup the way I liked it, I never had to change it and it was running for at least 1YR+.

I think you have a good idea on how you want to configure your system and for the most part you have the right idea. One thing I would look at though is adding more RAM into your server to handle the extra transcoding needed for MVP clients. Also, I would suggest a beefier card for the clients as well. I use a 6600GT but running it full tilt at 1080p is (like another user said) pushing the limits of what the card is capable of.

Finally, you mentioned recording simultaneous HD streams. I am assuming you have cable so to do this you are going to need to look at the firewire thread on doing this (Ill find the link for you). It is possible to record multiple streams at once however I have no experience with it. Looking at that thread will be invaluable.

--Regards, AdamR

edit: some good threads ....

STB Firewire (IEEE-1394) Support

Minimum H/W Requirements for HD(firewire)/SD Recording Only (Not much content yet)

[zhulick]

thank you everyone for your response...

after reading and reading and reading some more, i think i finally came up with a solution that i'm going to go with...

first off my setup need has changed rather drastically... one of my old sdtv's just died, and a new widescreen phillips hdtv tube is en route. second, and probably even more important, it turns that my house's cat5e wiring is simply not working properly. only one room is live, and the rest are dead... contractor blames the electrician, he blames the plumber etc... since the wires are in the walls, there is no way to check which one of these idiots managed to cut them somewhere and there is just no way i'm pulling sheetrock with a newborn in the house... so no wires...

so now i will need something that can drive the following
one 52" mitsu dlp hdtv
one 30" phillips crt hdtv
one 24" samsung hdtv
coming soon are
two small sdtv's (office and kitchen).

the server equipment remains the same.

the server will now be housed in the bedroom and will have to drive the 30" philips. i will break up the rest into groups, because i'm not quite sure if i got everything right.

1.) the server will have three 150's installed. i chose these over the 500 because of their versatility and price. i'm not "married" to these cards so if there's a better card/performance/price combo please let me know.

2.) these will be attached via s-video to three SA-4200 HD cable boxes. These are the standard HD cable boxes that Cablevision offers (no motorola). Since cablevision doesn't charge anything extra for HD boxes, i see no reason to go with older SD models.

3.) these will be controlled via a usb-irt blaster, which as it happens, can control up to three stb's. so far so good.

4.) also i'm going to add two cat's eye usb hd tuners. maybe three, i'm not sure what the max is for sage. plus i'm sure recording from all three at the same time, may really tax the system..

5.) the machine will hook up directly to my 30" hdtv via a dvi-hdmi cable/adapter.

this takes care of my server/bedroom setup. i think that my components should be ok, and i can possibly add another stick of ram to bring the total to 1.5gb or maybe 2. video card maybe upgraded later as well, and the 9800pro may end up being moved to a client for the big tv in the living room.

the 24" Samsung SD-CRT in my kid's room should be an easy setup. his happens to be the only room that's wired properly, so i'm just going to stick an mvp client there and off he goes.

the big 52" DLP in the living room is a problem. running a wire there would be an ugly messy affair, so mvp is a no-go. Maybe when the wireless mvp comes out it will become an option again. Even then it will only be good enough to play back sd recordings. HD-MVP is like bigfoot, there are plenty of rumors of it's existence, and some even claimed to have seen it, but it's just not a solution right now. for the time being i will have to stick with the SA-8300HD DVR from my cablecompany. This is very dissappointing since i would've much preferred to have the whole house running sage and not deal with the horrible cable co's dvr.

questions:

1 how would the s-video captures from hbo-hd look like. will i have the four bar effect (two on side two on bottom), and if so, is there any way to have Sage automatically recognize that and properly display the picture? My wife is simply not going to look for the tv remote to push the right zoom setting. what would the picture quality of these recording look like? my display is capable of 1080i, would my pc upscale these recordings?

2.) the biggest question is still what to do with the living room. it's one room where i really want to be able to watch tv in all it's glory, and one room for which i do not yet have a solution.

my budget took a nice hit when the bedroom tv broke. it immediately went from a grand down to $600, which just may not be good enough to get all the cards, accessories and still have a client build.

as i see it my costs are.
one sagetv 150 bundle from pcalchemy - $119
two pvr-150's from wherever - around $120
two cat's eye usb hd tuners from wherever - around $120
usb-irt blaster - $50
this leaves me with about $200 to put together a nice client, which is impossible.

so for now the living room, and the nicest tv/viewing spot in the house is stuck in the stone age, and will have to stay that way. i'll have to take my time and wait for either an hd-mvp to come out, or wait for the cable card supported pc tuners. all are rumored to be out soon, and should be at reasonable price points in a year or so (guessing here), by then i'll have a new "war-chest" and will try again, but for now this is my setup.

what do you guys think...

thanks...

[mayamaniac]

Originally Posted by zhulick

... There's no way to interface with these via serial or firewire connections.

I don't have much experience with HD recording, but this seems to be the big problem. If you don't have analog feeds and only HD feeds, then maybe you need an R5000-HD or more like 4 of them.

Another problem is since all your content will be in HD, streaming them to the SDTVs will require transcoding and that is stress on the server. Your AMD 3200 is pretty good for a server, but I don't know if it can handle two HD transcoding at once since you have two SDTVs.