XXL Sage Install

[Humanzee]

Originally Posted by digitalgm

its silly for Sage to use 3 encoders to watch the same channel.

Couldn't you buy yourself a micro HDTV transmitter and broadcast a single source all over the house? Then you can make sure your monitors have HD tuners in them and you just tune them all to the same channel. Thats a lot easier with a channel modulater over RG6 but I don't know that you can even find a HDTV channel modulator.

[blade]

No offense intended, but the entire setup sounds a bit ridiculous to me. Even if you had a big superbowl party with 100 tvs going you'd still only need 1 tuner.

I don't think I could ever find +40 shows on at once that I would need to capture. Not to mention if you're capturing that many shows there is a good chance one will repeat again before you get a chance to watch it.

There is absolutely no way you'd ever need that many tuners or dedicated commercial processing servers for a single family residence. I can easily process 4 shows at once in realtime on my xp1400 machine. Sage servers with more modern processors should easily be able to process the recordings without having to build dedicated machines to do it. The increased network activity of dedicated servers would be more of a concern to me than lack of cpu power by the server.

If you just have more money than you need and want to waste some then that's understandable, but if you honestly think you'd ever use even a fraction of that hardware you're off your meds.

Either way I'd like to see some pics once you get things setup.

[digitalgm]

Originally Posted by Opus4

It won't use multiple tuners to watch the same channel. If a show on a channel is being recorded & another client wants to watch the same show, that client will simply watch the existing recording. SageTV won't fire up another tuner just to record the same thing.

Unless you really have 40+ different shows that could be recorded at the same time, those 40+ tuners will never be in use at the same time.

Also, if you have 3 tvs in the same room, it will be difficult to get them all syncronized while watching the same show -- that single show will most likely be playing at a different point on all 3 TVs.

- Andy

Andy: Thanks very much for your response - I never knew that Sage would be smart enough to use the same encoder for multiple streams on the same channel. Although, you say that they wont be at the same point is pretty disconcerting - do you have any specific experience with this situation?

Originally Posted by SHS

Magma said you can order 13 slot case they pop in 7-slot mainboard that cool I guest then your all set.
The only thing I can see with your setup that may or maybe not be a problem is the fact your only install one hard drive and your planing a possable on highside having 10 tuner recording all at the some time plus it need 10 simultaneous streams clients which if I'm rigth is gone be a lot Disk Activity and real question that come mind is weather or not that work with out all disk trashing and I guest you be the first one to fine out.

SHS : For this reason alone I may decide to instead put 2 or 3 smaller hard drives in the machine and enable the onboard RAID in striping mode. This will greatly increase the reads and writes I can sustain on a single machine. As always, I'll report back and let you guys know what I end up with.

Originally Posted by ben_95sl1

Can't you solve most of your issues with switcheable video distribution and an RF remote????

Im not really sure how they could be. I'd like the capability for each TV set to be able to watch any live channel it wants, HD or not. In addition, they should all have access to the DVD library as well as the music library. Furthermore, I want the ability to elegantly mirror a program on one tv to another. Given those requirements, what did you have in mind?

Originally Posted by jptaz

My suggestion for USB is more for HDTV as I have 3 of the VBOX and they do a great job. I have only been using my PVR USB2 for about 2 weeks now and so far it has been solid and I know other people swear by them and only have them. From a power consumption and cooling stand point the Hauppauge USB2 devices are going to save you some money and also as a side note my Hauppauge USB2 device managed just fine after resume from hibernate, but none of the vbox USB devices did. I don't know if that is because I have them connected to powered USB2 Hub and the PVR UBS2 is directly connected to my server. The PVR500s probably are a good choice for you given the rack mounting. The only issue I have had with the PVR500 and SageTV is that SageTV decided to no longer tune Analog correctly with the PVR 500, but I have never had any issue with Svideo on the Hauppauge cards after over 3 years of heavy use.

Also I thnk you will find that 10 Analog Boxes is sufficient and that maybe 4 OTA HD Tuners is good enough. I am managing with 3 and the beauty of the USB HD Tuners is that I can easily add them to the system without having to shutdown the box and all I have to do is restart the SageTV Service and add them in. I may still add a 4th HD Tuner and drop another Terabyte of Storage into my Server, that would basically bring me to 8 Tuners and then I may drop one of the Analog Tuners and save the $7.50 a month rental fee for the Digital Cable box.

John

John - As always, time will tell. I will go ahead and build up the sytem initially with 10 analog boxes and couple OTA HD tuners. Then, I can always see how much use this beast is getting but the way I am designing this, it should be pretty simple to expand to the FULL system.

[briands]

Originally Posted by digitalgm

I'd like the capability for each TV set to be able to watch any live channel it wants, HD or not. In addition, they should all have access to the DVD library as well as the music library. Furthermore, I want the ability to elegantly mirror a program on one tv to another. Given those requirements, what did you have in mind?

I think the LIVE tv is the hold up for most of us questioning the size of your system. Once you've lived with a PVR for a while, you'll never watch live TV. Especially since you are planning to do the commercial processing which would do you no good if you are truely watching live. The key that some others have hit on is not number of simultanious viewers, it is the number of simultanious unique airings.

If you are really interested in live TV, just make sure your TVs all have tuners and use that to watch live.

Do what you want, but I'd suggest you could get by with 10% of your plan and add as necessary from there.

It is always interesting to see the envelope stretch though.

[digitalgm]

Originally Posted by blade

...hance one will repeat again before you get a chance to watch it.

There is absolutely no way you'd ever need that many tuners or dedicated commercial processing servers for a single family residence. I can easily process 4 shows at once in realtime on my xp1400 machine. Sage servers with more modern processors should easily be able to process the recordings without having to build dedicated machines to do it. The increased network activity of dedicated servers would be more of a concern to me than lack of cpu power by the server.
...

The real question though is can a single server encode 10 streams at once, support 10 simultaneous client connections as well as doing commercial processing in the background? I dont know the answer to this question but I am about to finding out

Originally Posted by briands

I think the LIVE tv is the hold up for most of us questioning the size of your system. Once you've lived with a PVR for a while, you'll never watch live TV. Especially since you are planning to do the commercial processing which would do you no good if you are truely watching live. The key that some others have hit on is not number of simultanious viewers, it is the number of simultanious unique airings.

If you are really interested in live TV, just make sure your TVs all have tuners and use that to watch live.

Do what you want, but I'd suggest you could get by with 10% of your plan and add as necessary from there.

It is always interesting to see the envelope stretch though.

Surprisingly enough I do watch an alright amount of live TV. My wife always gets on my case when I am watching shows that I love like family guy or The Sopranos as they are airing. I know its a bit silly but its a habit that has formed ...

In any case though, I will be starting small (well relatively) to test the waters with the setup. Only 10 analog tuners to start with ...

[jptaz]

I have been using my SageTV system for 3+ Years now and my wife of just under 2 years is still not all in on the PVR thing. She still likes just turning on lifetime for the Golden Girls marathons and just have it on when she is doing stuff around the house and there are times when she forgets to hit stop on the Media MVP and I will see something recording even though no one is actually watching. That is the main reason I got my PVR 500 a while back since she would do that and it would prevent a scheduled recording from getting recorded. If I had kids I am sure the problem would be worse and I would want more tuners. I can see wanting 10+ tuners. I am at 7 Active right now and if I get my PVR 500 working with analog cable that would bring me to 9 and really I have to do a fair amount of conflict resolution too.

John

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by digitalgm

I never knew that Sage would be smart enough to use the same encoder for multiple streams on the same channel. Although, you say that they wont be at the same point is pretty disconcerting - do you have any specific experience with this situation?

Anybody who has a Sage client installed on a laptop can demonstrate this. Bring it into the same room as a stationary client and play the same content on both. It's like putting two copies of the same DVD in different players and trying to get them synched up. With a bit of fiddling you can get close, but it will never be in perfect sync. Remember that the client controls playback (pausing, rewinding, etc.), so each client has to have a separate stream on the source file. It's not a like a true multicast where the same packets go to multiple clients.

Im not really sure how they could be. I'd like the capability for each TV set to be able to watch any live channel it wants, HD or not. In addition, they should all have access to the DVD library as well as the music library. Furthermore, I want the ability to elegantly mirror a program on one tv to another. Given those requirements, what did you have in mind?

What I'd do is hire an A/V consultant to help me design a system with a video matrix switch and a programmable controller. The Sage server and client boxes would just be a bunch of video sources coming into the matrix. Then if you want to slave three screens to the same video signal, you can do it. If you want a different Sage client stream to each screen, you can do that too. It would then be the controller's job to route IR control signals to the right playback device and video signals to the right screen. A smart enough controller (i.e. one that can interface with some custom software running on your Sage boxes) could make this pretty much transparent to the user sitting in front of a screen with a remote in hand.

Doing it this way, I think you could probably be quite happy with maybe half a dozen tuners and three or four Sage clients (depending on how many simultaneous viewers you think you might have). Again, it would be the controller's job to match up screens with clients on demand.

Of course I haven't actually built a system of this scale myself. That's why the first thing I'd do is consult with someone who does it for a living. For the price of half that hardware you could afford to spend a couple of hours with an expert.

[jchiso]

One of the (many) great things about Sage is that it is modular. You can add tuners and capture later on if you are taxing your currently-configured system. I did not know that you were unaware that you did not need multiple tuners to encode the same show for multiple clients, that's why I thought the 40:3 ratio seemed odd.

I would still say you should probably eschew the SD DirecTV tuners altogether and opt for 6 -12 DirecTV HD boxes; with however many of these R-5000 modded for HD capture. Add up to eight OTA HD tuners and you should be able to accomodate all of your household's viewing demands over the next three months or so. If you find that such a setup proves inadequate you can always add additional capture devices (provided you have available PCI slots or USB ports).

[ben_95sl1]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

Anybody who has a Sage client installed on a laptop can demonstrate this. Bring it into the same room as a stationary client and play the same content on both. It's like putting two copies of the same DVD in different players and trying to get them synched up. With a bit of fiddling you can get close, but it will never be in perfect sync. Remember that the client controls playback (pausing, rewinding, etc.), so each client has to have a separate stream on the source file. It's not a like a true multicast where the same packets go to multiple clients.


What I'd do is hire an A/V consultant to help me design a system with a video matrix switch and a programmable controller. The Sage server and client boxes would just be a bunch of video sources coming into the matrix. Then if you want to slave three screens to the same video signal, you can do it. If you want a different Sage client stream to each screen, you can do that too. It would then be the controller's job to route IR control signals to the right playback device and video signals to the right screen. A smart enough controller (i.e. one that can interface with some custom software running on your Sage boxes) could make this pretty much transparent to the user sitting in front of a screen with a remote in hand.

Doing it this way, I think you could probably be quite happy with maybe half a dozen tuners and three or four Sage clients (depending on how many simultaneous viewers you think you might have). Again, it would be the controller's job to match up screens with clients on demand.

Of course I haven't actually built a system of this scale myself. That's why the first thing I'd do is consult with someone who does it for a living. For the price of half that hardware you could afford to spend a couple of hours with an expert.

that's exactly what I meant/was thinking. a few clents would get the job done, video distribution would do the rest.

[digitalgm]

GKusnick, ben_95sl1 : check out what I said in post #56 of this thread on page 3 -- This is almost exactly the type of system that I will be setting up.

Let me know what you think

--Regards, AdamR

[src666]

Originally Posted by digitalgm

Hmm... I had never heard of any problems regarding that file but I may not have my ear to the tracks enough. Can you tell me more about how this could be stressed by all of the tuners, etc. I wish Narflex or one of Sage guys had commented on the thread by now.. Who knows, they may be as scared as I am to try this out.

There have been numerous reports of corrupted WIZ.BIN files. While that's understandable (computers aren't perfect), there is NO RECOVERY MODE for a corrputed WIZ.BIN file. Period. You have to restore an uncorrputed version. It's not editable or browsable to mere mortals, and the format hasn't been published.


This wouldn't be so bad, except the file contains all of the critical show information. Any recordings that came after the corruption will be tossed into the uncategorized "imported videos" section.

There is also the issue of large WIZ.BIN files being detrimental (sometimes very) to the system's performance. Do a bit of searching on it.

I'm not saying this is a showstopper, but be very, very aware of the fact that Sage put's all of it's eggs into one basket.

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by src666

...there is NO RECOVERY MODE for a corrputed WIZ.BIN file. Period.

Sorry for taking this slightly off-topic, but I'm not sure that's true anymore. It's already possible to export the metadata to an external file, using nielm's SageRecordings XML file generator or something similar. And in v5 a couple of new APIs were added for importing the more obscure bits of metadata into the wiz.bin database. So it seems like it might now be possible to write a plugin capable of restoring wiz.bin from external metadata files like the ones nielm's plugin generates.

[sniper's_scope]

hi i'm new here, honestly with the event of dvd's now days, you may aswell build a collection and store it on the server, with sas becoming the new standard stock up on hard drives, personally all the power to ya for building this extreme server, personally all you really need is 2-4 tuners to cover each format you wish to use wether it be analogue/sdtv/hdtv or sat hd tv...

though as i said before dvd's probly would better option, building a big tv server is a bit stupid since the the price of the tuners going to cost you heaps, while you will build this tvserver for your own reason, personally i don't think you need all those tv cards...

save ya money and stock up on your pci-x sas, i think a server full of sas controllers would be more helpful for storage...

personally if i had the funds, i'd probly build 1 or 2 tv servers, with chosen software, then dotted thoughout house i'd probly use link stations connected to a gig lan network switch to filter content to rest of the household from the server..

for future proofing with fibre channels is fine, though in a domestic enviroment i doubt you will need it as link stations aren't really up to the stage where you actually really need a fibre channel as a viable backbone solusion, as i doubt will see a fibre channel network link station as a viable solusion for atleast another 10-30 year, cat-5e or cat 6 will be the main stay for a few more years atleast, as for network backbones that's a different story, which i will not get into...


with all the major tvseries from the 30-40 years slowly showing up on dvd, i would start collecting tv shows you enjoy and copying the desired movie format you wish to watch it in, then broardcast over your home network and save some money, the way i see it dvd's make tv redundant, if you wish no ads in your broardcast...

a 3-4x tv tuner server is to extreme money can be better spent 2-6 24-48 500-750 gb sas sata hotswap media storage server if you're looking at mass storage...

[hechacker1]

i think your main problem is gonna be bandwidth and cpu usage.

I figured out the math and u will be using 6.82666666 megabits per second for each 3GB stream/recording. (btw your math matched mine)

So the math says..

100 megabits = 12.5 megabytes - Only support 14 streams.. probably less (overhead)
1 000 megabits = 125 megabytes - 146 streams

if u are using standard 100Mb connections your bandwidth will quickly be used up.

I guess if u are using multiple independent connection you will be fine.

however, most integrated 100/1000 controllers take up a LOT of cpu. My 100/1000Mb controller (nvidia Nforce3) uses 20-30% of my cpu under full load or with mixed files. And it's designed to be hardware accelerated. Most are not.

I think u should just have your encoder boxes do the Compskip processing (it's designed to use unused cpu cycles, why waste?) and that should help with bandwidth too.

anyways.. sorry if i didn't get this right or something, but its such a long and detailed thread.

[Mark SS]

Originally Posted by src666

There have been numerous reports of corrupted WIZ.BIN files.

Have been an STV user since December and I've probably had to restore my Wiz.bin from backup at least 5 times so far.

[blade]

Originally Posted by Mark SS

Have been an STV user since December and I've probably had to restore my Wiz.bin from backup at least 5 times so far.

Then you have a problem somewhere. I've been running Sage for a year and a half and have never had to restore the Wiz.bin.

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by blade

Then you have a problem somewhere. I've been running Sage for a year and a half and have never had to restore the Wiz.bin.

I am with Blade on this one. I have been using sage since 2.0 came out (I demo'ed it on 1.4 and right as I was about to buy 1.4, 2.0 came out). I switched to a client server setup in September of last year, and as of yet have had a corrupt wiz.bin file. I currently can record 4 SD shows and 1 hdtv show at a time and have 3 clients (2 mvp's and 1 other) and no problems.

Could it be your hard drive?

[src666]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

I am with Blade on this one. I have been using sage since 2.0 came out (I demo'ed it on 1.4 and right as I was about to buy 1.4, 2.0 came out). I switched to a client server setup in September of last year, and as of yet have had a corrupt wiz.bin file. I currently can record 4 SD shows and 1 hdtv show at a time and have 3 clients (2 mvp's and 1 other) and no problems.

Could it be your hard drive?

Could it be you are lucky?

Frankly, a success story does not a perfect product make. It's not an indicator that everyone else's issues are isolated aberrations.

Of course, a failure story doesn't indicate a flawed product either. It doesn't prove that a product is broken.

However, a lot of successes and a low, but non-trivial, number of failures is a pretty good indication of a problem that occurs under the "right conditions". Add that to the fact that a corrupted WIZ.BIN file is 100% non-recoverable (you can't just edit out the bad stuff and keep the rest - you have to toss the whole file), and you have a real area of concern.

I'm not saying that the situation is dire, but if I were setting up a network of systems that would rely on this single point of failure, then I would certainly be wary of the situation.

[ToxMox]

Then create daily backups of the wiz.bin

[src666]

Originally Posted by ToxMox

Then create daily backups of the wiz.bin

Which works great for me and you. But will that work for someone running upwards of 20+ tuners? They'd have to do hourly backups.

Guys, stop dismissing the problem as if it doesn't exist - it does. Yes, there are ways to minimize the damage of a corrupted WIZ.BIN, but there's not a way to FIX the file. And if you don't catch the damage soon enough (for example, I've been out of the country for more than a week) then you are totally screwed.

All I wanted to do was make sure this guy was aware of the possibility, and the extent of the potential harm, so he could be prepared and plan for the eventuality.