transcoder running on client

[Wheemer]

why is sage's transcoder running on my client

I expect it to only run on my server.

[nielm]

Video thumbnail generation at a guess. (use process explorer to see the command line)

[mayamaniac]

Thats one of many aspects of SageTV that I don't understand, which is the thumbnail generation. Why is it that each client must generate its own thumbnails? Why can't it just grab the thumbnails from the server like the MVP does? It seems redundant to have each client regenerate thumbnails which have been or can be done by the server.

[Wheemer]

yeah maniac that exactly what I was thinking...

I want my server to be the one processing things.

[GKusnick]

The thing is that having the server do everything isn't scalable. If you have a lot of clients, you want the clients to do as much of their own processing as possible to minimize the load on the server.

Now you could argue that if a thumbnail already exists on the server, it's silly for the client to generate another one. It should just pull the existing one over the LAN and cache it locally instead. For all I know it actually does that; I haven't tested it. But if a thumbnail doesn't exist, it makes more sense from a scalability perspective to do the generation client-side, using client CPU cycles rather than server CPU cycles. So that's probably why it's done that way.

I understand that in your particular case you want it to work differently, and I suppose you could make a case for having that option. I'm just saying that the current behavior is not totally off the wall but is actually a reasonable default for people with multiple clients.

[mayamaniac]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

Now you could argue that if a thumbnail already exists on the server, it's silly for the client to generate another one. It should just pull the existing one over the LAN and cache it locally instead. For all I know it actually does that; I haven't tested it.

I have tested it, and no it does not pull the existing one from the server. The idea to releive server loads by off loading some of the work to the client is okay with me. But it needs to be streamlined so that it is efficient to reduce unnecessary work.

For example, generating thumbnails daily for recorded shows isn't a big deal. You probably have 20-50 shows recorded and each client can generate its own and it only takes a minute or two. But if you store photos and imported videos, and lots of them, in the thousands, it takes a very long while for SageTV to generate the thumbnails for them. And so its very inefficient to have each client do its own thumbnail while there is already a good generated set on the server. Especially for those with MVP and I'm sure for the future HD extender as well, you will most likely need to have the generated thumbnails stored on the server side. So since it's already on the server, the clients should just copy them over the LAN instead of recreating them. Its a difference of minutes to hours.