Can you share recorded tv and guide between two sage tv media centers?

[mohanman]

Hey guys, I have one pc in living room and one in bedroom. I like the idea of both having their own capabilities fully when it comes to videos/photos etc. Is it possible instead of using media center and client in the other room to use two media center sage tv softwares and share the guide and recordings?

Thanks
Mo

[Opus4]

If you have 2 separate SageTV servers, each with their own content, they will not share EPG or recording data.

You could import one server's recordings into the other server and play them from the video library, but there is a risk of getting strange recording entries instead of imported videos: because recordings are matched to their airing info via the ID number as part of the filename, and each server generates its own set of file ID numbers, one server's ID number might match to a different show on the other server.

- Andy

[hmca]

I do this every week! I have access to OTA Canadian shows that my girlfriend does not. At the end of the week, I transfer all "her" shows via USB 2.0 to a 2.5" portable hard drive using "Beyond Compare" and then reverse the process on her Sage system. She watches from "Imported Videos" that I placed on her main menu with "Dynamic Menus". Works perfectly. Have not seen any instance of two shows having the same ID number. Won't say it can't happen, but so far it never has.
I transfer about 30 gig a week to her Sage system. She has the Canadian channels custom programmed into her system and she lets me know what to record for her that week.

[GKusnick]

The external drive trick does work, but for two machines in the same house, it's really much simpler to just set up a normal client/server system instead of two independent servers. The client UI has all the playback and viewing capabilities of the server UI, so you're really not missing anything by using the client.

If for some reason you have capture cards in both places, and it's not possible to move them all to the server, you can set up the second machine as both a network encoder and a playback client. You need a second copy of SageTV Media Center for that (not SageTVClient), but there's still just one server that manages all the recordings and catalogs all the media (including media on network shares).

The question is: what advantage do you think you're going to get from having two servers (i.e. two recording schedulers, two media catalogs, etc.) that you can't get from one server plus client and/or network encoder?