How "strong" does the sagetv server need to be?

[mohanman]

Hey guys,
I am thinking about using my mac mini 1.66 dual core as a server which I would never touch, it would just be on, and would be running sagetv. It would be the recorder and server.

The only quesiton I had, is if those sagetv HD extedenders do come out, and I use those throughout the house, how much video "power" does it require from the mac mini? Or would it use its own hardware and simply stream the HD recordings from the mac mini?

Thanks
Mo

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by mohanman

The only quesiton I had, is if those sagetv HD extedenders do come out, and I use those throughout the house, how much video "power" does it require from the mac mini? Or would it use its own hardware and simply stream the HD recordings from the mac mini?

It just streams, no decoding on the server at all, with one caveat.

If it's like the SD Extender, any formats that aren't natively supported by the extenders hardware will be transcoded to a native format by the server before streaming. If that's HD, that's a significant amount of power.

The good "news" is, hopefully the extender will support MPEG-2, VC-1 (WM9), and H.264 natively so there should be almost nothing it can't decode natively.