SageTV and Windows Home server

[skaterpunk0187]

Has anyone used sagetv for whs? i cant find much about it. i run xp media center edition 2005 and i used beyond tv if sagetv functions like these programs it is worth it or not i tried installing the trial but it says my timeis up so i didnt get to use it. It would be great if ppl could tell me how thay like it and the features

[dflachbart]

Originally Posted by skaterpunk0187

Has anyone used sagetv for whs? i cant find much about it. i run xp media center edition 2005 and i used beyond tv if sagetv functions like these programs it is worth it or not i tried installing the trial but it says my timeis up so i didnt get to use it. It would be great if ppl could tell me how thay like it and the features

I am running the SageTV Add-in for Windows Home Server for quite a while now, and it performs flawlessly for me. Having a storage server which is also able to run SageTV was just a perfect solution for me. Note that I am *not* using recording directories on a WHS share (SageTV records to a drive outside of the pool which is not managed by WHS), so I can't comment on any problems / performance aspects (due to the lack of 64k cluster) in this regard. Featurewise, well, it's pretty much the same as the standard SageTV version. The plugin page in the WHS console allows you to start/stop the service, and to register new PS / MediaExtender licenses.

Hope that helps,

Dirk

[weathersinc]

I have read several things regarding SageTV, yet I still do not understand it. Does the add in allow me to install a tuner in my home server and allow it to record TV from it? If it does, that is what I am looking for. This would eliminate the need of an extra machine on my network that is only recording TV. Any clarification would be greatly appreciated.

[PGPfan]

Originally Posted by weathersinc

I have read several things regarding SageTV, yet I still do not understand it. Does the add in allow me to install a tuner in my home server and allow it to record TV from it? If it does, that is what I am looking for. This would eliminate the need of an extra machine on my network that is only recording TV. Any clarification would be greatly appreciated.

Yes, It does allow you to put a tuner/capture card into your WHS machine (which is running completely headless) and record TV. Works just great.

-PGPfan

[autoboy]

SageTV records to a drive outside of the pool which is not managed by WHS

I'm totally new on the WHS discussion but I am thinking this could be the perfect solution for me as long as SageTV works well on WHS. The drive "outside the pool" is still inside the Media Server but is simply a 64K drive not directly managed by WHS right? It is not a network drive or something.

I record all my TV on a 750GB drive and I have 3 200GB drives with the rest of my media on my Windows XP media server. I could set up the 750GB drive as a 64K drive on my WHS box and the 3 200s would be managed drives in WHS for everything else. One of the most annoying things is managing all my files around the house. It really sucks and I'm looking for a solution. I don't use raid yet and I like the concept of the backups.

[chefski]

Well sorry to hijack this thread but im missing something somewhere

I have downloaded WHS and installed all OK

I have tried 2 different TV cards
Hauppage Nova T PCI
Leadtek Winfast DTV 1000
in my WHS box and installed the drivers.
I have installed the WHS edition of Sage TV and is now running as a service

I then installed Sage TV Client and now cannot get any TV on it i have tried all settings, when i scan for channels i can see them in the window and shows 40 channels found or there abouts. When i then enable all chaneels or exit doesnt matter what i choose i go back to main screen and try and watch Live TV but am met with a black screen and no sound.
No matter what options i change in setup for the video ie MPeg Decoder i still get the same.

Any help would be much appreciated as this is completely doing my head in now but i need to have some sort of PVR software for when WHS is released to enable me to view on my laptop.

[PGPfan]

Chefski,

Have you gone through the setup wizard for Sage, from the WHS box? Make sure you've setup your recording directories correctly.

-PGPfan

[AtariJeff]

Originally Posted by chefski

Well sorry to hijack this thread but im missing something somewhere

I have downloaded WHS and installed all OK

I have tried 2 different TV cards
Hauppage Nova T PCI
Leadtek Winfast DTV 1000
in my WHS box and installed the drivers.
I have installed the WHS edition of Sage TV and is now running as a service

I then installed Sage TV Client and now cannot get any TV on it i have tried all settings, when i scan for channels i can see them in the window and shows 40 channels found or there abouts. When i then enable all chaneels or exit doesnt matter what i choose i go back to main screen and try and watch Live TV but am met with a black screen and no sound.
No matter what options i change in setup for the video ie MPeg Decoder i still get the same.

Any help would be much appreciated as this is completely doing my head in now but i need to have some sort of PVR software for when WHS is released to enable me to view on my laptop.

Don't forget the client machine must login with a username that WHS recognizes. Otherwise the client can't access the SageTV recording directory for playback. I just created a generic "HTPC" user in WHS and auto-login with that ID.

[silverfoxxx]

Hi,

What cards have been proven to work with a whs set up i've been trying a nova t dual tuner but if i try to record 2 programs at the same time my server reboots, seems ok with 1 tuner.

[fitzlade]

Originally Posted by silverfoxxx

Hi,

What cards have been proven to work with a whs set up i've been trying a nova t dual tuner but if i try to record 2 programs at the same time my server reboots, seems ok with 1 tuner.

Had the same problem with the nova t dual tuner. WHS rebooted (blue screen) when recording / watching two programs. Sometimes even with just one program if the server was under load.
After trying various things (dedicated drive outside the pool, more memory, faster COU, fiddling with priorities) I finally swapped the tuner for a Terratec Synergy 2400i DT. That solved the problem

fitzlade

[Grasshopper]

Is there any particular reason to use a recording drive that's not managed by WHS, other than the 64k formatting issue? I used Gerry Plasky's formatting trick from the WHS forums to format my WHS drives to 64k clusters, so my managed drives are okay on that front. Is there another reason to hold off on moving my recording drive to the WHS pool?

[rlvogel322]

Originally Posted by Grasshopper

Is there any particular reason to use a recording drive that's not managed by WHS, other than the 64k formatting issue? I used Gerry Plasky's formatting trick from the WHS forums to format my WHS drives to 64k clusters, so my managed drives are okay on that front. Is there another reason to hold off on moving my recording drive to the WHS pool?

When I was using the beta version of WHS I did the same thing Gerry did (thanks to his write up) and formatted the managed drives as 64k clusters. Everything started out working great. However, after about a week when I tried to watch an HD show while recording another it stuttered very bad to the point the picture would just freeze. The WHS dmigrator was constantly running on the box and the HD activity LED never went out.

Now I will mention that I was also using the box for playback and have since moved to the HD extender but when I reinstalled the release version of WHS I left the recording drives out of the pool and have not had a single issue.

[AtariJeff]

Even with my SageTV drive out of the pool and formatted with 64k blocks I still had pretty bad stuttering when home server was balancing storage. That's why I moved SageTV back to a dedicated box again. Zero issues now.

[gplasky]

At this point when I recently redid my SageTV XP Pro server and made it a Sage TV WHS server I left the recording drives OUT of the managed pool. Only reason I did it that way is because of the data loss issue. I didn't want to find out on my own if the Sage recordings could be affected by that. So my primary drive (400 GB) was automatically partioned and formatted by the WHS install. I left all of my other SATA drives disconnected thru the install. After everything was up and working and shutdown and reconnected all the SATA drives and left them unmanaged. (And they also had existing recordings on them.)Everything works fine with my 2 x nVidia DUalTV tuners in the box and 1 HDHR on the network. (And I never used my server for viewing)Some DVD rips and music rips exist on the Data partition form the primary drive and I've had no issues even though that is formatted in 4K clusters. But I won't be putting any HD recordings on there.

Gerry

[Tiki]

I still haven't been able to figure out the advantage of using Sage with WHS versus XP Pro or some other OS.

I thought cost might be a reason, but WHS is more expensive ($159 for WHS versus $139 for an OEM copy of XP Pro or $109 for an OEM of Vista Home Premium at NewEgg).

From what I read, you still need to hook-up a monitor to do the initial set-up on a WHS machine, so it's not truly headless either. After that, I guess you can administer it via a browser or something.

If you were using XP or Vista, you could disconnect the monitor after setting everyting up and just use remote desktop to administer it too couldn't you?

What am I missing? Are there other reasons that a person who was setting up a new Sage PC might want to choose WHS instead of one of the other options?

[Grasshopper]

Exactly the right question, Tiki. My answer is that there aren't really any Sage-related reasons to go WHS, but there are other reasons that may be compelling for you. First, WHS does automatic daily backups of all the other PC's on your LAN. If something horrible happens, just boot from the Restore CD, tell the server which PC you're restoring, and you're back in business. This works well and has already saved me more than once.

Second is the 'drive cloud'. Under XP, your system drive will be "C". Add a drive and call it "D". Another gets labeled "E" and so on. Not so under WHS. In WHS, all the drives in the storage pool are treated like one huge "D" drive. If you choose to enable file duplication, the OS will store two copies of your files on separate physical drives, so that if you lose a drive in the server, you don't lose any data.

There are also a couple of downsides. First, there's a reported data corruption bug (I haven't experienced this personally). We've been promised a fix by June. Second, playback can get jittery if the server decides to reallocate files across its hard drives while you're trying to watch TV. I'm confident that this will be resolved, too, as more folks move toward this platform as a home/media server.

Oh, and if you're pinching pennies, bear in mind that the WHS version of Sage comes with an Extender license, too, so that alone will offset the higher sticker price of WHS.

[Slipshod]

Originally Posted by Grasshopper

Exactly the right question, Tiki. My answer is that there aren't really any Sage-related reasons to go WHS, but there are other reasons that may be compelling for you. First, WHS does automatic daily backups of all the other PC's on your LAN. If something horrible happens, just boot from the Restore CD, tell the server which PC you're restoring, and you're back in business. This works well and has already saved me more than once.

Exactly. The way to think of it is "I want WHS, and I want Sage. Why not combine them in one PC?" If all I was going to use was Sage I'd probably use XP. The backup function is what made me want to go with WHS. Additionally, there's a company called keepvault which has $90/yr online backups for "unlimited" data on your WHS data drive. Unlimited = all files less than 5GB in size (each). So I'm going to replace the ReadyNAS for fileserving, add a new backup server for the PCs, add off-site backups for the fileserver, and have it be a kickass Media server. Plus, the Microsoft employee price is $35 for WHS, and I have a friend there...

I'm also completely avoiding the drive-extender due to performance and data corruption concerns and going with an "unsupported" RAID configuration. I spent the 90's doing sysadmin/netadmin jobs, so I'm very comfortable with managing my own storage and don't need MS to do it for me.

[taylormadearmy]

Originally Posted by fitzlade

Had the same problem with the nova t dual tuner. WHS rebooted (blue screen) when recording / watching two programs.

fitzlade

Same for me too - its a shame really as for me it was a rock solid device on XP using MCE. I guess it could be a WHS issue rather than SageTV?

I now use 2 old Hauppauge single tuner PCI cards that I had lying around and 1 Nova-T USB Stick. I have a second stick to use - but currently have run out of coax cables with which to plug it in...

T

[othy]

Originally Posted by Tiki

From what I read, you still need to hook-up a monitor to do the initial set-up on a WHS machine, so it's not truly headless either. After that, I guess you can administer it via a browser or something.

If you were using XP or Vista, you could disconnect the monitor after setting everyting up and just use remote desktop to administer it too couldn't you?

Assuming that most of us are system builders, we end up having to connect a monitor for initial setup of any computer, headless or not. Once you've got WHS up and running, it has a client program you use to access most of its features (or you use Remote Desktop) from the other machines on your network, and you no longer need the monitor.

I haven't put Sage on my WHS server yet (waiting for the HD100 to re-do everything), but I'm happy with WHS for backup and central file storage. And I think Slipshod hits the nail on the head: I wanted WHS and I wanted a Sage server, so it made sense to combine the two.

As an aside, I think that once the idea of a WHS (or a competing home server solution) catches on, it will REALLY catch on--at least among power users with multiple computers. The data corruption bug has meant that much of the press and buzz about WHS has been negative, but I think it's a great idea. Like many people I think I had to talk myself into it a little (why do I need a storage pool? Why not just use Server 2003 or XP? Who cares about the computer backups?), but the free 120-evaluation sold me. I think it's a product that is solid and will only get better as it matures.

Tim

[DOS64K]

Originally Posted by othy

The data corruption bug has meant that much of the press and buzz about WHS has been negative, but I think it's a great idea.
Tim

The data corruption bug has been really overhyped. It involves only a few specific file types and programs and generally only applies when those files are edited directly on the shared drive pool.

I've been using WHS since the betas and have been extremely happy with it. It has saved my bacon a couple of times due to dying HDDs and the technically challenged in my household. With five networked PCs in the home, file sharing and backups alone are worth the price of admission. When the HD-100 extenders become available again, I will be combining my Sage server/client and WHS box into my dream uber-server.