Mac Mini and SageTV

[lcurrie]

Hi All,

I'm about to take the plunge and setup a SageTV box. I was thinking about using the Mac Mini but the more I read, the more confused I get.

Most of the postings I see have a PC server with a Mac Mini as a client. Can someone please explain this setup? Are the minis not powerful enough to be the entire setup? Also, what's the server/client setup relationship? Can I not just have one box that serves (I guess this would be the server ) the recorded shows to my TV.

My priorities in my system will be to:

• Record 2 channels at once (or record one, play one)
• Have some sort of HD workaround. From what I'm reading, this would be done through using Firewire. I'm still not quite sure how this works...
• Be able to be used with a TW digital cable box. I have the SA8300HD currently.
• Get the best picture quality possible on my HDTV (1080). I also have a second HD TV I'd like to mirror to. I think I can achieve this through an external device though if it's not possible through the existing Sage device.

Thanks,

Lynn

[Conejo]

My understanding is that SageTV Media Center server will only run on MS Windows or certain Linux operating systems.
It might be possible to run XP on the mac-mini though that would be an extra cost and might not support all of the device features.

Sage has ported the PlaceShifter Client for the Mac OS. That's why you see it as a client option.

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by Conejo

My understanding is that SageTV Media Center server will only run on MS Windows or certain Linux operating systems.
It might be possible to run XP on the mac-mini though that would be an extra cost and might not support all of the device features.
.

Sage has a Mac version of the Media Center, http://store.sagetv.com/Merchant2/me...tegory_Code=SS .

So tht is Windows, Linux, and MAc for the server.

[Diginerd]

Let's try and clear this up for you:-

1. Any Mac Mini (G4 or Intel) will be capable of recording 2 HD streams at once, and at least serving a 3rd one out over the network. Although after a while it will struggle due to disk fragmentation on the slow, low capactity Hard Disk it has internally.

An external USB2 drive should help greatly, along with regular defragging. Steer clear of external Firewire Drives for this as with the amount of data flying around on the firewire bus it is asking for trouble.

On paper is should be fine, but in reality this WILL bite you.

Think: 2x Streems in from STBs, 2 x Streams out to Disk, and another stream from disk for playback.

With USB2 Disk you'll be able to keep the disk I/O separtate from the Capture in. STBs get picky..

2. Playback of HD out of the onboard graphics requires a modern Intel Mini with a fast CPU. Even then you may run into issues with 1080. I don't have a Mini so I can't confirm that this would be a problem in reality. That certainly would be great data for the community to get though. You can get around this by using clients though, more of which later..

Conversely there is no way you can expect a G4 Mini to directly render the video with anything approaching even jerky playback, there simply isn't enough power in the CPU/GPU combo. You can get around this too by using clients again.

3. There is a 1:1 ratio between STBs and capture over firewire. The SA8300 does have 2 tuners, but only one is accessible via firewire. This is true for all current STBs

4. Many Cable Operatorss do not enable the firewire port at all on the SA8300HD. There's a fairly easy way to find out though.

a) Install the Apple Firewire SDK
b) Power down the Mini & STB
c) Plug the STB into the Mini, and turn them both on and wait for them to boot.
c) Go to "about this Mac", click on Advanced and click on Firewire.

If you see entries for the cable box then it looks like you have a reasonable chance of getting this to work. If you get nothing, Simply rinse and repeat trying the other port on the STB. If that still doesn't work then grab an SA42xxHD box from them or the older SA32xxHD box if thats what TW uses. They legally have to have a product with an actiuve Firewireport that they can let you have, though they are NOT obliged to give you a DVR with Firewire enabled. You also will not be able to access content that has already been recorded on the STB's internal Hard Disk.

5. Since it sounds like you've never used Sage, install it and lauch. Go through the initial setup without setting up a video source. Once you get the main Menu you can quit and follow the instructions on pasting into the properties file (Which didn't exist until you completed the setup) and have at it.. Warning, this is considered a relatively "Advanced" setupm but we're a helpful bunch and keen to get folks using this so you should be fine...

6. Despite all this you may have heard of 5c copy protection. If TW have this enabled on any channels you won't be able to record anything on those channels. There is some debate about locals being mandated to be in the clear, and the vast majority of folks do indeed get at least the locals (CBS, ABD, NBC, FOX, PBS etc), some are lucky to get every HD signal and a fair few of the digital channels. The amount you get purely depends on where you live and this is the crapshoot part of the process (Good job there's a 15 day free tial then!)

7. 5c is different to Encrypted QAM, which is the method used to protect premium channels on the wire. Using Firewire you don't have to worry about that as the STB is handling it for you. On the Mac there is no support for HDHomerun yet in Sage, but that is another way of getting HDTV off the wire, although this usually has a smaller pool of likely channels to be working (Think locals again). Once HDHomerun comes into Sage on the Mac too then we'll be in a very enviable spot.

8. Sage supports the concept of a Server, Clients, Extender / Placeshiter Clients, and network Encoders.

The default setup the Server also displays the Gui, which can easily be thought of a server process and a client process on one box. To stream to multiple locations you need either HD Capable clients or wait a month or two for the HD Extender (Which will be cheaper than putting together a client machine and buying a client licence).

The way you record from firewire is via the concept of a network encoder. This is a process running on a machine which captures video from a source and communicates with the server via the network, this network can be confined to a single machine (Ie you run the server, the network encoder and the GUI all on one box, or they could be on 3 different machines..

Actually the multiple machine approach is not a bad one unles syou have a monsterously capable box. There is not much CPU required on the server to schedule and record. CPU muscle is required for decoding the video, doing commercial skipping (Which if you have an Intel Mac you'd have to run under a VM (Virtual Machine)), or transcoding (Not neccesary if you have HD Capable clients)

9. The Linux, WinTel and OSX versions of Sage can all talk to each other and have different capabilites. In general the WinTel version has the most toys that work with it, but there are a lot that run on the other platforms too. If you drink the KoolAid as heavily as I have you can wind up with multiple servers acting as network encoders and leverage the different tools under the various platforms.

If you have an Intel Mac though you can run parallels and have the best of both worlds.. Run Sage server on the Mac natively, but run commercial skipping in parallels (Or VMWare player for free if you can hack together a VM). Personally I'd be inclined to run the server under the VM so you can have support for HD Homerun too and run the network encoder for firewire on the Mac and run the client on the Mac. This all depends on having a serious CPU though, and preferably an upgraded one with true hypervisor support which I'm not sure if the Mini can do.

10. This is all a lot to take in, but essentially Sage is one of the most flexible and extensible systems that there is. Despite the core being "Closed Source" a large chunk of it it is exposed and there many amzing tweaks and upgrades that folks have contributed. Check out Sage MC for one... iPodifier is another that is unsung but awesome (Only for windows, but easy to run in a VM and with iTunes 7.3 it syncs with the Mac iTunes.

Why would you want this? Because it automatically grabs content, transcodes it to iPod format and sticks it in the play list in iTunes so you simply leave the iPod docked and you have last nights shows on your iPod ready to watch the next day without paying one red cent to the Apple store! All fair use and legal. :-)


Finally.. Welcome!! :-)

[Conejo]

SageTV for Macintosh V6.2 is Released!
Inglewood, CA (June 26, 2007) [...] Version 6.2 of SageTV Media Center software for Mac sells for $79.95 or can be purchased with the optional SageTV Placeshifter $99.95. SageTV Media Center with a USB TV Tuner bundle can be purchased for $199.95. The SageTV Media Extender is available for $109.95 (wired) or $169.95 (wireless). The SageTV Placeshifter option is available separately for $29.95 at http://sagetv.com.

Looks like the MAC version of Sage Media Center server was just released a few months ago. The reason you don't see it mentioned in the forums is that it's too new a product and most of us users here currently are MS lemmings or Linux gear heads and just don't know a better deal unless it hit us across the nose with a rolled-up newspaper.

Thanks ke6guj and Diginerd.

[lcurrie]

Wow. All great information.

I'll check on the firewire issue. I have an eSATA drive attached and *think* TW told me all the ports are enabled but I'll double check. Thanks for the tip.

Okay, so I'm flexible. Just to prove it, I'll switch gears.

Sounds like I really need to go with a Windows box or a linux box for this. I'm buying a system specifically for this purpose and from what I've read, Windows is the easiest option, so I'll go with that.

I'm a bit concerned about the channel blocking/encoding/not being able to get them so I'll test that as best as I can with the hardware I already have. I have an ancient eMachine gathering dust at the office. I'll buy a card and run some tests on that before buying the production machine.

In the reading I've done on the forums, I've gathered this:

• I should go with XP
• I need at least 3 Ghz if I want to do anything with HDTV
• I need firewire if I'm going to do HD recording
• I'm in over my head since I know Macs really well and only enough about Windows to be dangerous

I'll go re-gather my thoughts now and read a ton of posts and see if I can come up with a good configuration for a box.

Thanks again for the great information,

Lynn

[Conejo]

Originally Posted by lcurrie:
In the reading I've done on the forums, I've gathered this:

* I should go with XP
* I need at least 3 Ghz if I want to do anything with HDTV
* I need firewire if I'm going to do HD recording
* I'm in over my head since I know Macs really well and only enough about Windows to be dangerous

- Even though you can run XP on a mac under Rosetta, I believe running SageTV on an pure XP-only box is best for support reasons.
- 3 Ghz is a good choice if you're planning on recording multiple HD channels. You'll also want to think about large or multiple hard drives. Look at connecting them in a RAID (parallel) cluster so they share the load.
- Firewire off a capable cable box is good if you want access to the most number of digital cable channels. Another option is to purchase an HDHomeRun tuner that can receive HD OTA and/or HD QAM channels broadcast in the clear. Not as good as a Set-Top-Box/Firewire but lower cost/fewer channels is sometime a good trade-off.
- Dangerous is a good thing. What doesn't kill you makes you smarter.

You're on the right track, starting off slow. I mean, how much disposable income can one person spend on a thing like this. It couldn't be that much.

-rich

[bcjenkins]

Actually, Rosetta is the term used to run PPC applications on the Intel hardware. You can run Windows under Parallels or VMWare although you can't run SageTV playback under it (yet, VMWare has a new beta with DX9 so maybe)

Keep in mind though, many PC users complain about firewire recording. So if this is your objective, don't toss the Mac to the curb just yet. User guho has written a firewire plugin for the Mac to enable it as a network encoder.

Personally, I switched to the Linux server from Windows. I am going through some adjustment issues, but I find it does a really good job with QAM and HD recording in comparison. The firewire recording on the Mac side is very intriguing to me.

B

[jpwegas]

Diginerd,
Awesome post on summarizing all the Sage options!

Originally Posted by Diginerd

If you have an Intel Mac though you can run parallels and have the best of both worlds.. Run Sage server on the Mac natively, but run commercial skipping in parallels (Or VMWare player for free if you can hack together a VM).

I believe that someone got comskip running under Darwine on Intel Macs, but the only post I can find is here.

--John

[Diginerd]

Hmm I wonder if this could be done with a lightweight VM appliance.

VM Player is free, the code in the appliance open source and it could be as simple as a config file pointing to the path desired.

[Kirby]

Dont mean to resurrect an old thread, but regarding a Mac Mini, is there any issue with it being on 24/7 long term? Heat issues? I'm planning on getting one (or one of those Aopen mini Pc's) to use as a sage server (either under MacOSX or Windows) along with firewire STB setup, an external USB drive for TV recording, and eventually one of the USB/Component capture units that is coming in a month. I really like the Mac Mini/Aopen size, it will sit on top of my entertainment center, so no ventilation issues. I'm just concerned if these fanless computers are able to deal with long uptimes.

Also, regarding the mini, is there any issue with it running without a keyboard/mouse hooked up? Once configured, I would like to run it headless, as my viewing will all be done via HD Extenders. Does OSX have some sort of remote desktop software built in?

[sandor]

Originally Posted by Kirby

Dont mean to resurrect an old thread, but regarding a Mac Mini, is there any issue with it being on 24/7 long term? Heat issues? I'm planning on getting one (or one of those Aopen mini Pc's) to use as a sage server (either under MacOSX or Windows) along with firewire STB setup, an external USB drive for TV recording, and eventually one of the USB/Component capture units that is coming in a month. I really like the Mac Mini/Aopen size, it will sit on top of my entertainment center, so no ventilation issues. I'm just concerned if these fanless computers are able to deal with long uptimes.

Also, regarding the mini, is there any issue with it running without a keyboard/mouse hooked up? Once configured, I would like to run it headless, as my viewing will all be done via HD Extenders. Does OSX have some sort of remote desktop software built in?

they are built very similar to Apple's laptops, which i have never had any problem with. My mother in law has an older mini (PowerPC) and that G4 processor gets much hotter than the Intel chips used now, and she has no problems running it 24/7.

The Mac mini should be completely fine.

[mcbrems]

Originally Posted by Kirby

...is there any issue with it being on 24/7 long term? Heat issues? I'm just concerned if these fanless computers are able to deal with long uptimes.

Also, regarding the mini, is there any issue with it running without a keyboard/mouse hooked up? Does OSX have some sort of remote desktop software built in?

I run my Mac Mini Core 2 Duo 24/7 with SageTV for Mac without any issues. It does have a cooling fan, but it is very quiet. I bought some of those silicon rubber feet at Home Depot to get it up off the shelf surface by a half inch for added ventilation.

You will need a keyboard or mouse hooked up to the Mac for initial setup, but after that it should run fine without. OSX does have a built-in remote desktop capability. I've been using Chicken of the VNC and like it.

SageTV for Mac runs beautifully on my Mini, although there is an occassional video hiccup (dropped frames) during playback that is supposed to be fixed in the next build. I can't vouch for it's reliability as a server. I tried out SageTV Client once, but I was running it via wireless and it was herky-jerky. Wireless is just not fast enough I guess. Never tried it with real ethernet.

McB

[utahcybercowboy]

Has anyone used a more robust remote to control the Mac mini? I would like to be able to use the MVP remote or an MCE remote.

Thanks,

Steve