SageTV on a Server- Gfx Card needed??

[rebelBodhi]

Hello everyone,

This forum helped me get Sage going with Firewire coming from the STB earlier this year, so thanks a lot! I've been happy with Sage since.

But I'm enhancing my setup now, building it around an experiment with a big server I picked up--a slightly older Dell Poweredge:

• Dual P3 Processors
• 512 MB RAM
• No Graphics Card (just OEM integrated ATI RAGE graphics)
• No Sound Card
• Two Ultra-2 SCSI drives for the OS (Win XP) and Sage App (each on their own drives)

So far I have a Hauppauge 1600 running, Sage installed and configured, and am working on installing a Firewire card and external HDD for recording.

My question is: Do I need a graphics card in this beast, even if I don't plan to ever watch TV on it?


I plan to use Placeshifter in one room, and a media extender in the other, to view the recordings/watch TV.

I'm a CS guy, so no fear with technical details I'm just not sure if a Gfx card can contribute to the work the CPU needs to do to transcode/decode the cable signal and/or ATSC. Or would it just help in viewing the encoded data, which I won't be doing on that machine, in which case I would guess I don't need to buy one (so I can rather buy another one for my gaming pc and go SLI )

Thanks a lot for any advice!

[CollinR]

No.

[mayamaniac]

you can also run SageTV in service mode using Windows Services, where the SageTV engine is running completely in the background so no interface is loaded at all.