Multiple media sources (libraries)

[phatjew]

First, thanks to all for a great support community. I've been lurking in these forums quite a bit lately, and have already found helpful answers to most of my questions.

What I want to know, though, is whether I can use one copy of SageTV (server) to access multiple audio and video libraries, on different networked computers. Specifically, my roommate and I each have over 50GB worth of MP3 audio and mixed video (avi, dvd rips, etc.). Eventually I'll be a grown up with my own media server tucked away in the closet, but until then I'd like to avoid having to copy all his stuff to my machine, or all my stuff to his, just so Sage can be aware of it. We'd both have Sage clients installed, and I'd like for each of us to be able to watch movies and listen to music without really being aware of whose computer the actual file happens to be on.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[ErsatzTom]

Rather than copy my music over to my Sage server I just created a Network Mapped drive (I used M: for music) to my Mac, where I use iTunes to play, rip, burn, and buy music. Then you just add the new drive (M:) in the Library Imports Directories section of the Detailed Setup. You should be able to create a separate mapped drive for each of your collections and add them each separately. However, and I'm not sure about this since I haven't tried it, I have the feeling that where your collections overlap you will have duplicates. I don't think it makes any effort to prune out dups. I could be wrong, or if I'm right, maybe they will address that at some point.

t

[phatjew]

Thanks for the good response, ErsatzTom. That makes sense, certainly.

Does anyone out there know how Sage would deal with multiples?

Also, Will watching these movies over the network a) be slow enough to mess with picture quality, or b) consume so much of my LAN's 100Base-T bacndwidth that I will notice the slowdown in other network activities?