MediaMVP and HD100

[BostonDan]

I am planning on setting up a home network which will have MediaMVP players and HD100 players. If I record something in HD, will SageTV downsample the video file on-the-fly such that it can be played on the MediaMVP while still retaining the HD format for playing on the HD100? Also - Does anyone see any issues with running SageTV on the server within VMware?

[gplasky]

To your first question Sage will transcode the HD file to the MVP on the fly. It won't change the original recording.

I'm not sure how well VMware handles the tuner card hardware. And maybe USB tuners might work better than actual cards.

Gerry

[valnar]

Originally Posted by BostonDan

I am planning on setting up a home network which will have MediaMVP players and HD100 players. If I record something in HD, will SageTV downsample the video file on-the-fly such that it can be played on the MediaMVP while still retaining the HD format for playing on the HD100? Also - Does anyone see any issues with running SageTV on the server within VMware?

If you don't have any extenders yet, I recommend only buying the HD extenders. They are better even for SD, and won't tax your server.

SageTV will run in VMWare, but your tuners may not. If you want ATSC or clear-channel QAM HDTV, then I highly recommend the HDHomeRun tuner for your setup since it's Ethernet based. USB 2.0 support may be a bit tricky with VMWare, which would be your only other option for the other tuners. Recording in VMWare may also be a problem if you aren't using dedicated disk or a SAN. Don't use an image file!

All in all, I wouldn't recommend VMWare for this purpose, but it *can* be made to work.

-Robert

[Slipshod]

I'm doing the opposite... I'm setting up a new server and will be running Sage on the host OS and installing VMWare along side it to run VMs for Linux. I didn't want to mess with trying to get Sage smooth in a VM.

[valnar]

Originally Posted by Slipshod

I'm doing the opposite... I'm setting up a new server and will be running Sage on the host OS and installing VMWare along side it to run VMs for Linux. I didn't want to mess with trying to get Sage smooth in a VM.

I do that now with Windows 2003 (SageTV on host). I run a VM with VMWare for testing, but it doesn't do much. That will work.

Robert

[BostonDan]

Thanks everyone for the help. My plans now are to run Windows XP Professional on the host operating system with SageTV. I'm still going to run VM Ware to enable OpenSUSE with Samba for sharing files unrelated to media. For hardware, I'm starting with (2) ATI TVWonder 650USB tuners and a LSI-MegaRAID with (4) 1 terabyte drives in a RAID-5 configuration. I still record a decent number of analog stations which are not yet available in digital.

If anyone sees anything I can do to improve this or make my life easier, I appreciate the continued feedback.

My previous box had (2) Hauppauge 500MCE tuners. I had two fans fail in the case fail and the internal tuners ended up frying both tuners and the motherboard.