Many tuners with many playback machines

[rnewman]

Ok,
I now have many tuners:
Hauppauge's PVR-500,PVR-350,HD-PVR
AVerMedia MCE 500
HDhomeRun

many playback machines:
SageTV client: HD and analog playback
mediaMVP (2) (analog only)
STX-HD100 (hd only)

If I can't have different guides/folders for each type of playback machine
then I need to id different versions of the same tv program for proper selection. I tried the different cities, but that is not good enough.
So I guess I have to go back to XMLTV Import Tool!
Anybody using it in USA that can help me set it up again?
Thanks,
Ray

[BFisher]

I don't understand your question... so this is my best guess at what your asking...

I have 6 tuners - some OTA antenna, and some via analog STB (DirecTV). I have 2 sets of schedule data - one for the OTA digital channels and 1 for directv. However, they all get blended together on the EPG. And I don't care what the source is... Sage is smart enough to handle that for me. I just select the show I want and it records whereever it's appropriate.

Same with playback. I have a mix of HD Extenders and SD MVPs and Placeshifter laptops. Again, I don't care... I pick what I want to watch and the server manages it. If it needs transcoding, it does it. If it doesn't need it, it doesn't do it.

Hope that helps...

[rnewman]

I have found that mediaMVP does not play HD very well.
and SageTV's HD extender is poor with analog recording.
BUT
I will check it out.
Thanks,
Ray

[BFisher]

I disagree about the MVP poor for HD. I think it does an exceptional job... enough that my wife commented that the upgrade to the HD Extender wasn't that huge of a picture improvement for our bedroom TV (only 30"). Make sure you have the transcoding set to High Quality (agreed, standard is not good).

And make sure your HD Extender is set to the highest resolutions your TV can accept. If you check all the resolutions it can accept, it will send the image out as it was recorded (ie. 480i). If you set it to 720p or 1080i or 1080p (whatever your TV is), the HD Extender will scale to match and it does a pretty good job (for a $200 box, it does a quite good job).

[CollinR]

Also if your analog recording quality is not so good the results will be reflected on all HD displays.

You may need more CPU on the server to watch HD on an MVP or multiple MVPs with sucess.

[rnewman]

Most of the time I can play my hdhomerun programs on mediamvp
BUT
fast forward/next/fast reverse/prev. lockup the playback.
My hd STB records great through s-video input to my PVR-350
for all programs. But I want to use HD-PVR for HD recording.

I guess I will have to evaluate each means of recording and each means of
playback with different recordings.

oh' well.
Thanks for the feedback.
I'll post my testing.
Thanks,
Ray

[rnewman]

The processor usage goes way up for transcoding for HD-PVR's H.264 files.
100% for my AMD64-3800+ SageTV server (with errors).
HDhomeRun only used 50%
I guess it come down to codecs and cpu power.
Time to upgrade cpu horsepower.
Ray

[BFisher]

The HD-PVR is new. I'm betting Sage and Hauppauge work on this issue.