What am I forgetting for a new server?

[dislecksea]

After getting such a great response to my last post (thank you very much) I am ready to move forward putting together a SageTV/WHS box (She Who Must Be Obeyed authorized the initial expenditure for my b-day!). As I stated in my last post, I want this to be a mostly “set it and forget it” sort of installation that we use for video and music distribution throughout the house. FYI – we will be using it to replace our 1 television with dual tuner DirectTV with Tivo from our old house.
Here is what I am planning.
1. 2 HD extenders for now (47+ inch LCD in the living room and 26 inch LCD in our bedroom). I suspect that this will expand over time.
2. A computer just next to the open kitchen with a SageTV client on it. The screen will be able to be turned to be viewed from the kitchen.
3. A WHS box (headless) in the basement with at least CAT5e cable (if not CAT6) running to the extenders and computer(s).
4. Per the responses to my other thread, the WHS will have at a quad core CPU.
5. 2 HD-PVRs hooked up to the sever via USB.
6. Each HD-PVR will be hooked into a DirectTV HD receiver via the Patterson Technology USB TV Translator.
7. I will run the SageTV WHS version with SageMC and CenterSage. I want commercial skipping active but understand that it is not up and running for HD-PVR files yet.
8. Not that it should matter, but just in case: on the WHS box I will also be running Homeseer with a Z-Troller attached.

So, I know that my server will need:
1. to be able to handle the quad-core intel CPU (people on the board seem to like Intel better than AMD).
2. gigabit LAN.
3. 2 or 3 Megs of memory since 32 bit WHS won’t handle any more.
4. at least 4 USB ports (2 for the HD-PVRs and 2 for the TV Translators).
5. no audio card. Onboard should be fine.
6. no video card. Onboard should be fine.
7. for starters, a couple of hard drives. I will probably go after 2 500G ones. The WD Green drives seem popular.

So, my questions:
1. Is there anything I have listed/omitted that leaps off of the page at you as just plain wrong or a bad idea?
2. I have looked at some of the pre-builds on e-bay or deals out there and it seems that I might be better off (cheaper) going that direction rather than building. Any thoughts?
3. Many of these machines come with a video card. Is there really no use for this in this situation? Even for commercial processing (when it is ready for the HD-PVR)? Should I just take it out or leave it in?
4. Is 2 HD-PVRs the way to go? It is pretty expensive. I know that many people have far more tuners, but we only occasionally have had a conflict with our 2 tuner Tivo. Would a HD Homerun be better? I live in Atlanta and should be able to get HD local signals pretty well. Should I plan to add later?
5. There is lots of talk about managed shares v. unmanaged shares and formatting a certain way to avoid stuttering but, no matter how I try, I just cannot seem to wrap my head around this issue. I have done some searches of the forums and the web, but I still don’t get it. Can anyone reference something I could read to get up to speed? Preferably written in crayon using small words?
6. Like I said, what else am I forgetting?

Thanks in advance for all of your help. I have been lurking here for years so I know how great you folks are at helping simpletons like me get on board.
- Miles

[Chriscic]

Sounds like a great setup.

The advantage of a HDHomerun is that you don't have to pay for another cable box, really two cable boxes to the extent that the HDHomerun has two tuners. The disadvantage vs. a HD-PVR is the files sizes will be bigger and obviously you will be limited to what you can get via ClearQAM and/or OTA.

I can't see why you'd need a discrete videocard for the server. You could always add one down the road if accelerated transcodes via GPU become possible... I don't think they are now.

Curious as to why you're going Quadcore. Even a feeble 1ghz CPU should work fine as a server. Are you planning on doing some sort of transcoding that will take advantage of the extra cores?

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by dislecksea

7. I will run the SageTV WHS version with SageMC and CenterSage. I want commercial skipping active but understand that it is not up and running for HD-PVR files yet.

So, my questions:
1. Is there anything I have listed/omitted that leaps off of the page at you as just plain wrong or a bad idea?
2. I have looked at some of the pre-builds on e-bay or deals out there and it seems that I might be better off (cheaper) going that direction rather than building. Any thoughts?
3. Many of these machines come with a video card. Is there really no use for this in this situation? Even for commercial processing (when it is ready for the HD-PVR)? Should I just take it out or leave it in?
4. Is 2 HD-PVRs the way to go? It is pretty expensive. I know that many people have far more tuners, but we only occasionally have had a conflict with our 2 tuner Tivo. Would a HD Homerun be better? I live in Atlanta and should be able to get HD local signals pretty well. Should I plan to add later?
5. There is lots of talk about managed shares v. unmanaged shares and formatting a certain way to avoid stuttering but, no matter how I try, I just cannot seem to wrap my head around this issue. I have done some searches of the forums and the web, but I still don’t get it. Can anyone reference something I could read to get up to speed? Preferably written in crayon using small words?
6. Like I said, what else am I forgetting?

Thanks in advance for all of your help. I have been lurking here for years so I know how great you folks are at helping simpletons like me get on board.
- Miles

I run a headless WHS I built myself. For the most part I have no reason to run Sage on the WHS server. Sometimes I do for convenience of configuration but use the default STV for that. That will always have the latest features and configurations compared to SageMC. I also don't use the WHS for any client viewing either. It's a server and I use it for storing and serving up the media.

2. The prebuilds will be fine. On a headless server video and audio doesn't even matter. You don't want to run Sage as a client on a WHS server. (My opinion)
3. Video card is for viewing. Has nothing to do with commercial skip or the HD-PVR. Only if the machine you are getting is going to be a SageTV client. Then you will want a video card that does hardware processing of the h.264 HD-PVR for viewing. Doesn't do anything for recording.
4. 1 HD-PVR will not be enough because with it you will be able to record any of the HD channels. You're sure to come up with a conflict. I would recommend 2. I have a HD-Homerun and a HD-PVR. The HD-Homerun will get the clear QAM channels which in most cases will be the HD version of your locals. So I use my HD-Homerun for all the HD locals. And I use the HD-PVR for any of the other HD stations.
5. In the default setup of drives in WHS is does not give you the opportunity to format the drives in 64k blocks. One of the reasons for the unmanaged shares is because you treat them as any other drive in a Windows environment and you can format them with 64K blocks thru the Disk Administrator.


Gerry

[sic0048]

Regarding the drive questions on the WHS...

1) It is recommended that what ever drives you are using for Sage do NOT get added to the pooled storage by WHS. They will simply appear as regular drives on the machine which are separate from the combined drives of WHS that appear as one drive letter. You can backup the Sage drives onto the WHS pooled drives if you want, but do the actual recording of shows on regular drives not in the pool.

2) It is recommended for any SageTV system (WHS or not) that you format the drives used by Sage to 6400k. This basically refers to the smallest block that the drive is broken into. For normal drives, you want the blocks to be much smaller, but since you are going to be writing large continuous files on the drive, it works better to use a larger minimum block size. What this means is that if you write a 1k file on the drive, it will be writting on a block that is 6400k in size and therefore waste 6399k of space. Again, this is bad for normal drives, but not a big deal when you are talking about large files like Sage produces. It will mean less blocks are actually used for a large file and it is easier for Sage to play back files when they are on fewer (but larger) blocks.

[Slipshod]

Originally Posted by Chriscic

Curious as to why you're going Quadcore. Even a feeble 1ghz CPU should work fine as a server. Are you planning on doing some sort of transcoding that will take advantage of the extra cores?

If you want commercial skipping with the HD-PVR, a quad-core is a good idea. H.264 is very CPU intensive. Otherwise you'll have to enlist another PC on your network to do the processing, or learn extreme patience.

Originally Posted by dislecksea

4. Is 2 HD-PVRs the way to go? It is pretty expensive. I know that many people have far more tuners, but we only occasionally have had a conflict with our 2 tuner Tivo. Would a HD Homerun be better? I live in Atlanta and should be able to get HD local signals pretty well. Should I plan to add later?

Give the HDHR some serious thought before going with 2 HD-PVRs. If you don't have too many conflicts, and if they are usually with network TV shows or cable shows that repeat, you should be fine with an HDHR and 1 HD-PVR. That should be cheaper up front, and it should save you a little on monthly fees for the extra receiver and not needing a local feed.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by Slipshod

If you want commercial skipping with the HD-PVR, a quad-core is a good idea. H.264 is very CPU intensive. Otherwise you'll have to enlist another PC on your network to do the processing, or learn extreme patience.

I'm pretty sure ShowAnalyser isn't multi-threaded, so once it DOES start supporting H.264, a quad core would only be of an advantage when processing 3 or 4 recordings at a time. Personally, for a headless sage server, I'd rather go the lower-cost/lower-heat/lower-kWh dual-core approach.

[davephan]

Two 500 gig drives is a good start, but you might find you'll need more disk space soon, especially if you use RAID 1 and only have 500 gigs. I'd recommend a separate physical drive for your operating system drive. If you keep the system drive down in used disk space, it will be easier and quicker to take disk images of the system boot drive, for a quicker recovery with disk imaging software. After using SageTV awhile, you'll want to have a recovery plan to quickly restore the system drive if there are problems -- you never want to rebuild from scratch if you can avoid it.

2 - 3 gig memory sounds like a good idea. I started with 512K, and it wasn't enough. My system was caching continuously until I boosted the memory to 1 gig. My newer system has 2 gigs and never has memory problems; it usually consumes about 800 - 900 megs all the time.

A fast Quad-core is a good idea, unless the budget only allows a fast dual-core. Extra CPU help future-proof the system so you don't have to replace the system for more years.

The USB-UIRT is more flexible if you change between DirecTV, Dish Network, and Cable TV to get better pricing every several years. If you stick with DirecTV, then the serial set top box is a better method from what I've heard. I use a USB-UIRT and switch providers every 2 - 4 years.

Dave

[dislecksea]

Thanks for the responses.

As to the choice of tuners, I need a little clarification.

Assuming that I have 2 DirectTV receivers, and I go with 1 HD-PVR and 1 HD Homerun, would the idea be that the HD-PVR will use 1 receiver, one tuner in the HD HR would use the other receiver, and the last tuner in the HD HR would use OTA signals?

Am I understanding the suggestion correctly?

[Apap]

If you want to capture HD from both of your Directv receivers you will need 2 HD-PVRs. The HD Homerun can only capture ATSC signals form Over The Air TV and/or unencrypted QAM digital cable channels.

[Slipshod]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

I'm pretty sure ShowAnalyser isn't multi-threaded, so once it DOES start supporting H.264, a quad core would only be of an advantage when processing 3 or 4 recordings at a time. Personally, for a headless sage server, I'd rather go the lower-cost/lower-heat/lower-kWh dual-core approach.

The new H.264 version is multi-threaded. Jere posted about it a while back, and I just tried out the private beta. Took just under 7 minutes to scan a 1/2 hour HD show recorded from the R5000 (Dish Network). All 4 cores were running at 98%+ while it was running. I'm *really* glad I sprang for the 45nm quad-core.

Cheers,
Slipshod

[phelme]

Originally Posted by Slipshod

The new H.264 version is multi-threaded. Jere posted about it a while back, and I just tried out the private beta. Took just under 7 minutes to scan a 1/2 hour HD show recorded from the R5000 (Dish Network). All 4 cores were running at 98%+ while it was running. I'm *really* glad I sprang for the 45nm quad-core.

Cheers,
Slipshod

that's interesting news. I imagine Comskip, if/when it ever is updated for H.264, will be similar. I've actually turned off all my Comskipping for the time being, no point in it since most of the shows are being recorded off the HD-PVR these days. And I find I actually don't mind skipping with the FF keys. I know, I must be losing it...

Reading this thread makes me think most people must run their servers headless, because they think video oomph (read H.264 playback) isn't needed. I think at the very least one would need a video-ready 780G or 945G motherboard for checking playback locally on the server. I run my server on a KVM switch with my Macs and PC game machine so I can do just that. I'm considering upgrading my server motherboard as well from an aging socket 939 board, but want to see what the commercial skipping software and Sage transcoding is going to require first. Looks like the beta ShowAnalyzer is confirming that a quad-core is the way to go.

[gplasky]

You need the horsepower, not the graphic power on the server if you run headless. My server has the built-in Itel graphics but I don't watch SageTV on my WHS server. Don't need to. But I need the hp for the new SASuite comskipping. SO at the very least it doesn't matter what mb or graphics card you have. Just how much horsepower (quad) you have. And as much memory as can be supported by your OS.

Gerry

[Slipshod]

Originally Posted by phelme

Reading this thread makes me think most people must run their servers headless, because they think video oomph (read H.264 playback) isn't needed. I think at the very least one would need a video-ready 780G or 945G motherboard for checking playback locally on the server. I run my server on a KVM switch with my Macs and PC game machine so I can do just that. I'm considering upgrading my server motherboard as well from an aging socket 939 board, but want to see what the commercial skipping software and Sage transcoding is going to require first. Looks like the beta ShowAnalyzer is confirming that a quad-core is the way to go.

I think you'll find a bunch of the HD-100 users eventually end up with a dedicated or even headless server.

When I was shopping for a MB, I focused on getting a stable MB that had good 2003 Server drivers and built-in video with the least memory possible. I wanted to be able to use as much of the 4GB as possible (%@$%$@ WHS is only 32-bit!) so I needed either no video or a minimum ammount of video RAM. Found a nice 775 server board with 32MB onboard video, 8 SATA hookups, 4 LAN (don't ask), 45nm compatibility, and a good ammount of PCI and PCI-E slots.

I hardly login locally, I use RDP for most operations. I have an LCD, mouse, and keyboard on it, but almost never use them.

Cheers,
Slipshod