Question on server?

[crimkid]

I am a little lost here. I have been viewing some threads and i dont quite understand a few things. I thought that a fairly beefy server was needed to serve the recorded shows and movies out to the TV's viewer media extender? Is this not right? i have a fairly newer dual core pentium with 3 gb ram that i had intended on using as my sage video server, but after reading some different posts, it makes it sound like a beefy server is not needed. Can anyone shed some light?

I have that server, that i think i will have 2 dual tuner cards installed, keep 2 cable basic boxes, and 1 cable direct feed, to server TV and media to 3 tv's in the house. Any comments are appreciated.

[Slipshod]

Originally Posted by crimkid

I am a little lost here. I have been viewing some threads and i dont quite understand a few things. I thought that a fairly beefy server was needed to serve the recorded shows and movies out to the TV's viewer media extender? Is this not right? i have a fairly newer dual core pentium with 3 gb ram that i had intended on using as my sage video server, but after reading some different posts, it makes it sound like a beefy server is not needed. Can anyone shed some light?

I have that server, that i think i will have 2 dual tuner cards installed, keep 2 cable basic boxes, and 1 cable direct feed, to server TV and media to 3 tv's in the house. Any comments are appreciated.

If you use the HD-Extender on your TVs your server is fine - it will just be server files and not transcoding anything.

[pjpjpjpj]

Originally Posted by crimkid

I thought that a fairly beefy server was needed to serve the recorded shows and movies out to the TV's viewer media extender?

If you have a Sage HD Extender, the extender does all of the work. Your server can be old and slow (relatively), as mine is. I do not watch anything on my server (it crashes my server), I only watch through the extenders.

However, if you use the MVP extender, the PC does the work, and you need a "beefier" server (though not as much, since MVPs are not HD). Also, other operations (mostly done via adding customizations) can require the server to do the work; Comskip, the webserver plug-in (if you are watching remotely), etc., require the transcoding work to be done by the server. I believe that Placeshifter is the same way.

Simply put: look at the SageTV page (where the software is sold) for the "system requirements". If you only use the HD Extenders to watch, then you only need to meet the (low) requirements listed as "Hardware encoding". Otherwise, you need to meet the other requirements shown ("software encoding").

But if you have a dual-core with 3 GB RAM, (without going to check for you), I would guess you'll be fine. Check your video card vs. the requirements, too.

[Beefcake550]

Are you going to be doing any HD recording AND commercial skipping? If so, the beefier the better for the commercial. I agree that the old/slow server would be fine if you are not doing any processing on the recorded files and therefor just serving them up.

-Brian