Recording Multiple HD programs

[hedly]

I am preparing for the Feb analog cutoff by getting ready to purchase a HVR-2250. This would give me 3 digital tuners to record OTA signals. I was thinking of dedicating two for recording and one for tuning.

This system (specs listed in my signature) is also used to view the programs that are recorded and watch live TV.

Does anyone have any experience with recording multiple digital channels while viewing a third. My system sometimes lags when watching a program when a recording starts but if I pause the show for a couple seconds it usually alleviates this issues.

but what about multiple digital programs? Do I have enough of a system to do what I need?

Any suggestions or ideas?

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by hedly

I am preparing for the Feb analog cutoff by getting ready to purchase a HVR-2250. This would give me 3 digital tuners to record OTA signals. I was thinking of dedicating two for recording and one for tuning.

This system (specs listed in my signature) is also used to view the programs that are recorded and watch live TV.

Does anyone have any experience with recording multiple digital channels while viewing a third. My system sometimes lags when watching a program when a recording starts but if I pause the show for a couple seconds it usually alleviates this issues.

but what about multiple digital programs? Do I have enough of a system to do what I need?

Any suggestions or ideas?

How many shows you can record without issues, really has less to do with the system and more to do the with Hard drives themselves. Your system should be fine. What do you have for hard drives? Do you have it set to 64K clusters? Many will have various recommendations of what is ideal. The consensus is though that if you are recording HD that you should have a separate hard drive for the OS. My setup is currently a small SATA hard drive (100GB) for my OS and 3 x 320GB hard drives for recordings. I would recommend a couple of smaller hard drives rather than one big hard drive. This way it increases your chances that Sage is recording to more than 1 hard drive at any time (there is no guarentee as Sage records to whatever drives have the most available storage when it starts the recording, but it at least increases your chances). This is just my recommendation. I have recorded as many as 3 HD and 2 SD with my setup with no problems at once (not sure if I was watching any shows when this occurred).

[hedly]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

How many shows you can record without issues, really has less to do with the system and more to do the with Hard drives themselves. Your system should be fine. What do you have for hard drives? Do you have it set to 64K clusters? Many will have various recommendations of what is ideal. The consensus is though that if you are recording HD that you should have a separate hard drive for the OS. My setup is currently a small SATA hard drive (100GB) for my OS and 3 x 320GB hard drives for recordings. I would recommend a couple of smaller hard drives rather than one big hard drive. This way it increases your chances that Sage is recording to more than 1 hard drive at any time (there is no guarentee as Sage records to whatever drives have the most available storage when it starts the recording, but it at least increases your chances). This is just my recommendation. I have recorded as many as 3 HD and 2 SD with my setup with no problems at once (not sure if I was watching any shows when this occurred).

paulbeers,
Thank you for the reply. Wow, 5 show and two of them Hi-Def. Yeah, my concern was the writing to disk and if it could actually keep up with the amount of data. Right now I have two HD, one with the OS and some room for recordings and then a 500GB drive that is solely for recordings. I don't remember the cluster size on the OS HD, but I don't think it was 64k; but I think by the time I installed the 500GB I had read that 64k clusters were the recommended setting.

It is too bad that Sage can't assign a HD to each tuner. I had thought that I read somewhere that Sage records to one HD (or folder) until it is full and then either deletes files based on your settings or goes on to the next HD (folder). I assume from your setup that you record to your server and then pull the data from your clients. So you are not recording and viewing on the same machine; your clients are doing the legwork generating the hi-def content.

I wonder about a hard drive's ability to simultaneously read and write high definition data. I guess I will just have to try it and see what happens.

If anyone else has any experience, I would greatly appreciate it. I am sure this question will come up at Feb 17 approaches.

Oh, by the way, today I heard that Obama asked congress to delay the digital switch over.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...,6537360.story
I thought he was the harbinger of change? Whatever.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by hedly

It is too bad that Sage can't assign a HD to each tuner.

There is a property you can use you force a tuner to record to a specific recording dir:
mmc/encoders/<tuner #>/forced_video_storage_path_prefix

I had thought that I read somewhere that Sage records to one HD (or folder) until it is full and then either deletes files based on your settings or goes on to the next HD (folder).

No, it records to the recording dir with the most free space currently, as explained in Appendix C of the PDF manual. That ends up trying to even out the remaining recording space on each drive.

I've had all 7 of my tuners recording to the same drive (4 are HD) while playing 1 (or more; can't remember what all I tried playing) HD recordings w/o a problem.

- Andy

[hedly]

SEVEN tuners!!! Yikes.

Well thanks for the reply. Now all I have to do is convince the wife that we need another tuner card. But she loves the system and loves Sage so it should be an easy sell.

Thanks all.

[dvd_maniac]

I have 6 tuners. the dual HDHR the dual 2250 and 2xHD-PVR's. They all record in HD. I have had all 6 tuning while watching a few of them on the HD-Extenders without any problems until I changed my recording HHD setup from raid-0 to a single drive.
If you end up with recording/playback issues and your M/B is capable of Raid then I suggest buying another 500GB and striping them.

[hedly]

Originally Posted by dvd_maniac

I have 6 tuners. the dual HDHR the dual 2250 and 2xHD-PVR's. They all record in HD. I have had all 6 tuning while watching a few of them on the HD-Extenders without any problems until I changed my recording HHD setup from raid-0 to a single drive.
If you end up with recording/playback issues and your M/B is capable of Raid then I suggest buying another 500GB and striping them.

dvd_maniac,
Do they all record to a server and you pull from there to the HD-extenders?

Striping is what I had though until Opus showed me the way to point each to a hard drive. I think I will try that option.