WORKING-Sage, VMware Server 2, UNraid, Hauppauge PCI Nova T500, USB passthrough

[al_uk]

In case anybody is thinking about doing the same...

I have been trying to reduce from 2 machines to 1 running 24x7 to save power.

One machine was a SageTV server running Vista, the other runs UNraid as a storage server.

I use a PCI Hauppauge Nova T-500 dual tuner.

I now have VMware server 2 running on the stock(ish) UNraid server, which allowed me to set up a 2003 server VM to run SageTV.

I have just bought an HDHomerun DVB-T unit, but that is not yet working properly with Sage.

As an experiment, I installed the Nova 500 in the UNraid server, and surprisingly, it appeared within VMware as an available USB device. I then passsed this through into the SageTV VM, and installed the Hauppauge drivers on the VM. I had to upgrade the virtual machine to hardware v7 (an option on the web gui) which provided USB 2.0 speeds.

SageTV then recognised the tuners, and after a bit more setup, it all seems to be working. I have now switched off my physical SageTV server.

Next steps will be to install the other Nova 500 I have in the UNraid system, and decide whether to keep the HDHomerun, as if the Nova cards work and are stable then I don't need it any more.

[smino]

Do you have your install docs to post how to do it?

[ace007]

I'm running a little differnet way. I have a standard HDPC running Vista x64. The base OS is running Sage with all of the differnet video inputs I'm using. I'm also running VMWares Virtual Server product and have a web and email server running on a Server 2003 VM x64. It runs pretty well.. I limit the VM to only using one of two cores so it does not overwhelm the server. I also haev 6GB of RAM in the box to make sure there is enough to go around.

[GaryL]

I’m currently trying to setup a similar system, although in my case I’m using Ubuntu 8.04 Server as my host and Windows XP Pro as my guest.

I’ve got myself to the point where my USB Hauppauge Nova T-Stick has been recognised and installed on the guest without any difficulty. But when I try to install the WinTV software to test that everything is working before I look into SageTV, the setup freezes/never runs. But I’m not sure if this is an issue with USB pass through/Hardware or with the WinTV software.
Does the WinTV software work fully for you?

[valnar]

OP: Why not just run Windows 2003 directly on the hardware and Sage on top of that? Put all your disks in the server. Seems simpler. No need for the UNRaid NAS. Just one big server.

Run the free version of VMware Server for Windows if you need more VM's, but keep Sage outside of it so you have flexibility in the future (firewire tuning, PCI tuner cards, etc).

[al_uk]

GaryL, I have not installed the wintv software. I just use the driver install pack. However, I did have some intermittent problems with sagetv freezing when trying to access the tv card. A reboot did not fix it.

I resolved this by moving to XP as the guest OS for running sagetv instead of 2003 server. I now have 2 pci nova 500s working as usb pass through devices.

Another thing to try is to create a new blank virtual machine, and add the xp guest vmdk as the hard disk for it.

The other thing to make sure is that your virtual machine is v7, not v4.

Valnar, I wanted to use unRaid for file storage as it is a better fit for me than 2003 or whs. ie. only losing 1 disk to parity, not losing the whole array if > 1 drive dies, and being able to add more drives of varying sizes to the pool.

[GaryL]

Thanks for your reply,

I decided to swap my USB tuner for my Hauppauge Nova 500 TD (same as yours at a guess) that I had sitting about.
Installed the driver via windows update and then installed SageTV. All is perfect now. Didn't even try installing WinTV this time, but I guess it mustn't like the fact that its not connected directly as such to the TV tuner.

I also installed SageTV Client on my Mac and it all seems to be running 100% as well.
Server resource usage is not as bad as I expected either, so all is good.

I've only just discovered SageTV, and having it in a VM makes life a lot easier for me, as every few months I find/see something else that I want to try out so my setup is consistently changing.

[smino]

I just switched to Linux Mint for all my media playing. It is fast, clean, and works right out of the box, without having to install anything.
I totally dropped XP from my home! Sweet. I am not a linux techie, that is why I love Linux Mint 7 64 bit. It is a ubunutu redistro. I also use unraid.