Out of curiousity: SageTV on HP MediaSmart WHS?

[AzJazz]

1) Does the HP MediaSmart WHS have enough horsepower? I think it is a 2GHz Celeron with 2 GB of RAM, but not sure ...

2) Can I use my existing SageTV WinXP license key with it?

3) If I decide to jump for it, what posts here would be good for my installation?

Thanks!

[MitchSchaft]

1. I have the Ex475 (1.8GHz cpu). You would need external TV tuners (HDHomerun for example). That's the only thing keeping me from using mine as a Sage server. Plus, I'm scared the CPU won't keep up. I have a quad core on my sage server currently. There are plenty of people that run the Sage server on their WHS box, but I'm not sure about the HP.
2. You can use the XP license on it.
3. Search feature

[stefam]

My HP MediaSmart works Great as a Sage Server!

I upgraded the memory to 2GB (easy to do!). And I do use an HDHomerun.

Performance is great. I can stream to 2 HD200s while recording a third show. I have show compression on and I don't ever notice when it is running. My CPU meter on the WHS is OK and I never have run into temperature issues.

I also have AnyDVD resident on that machine as well with no issues.

Love it!

-Mike

[Djc208]

It depends on what you want the server to do. Recording and playback require no more CPU horsepower than copying files or streaming media. The tuners do all the encoding (or for digital translating) of the signal, so the computer only has to store the incoming digital signal. Sage will run the CPU kind of hard on initial startup but how often is that going to happen?

No people run their Sage servers on much less. I've had mine on an AMD Sempron 64 (doing playback too), upgraded that to an Athlon 64, when I went to a server I actually went back to a P4 2.8 because it had a much better MB. All were fine for recording and streaming (and even playback).

The reason to have big CPUs is for transcoding and comskip. Both see big benefits from better processors. They should be fine on your HP, but will operate slower and take longer than on a faster machine.

As others have stated the big downside is expandability. All the tuners would probably have to be external, which isn't a huge problem depending on the tuners you want.