SageTV Server and Graphics Card Question

[will]

I am in the process of setting up a SageTV server with two or three HD PVRs (haven't decided yet). I plan to use multiple HD200s (up to 5 eventually) to connect my TVs to the server and possibly one client license to connect a computer in the kitchen.

To save money I would like to recondition an old motherboard, a Pentium D 930 (3.0 GHz), and 3GB of DDR2 667 RAM. The motherboard only has one x16 and x4 slot. I plan to purchase an x8 hardware RAID card (probably the Areca ARC-1220). To have the card work properly I would need to install it in the x16 slot meaning I would not have an open slot for a modern GPU.

Does SageTV (as a server) utilize the GPU for encoding/transcoding? Would there be any benefit to having a GPU with SageTV (as a server) and multiple HD PVRs? The server, once setup, will be headless and in the basement connected to my network.

Thank you for the help,
Will

[GKusnick]

The graphics card handles decoding for a directly attached TV or monitor. If you're using HD200 clients, the HD200s will do the decoding. PC clients running SageTV Client will use their own graphics cards for decoding.

Transcoding is done by the server CPU, not the server graphics card.

Under no circumstances does the GPU do any encoding; that's done by the HD-PVRs.

[will]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

Transcoding is done by the server CPU, not the server graphics card.

Under no circumstances does the GPU do any encoding; that's done by the HD-PVRs.

So it would probably be wise to invest in a good RAID setup with fast hard drives. I imagine the big bottle neck with multiple HD-PVRs is writing to the hard drive (esp. while serving up content via streaming).

Thanks for the information.

Will

[stanger89]

The HD PVRs aren't really any worse than any other tuner/card.

[Thomas Wischgol]

I have three digital tuner cards (one AverMedia A180 and a HDHR) and was using two additional analog cards. I am using two hard drives which are not set up as RAID or anything (one of the hard drives is a WD green). I never had any issues with the write performance (i did enable proper write caching in XP though). The system is able to record all five streams with no problems. So I would not think you need a RAID system necessarily unless you are planning on striping them to get a massive storage system.

Thomas