Octa-ATSC Tuner Ideas

[MrVining]

Right now I have 3x HDHomeRun for tuning up to 6 things. I thought that was going to be over kill, but now I'm thinking not so much. Often my wife and I record 4 things at once, my son often watches / records PBS Kids. This only leaves me with 1 tuner for over head and that pretty much wont do, because I know it's going to happen when we want to record a 5th + show, and on top of that I'm starting to get back into PBS myself.

I thought about just adding another HDHomeRun, but honestly with the 5x HD200 (max of 3-4 used at once) we are up to, that little network port is just tapped out.

I'm thinking about buying a "ASUS P5Q Premium" Link, and a couple of little switches. Then dedicating 2 of the network ports for HDHR tuners. And one of the ports to my HD200 front ends. What are your thoughts?

I have also tried to search for dual and quad ATSC pci tuners, but everything I find that calls itself dual is just one ATSC and one NTSC tuner... BLAH to that nonsense.

[david1234]

That is a cool board- I hadn't seen any quad lan consumer boards before!

A single gigabit port should be able to handle all the hdhomeruns you can throw at it. I figure even at Bluray bitrates (45mb/s), at best you'd hit 360 mbit/s with everything pumping out HD. I'd be far more concerned with my drives melting down

Give it a try, the only place I can see being an issue is just managing the multiple networks on your server, but if it's not a problem for you, then it should work fine.

[MrVining]

Both the HDHR and the HD200 have 10/100 network cards/ports or whatever. So that limits them to send and receive at 100 mega bit. I guess I could be confused about how/what a gigabit switch does, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't combine the packets into a gigabit format. Actually I never really looked into it, so there is a good chance I am way off. I just assumed if a 100 megabit connection was transmitting for x amount of time, that it would take up the receiving computers port for x amount of time 100 megabit or gigabit.

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by MrVining

I just assumed if a 100 megabit connection was transmitting for x amount of time, that it would take up the receiving computers port for x amount of time 100 megabit or gigabit.

Not correct. What you're descrbing is circuit-switching, the way old-fashioned telephone networks used to work, where the transmitting station owns the wire for as long as it takes to transmit its message.

The whole point of packet-switching is to avoid that. You break your message up into little chunks, which can mingle with other little message chunks on the same wire, so a slow transmitter doesn't end up hogging the whole wire.

A single gigabit port can therefore receive transmissions from many 100-megabit senders simultaneously. Since a single HDHR doesn't even use the full 100-megabit bandwidth, there shouldn't be an issue streaming 8 (or more) HD streams over a gigabit LAN to a single server port. All you really need to do is get a wider (e.g. 16-port) gigabit switch, or daisy-chain a couple of 8-port switches.

[stanger89]

FWIW, if you really were to run out of room on a single gigabit link, you'd probably want to look into some form of Link Aggregation

[MrVining]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

The whole point of packet-switching is to avoid that. You break your message up into little chunks, which can mingle with other little message chunks on the same wire, so a slow transmitter doesn't end up hogging the whole wire.

Hmmm this is good news for me then! So then the switch must store the for at least a short time? Rx 100 then Tx 1000?

[Fuzzy]

another option (cheaper) is to just add another cheap gigabit port to the server, and split the HDHomeRuns between them.

[Taddeusz]

I only have a single HDHR but decided to keep its traffic off the greater network. I installed an Intel PCIe gigabit adapter that hooks to a gigabit switch that connects to the whole network. I then use the onboard NF4 NIC to connect to a 100mb switch which only connects to the HDHR. If I had more than one HDHR I'd swap that switch out for a gigabit one just to help keep from saturating the link. It's fine the way it is though.

I used to have the HDHR directly connected to the server without the switch but the HDHR wouldn't be able to acquire an IP address after rebooting. This became a real issue when working with my server remotely. The only thing I wish I had now is remotely switchable power distribution for those times when something needs power cycled but you can't be there to do it.