How many devices?

[forumsviewer]

How many extenders is a single SageTV capable of handling?

Is it primarily about bandwidth, computer power of the system running SageTV center or licensing?

[stanger89]

There's no artificially imposed limit, and I don't recall anyone ever complaining about running into a case of having too many.

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by forumsviewer

Is it primarily about bandwidth, computer power of the system running SageTV center or licensing?

All of the above. You can of course have as many inactive extenders as you please, but each active connection consumes a license plus some amount of CPU and RAM on the server. Graphics-heavy plugins will consume quite a bit of server memory per client. Multiple simultaneous playback streams from the same physical disk can push the limits of disk performance depending on fragmentation and the placement of files on disk.

[stanger89]

Actually the extenders (HD200 and HD300) don't consume licenses, theirs are built in.

[GKusnick]

Right; good point.

[forumsviewer]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

All of the above. You can of course have as many inactive extenders as you please, but each active connection consumes a license plus some amount of CPU and RAM on the server. Graphics-heavy plugins will consume quite a bit of server memory per client. Multiple simultaneous playback streams from the same physical disk can push the limits of disk performance depending on fragmentation and the placement of files on disk.

I see, so the limitation is technically on the hardware of the server side.

Are there any documented "movie takes X bandwidth" type reports or tests people have done?

[stanger89]

Just basically the standard numbers:

Blu-ray: 50Mbps
ATSC HD: 20Mbps
DVD: 10Mbps

[GKusnick]

Do you have a ballpark guess of how many extenders you'd like to run? Half a dozen or so should not be a problem, and I believe there are people here running that many. But if we're talking 20 or 30, that's a different kettle of fish and you will need industrial-strength server and networking infrastructure for that to be viable.

[Nelbert]

20-30 extenders would need more than just a large box.

Depending on what the extenders/sage plugins are doing (even with less extenders), JVM size on the server could be a limiting factor.

For Java JVMs
With 32 bit Java on Windows you'll get a ceiling ~1.4G-1.6G
With 32 bit Java on Linux 32bit you should get ~2G
With 32 bit Java on Linux 64 bit you should get ~3G

You cannot run SageTV in a 64 bit JVM because the SageTV JNIs require a 32 bit JVM.

[keefb]

Also, network capacity could be a problem. If you are running several clients simultaneously, you will need gigabit capability on the server & also gigabit switches in the network, even if you are using 100mb/s clients such as HD200/300. If you are thinking of running the server on WHS then you will definitely need the media drive to be outside the data pool.

Another disk bottleneck may come if you are trying to record several shows whilst playing back to multiple clients particularly if you start to playback before the show record ends.

We are talking about a domestic scenario for SageTV not an industrial strength media streaming/distribution system!!!!