Challenge to Sage Gurus: Remote recording solution needed

[Media Quest]

I have two homes. Home A has satellite tv and home B does not. Home B has a sage server and media extenders at each television receiving OTA broadcasts.

I would like to occasionally record cable programs from home A and make them available on my sage server at home B.

So far, the best solution that I have determined is a PC at house A running Sage Media Server, and the HD-PVR solution for recording satellite programing.

Is there a way to do this without the second Sage server, and somehow control the HD-PVR tuner from the existing Sage installation at home B?

Either way, I would then need some kind of solution to transfer the programs from home A to home B, perhaps a VPN of some sort, with programing periodically downloaded to Home B by a batch file or script of some sort. Obviously, watching the satellite programming live is not an issue, just an occasional recording the same day or later.

What am I missing? What would be the easiest way to do this?

[gplasky]

A couple of thoughts:

So you could setup a SageTV server at your satellite house. And then set up a directory monitoring tool to watch the recording directory and FTP the recordings to your other house. If you put them into the Sage recording directory you can have BMT import it as a TV recording and grab meta data for it. I know the current version of SageTV will put meta data into the file but I'm not sure how that would work between 2 Sage systems. Maybe Sage will just see it as a recording and keep the pertinent meta data.

A Placeshifter client would also allow you to connect to the Sage server at the satellite house and view those recordings. But picture quality would be dependant on your Internet speed.

Gerry

Gerry

[GKusnick]

The easiest solution (but not the least expensive) would be to subscribe to satellite service at home B and do your recording locally there.

Have you measured your Internet throughput from home A to home B? Unless your upload speed is very fast, expect it to take many hours to transfer one HD recording. My guess is that after doing it a few times, you'll decide that it's not something you want to do very often.

You could reduce the transfer times by recording at a lower bitrate. But if you lower it substantially, then you might as well just use Placeshifter to stream them instead of shipping them over to play back locally.

But any solution that involves recording at location A will require a Sage server there to do the recording. (Even a remotely controlled network encoder requires a fully licensed copy of the server software.)

[APillowOfClouds]

What about a VPN connection and a network encoder?

[stanger89]

If you had a pipe big enough, that should work, but you'd need a very reliable, probably 20Mbps pipe.

[Fuzzy]

And since the network encoder also requires a full server license, is pointless to trouble with. You'd still be better off recording and transfering.

[Gustovier]

The easiest way is to just use an HD300 or PC in placeshifter mode. But like fuzzy stated the quality will be dependent on the upload speed from Home A and the download speed at Home B. Also note that even if you get like 5-8mbps from Home A -> Home B, it's not going to HD infact it will be a lil worse than SD. But it would work, and it would be easy breasy to set it up and control..