Cabling question?

[mfelly]

First off, I've been using SageTV since Nov.. And have been very very happy with it. Now I have an HD300 and the wireless dongle and it has been very slow.

I have decided to run a cable from my computer to the HD300. I was just wondering if I should run it thru my router (Netgear WNR2000v2 if it matters) or just add a PCI network card to my computer and run it straight to the HD300. Just wondering if there any pro or cons either way?

I know that my computer will have to be on for the HD300 to be hooked to the server. It is pretty much on 24/7 right now, so that is not a problem.

Thanks

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by mfelly

I have decided to run a cable from my computer to the HD300. I was just wondering if I should run it thru my router (Netgear WNR2000v2 if it matters) or just add a PCI network card to my computer and run it straight to the HD300.

Neither. Best practice is to get a separate gigabit switch and connect everything on your LAN to that (including the HD300). So the only thing plugged into the LAN side of your router should be the switch. That way all your local LAN traffic will bypass the router, and the only traffic going through the router will be Internet traffic. This is what routers are optimized for and it's generally a mistake (in my opinion) to depend on them for your local LAN traffic.

[SWKerr]

Just plug it into the router. Easy and simple, should just work.

That router is just 10/100 for wired connections but that should still be fine for your purposes. At some point you may want to consider upgrading to a 10\100\1000 solution but unless you have a lot of PCs on your network moving large files between them you may never notice the difference.

[mfelly]

Thanks for the quick responses. I think for right now I will run it thru my router to get it up and running to speed. Then add the switch as I would like to add an NAS device to the network.

If I understand it correctly, if I have the shows record on the NAS, they still have to go thru my server to watch? But will not have a significant impact on play back?

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by mfelly

Thanks for the quick responses. I think for right now I will run it thru my router to get it up and running to speed. Then add the switch as I would like to add an NAS device to the network.

If I understand it correctly, if I have the shows record on the NAS, they still have to go thru my server to watch? But will not have a significant impact on play back?

If you are using your HD300 as an extender, then yes the extender will "talk" to the SageTV Server software on your PC, which will grab the data from your NAS.

If you use the HD300 in stand-alone ("Media Player") mode, then it can be setup to get the data directly from the NAS.

In either case, the PC won't be doing any real work - the HD300 will handle decoding and scaling the movie for playback. But, you will have more traffic on your network when playing back from a NAS through your PC. With a good gigabit switch, it shouldn't be a problem even with several extenders operating at the same time. If you are only talking about 1 extender and not a lot of other network traffic, then even a 100MBit switch built into a router should work.