Best UI for windows and extenders? Original/Phoenix/Gemstone?

[btrcp2000]

I had planned on moving to Unraid for a lot of reasons, one of them being supposedly better ability to use the newer interfaces with extenders. Closest I can get is to SageTV Windows on an unraid VM due to r5000 tuners, which just don't want to play nice with linux no matter what i do, so that project is on hiatus for now.

I am all extenders (3 hd300s, 1 hd200, and 1 hd 100), plus one windows client in the kitchen. Unraid server has 20 cores and 32 gb ram, right now the Windows VM is using 4 cores and 4gb, but can easily be increased. Given the fact that I am stuck with windows fr the time being, what can I expect from using Phoenix/Gemstone/etc? Will they run okay, or should I avoid one or the other? Miany looking for the ability to customize menus and organize movies better.

tia

[wayner]

I really like Gemstone but it may use a bit more resources and that is an issue on Win with only a 1GB JVM heap size. With Windows on V7 I could only use about 3-4 extenders simultaneously without having issues. And some times even less as there may have been some memory leaks. I still have a Win server now running V9 and I don't use it much but it seems like memory usage is worse on V9 under Windows.

But on unRAID I am using a JVM heap size of 3GB and I have had more than a dozen extenders/placeshfiters connccted simultaneously without issues.

I would recommend that you try Gemstone - if you don't like it then you just change back to the default which takes a couple of seconds. Gemstone is also highly customizable.

[btrcp2000]

I haven't switched UIs since I had a bunch of mediaMVPs and SageMC was the hot new thing.

Can I install both Phoenix and Gemstone and all their required infrastructure, and then easily flip back and forth? I feel like I tried this once years ago and it was a disaster getting it unwound

[wayner]

I haven't used Phoenix but it is very simple to go from Gemstone to the default UI and back. Gemstone also includes a menu editor so you can easily change menus to be simpler if you so desire.