Mini-ITX Sage box with PVR-350 - Feasible?

[fieldeffect]

I've got a pretty kick ass SageTV box running, the only problem is that for my first attempt I didn't want to risk being underpowered, so I went for an Athlon XP 2600, 1GB RAM, 200GB HDD and a WinTV PVR-350.

It turns out that my processor utilisation is usually under 10% i don't know whether to feel smug or stupid

So I want my second box to be silent (I want the Hard Drive to be the only moving part) and i'm planning to do it with as fast a mini-itx board as I can get whilst still being fanless. I know I can get a 600Mhz fanless, and heard rumours about a 1GHz fanless (although I can't find one).

My concerns (which i'm hoping someone can confirm/deny) are:

- Assuming i'm using a PVR-350 for encoding and decoding, will a 600 or 1000 VIA be enough for faultless TV on 3Gb/hr (i'm assuming yes)

- Will I have to worry about the PVR-350 getting too hot in a small case?

- Assuming that Live TV and recording are Ok, will I find the interface to be very sluggish?

I'm not worried about any technical challenges, but I don't want to go out and buy a bunch of kit that someone has experience of not working too well.

As I said above, I want to be doing everything at 3Gb/hr. this is supposed to be better than the Tivo that my current box replaced (oh my god, I still can't believe that Sage is better than Tivo. Truly this is the 21st century )

Thanks for any experience anyone has,

Nick.

[nielm]

I have a Via M10000 (and PVR-250)... The CPU is a little bit underpowered for the drawing of menus, which means that it can take a few seconds for the LiveTV guide (and other complex menus) to show up, and changing channels is a bit slow... Otherwise it works fine. Obviously comskip and recompression is a no-go!
Playback for me uses 50% CPU, but with the -350, I guess it would use about 0!

Heat might be a problem for the -350 -- there are various threads that say that they had endless problems with a 350 until the put a fan right next to it...

[Matt]

I'd go Client/Server if you can, preferably with wired ethernet. Put your PC somewhere where the noise doesn't disturb you much and use a Hauppauge MediaMVP as Client for SDTV. MVPs are absolutely quiet (no fan, no disk), cheap and the picture quality is similar to that of the PVR350. BTW, MVP and PVR350 share the same limitation: they can't play DVDs directly.

Before switching to MVPs (I have now 3 MVPs, one for every TV in the house) I ran a M10000 w/ a PVR350 (just for TV-Out) as Client for some time. I ran it fanless (has been stable for months, but I don't know yet how much this will shorten its live ;-). I even ran SageTV off a USB Memory Stick to make sure the HD spins down.

Using a VIA ITX as server is nice from a power consumption point of view, but the system won't scale. I'm running now 3 PVR250 capture cards (adding number 2 and 3 increased the WAF a lot ;-) and 3 instances of the MVP Client on my SageTV server.

-Matt

[jhh]

Hi,

while what you want to do is perfectly possible I'd go with Matt's suggestion.

I have an M9000 with a 250 and navigation speed is acceptable. If you call up the menu while playing a DVD that is a bit on the slow side. EPG is ok for me but I don't have video preview.

For the server my main concerns were noise level and power consumption. On the client side things are a bit different and on both criteria the MVP cannot be beaten.

I have an MVP running and really like Matt's work on it. -Thank you Matt- the OSD fix made it work for me. The M9000 has a Sage and Sageclient running which drives the MVP and it works surprisingly well. On top of that it runs Nielms webserver also -Thank you Nielm.

If only I could have more tuners in the EPIA box.

Jan

p.s.: an MVP powers up a lot faster than an EPIA.

[fieldeffect]

My cable entry point to the house and weird room layout mean that the server box pretty much has to be in my stereo rack next to the TV, so i think the plan might be something like:

- Borrow a fanless 600Mhz EPIA that I can get for a few days and see what I can get out of it.

- If it's not fast enough for menus, still use it as a server, but also use an MVP as a client (thus solving the slow menu display problem).

Can the MVP stream Live TV? I've read about a problem with it playing too fast and exhausting the buffer. And would I be able to get the server to do remote channel changes via the MVP?

Cheers,

Nick.

[jhh]

Nick,

That is not going to do what you want - I think the minimum is the M9000 and I now wish I had the patience to wait for the M10000 even though it works. Thing is at the time I bought it there was no need to run Sage and Sageclient concurrently on one machine and there was no webserver. Sage drives one tv while Sageclient drives MVP on projector - not 100% happy with scaling but I think it is using composite rather than s-video. Must check the scart cable.

Your EPIA would still have to do all the work building the screens, menus, etc. This gets sent to the MVP which introduces an extra delay so that is not going to do what you assume. To do so you would need a PC running a Sageclient. You can do everything you can do with MVP as it merely displays what is on the Sageclient so changing a channel will work. I've heard about the live-tv problem as well but it is not an issue for me as I hardly ever watch live-tv.

Jan