Question for Multi-Tuner system users.

[Sailn]

A friend of mine (wih too much money) and I want to build a 7 tuner system. The system will be supplied feeds from 3 different sources: Digital Cable, Analog Cable and Dish. Each tuner will have a dedicated source. 4 tuners will be digital cable (he has 4 boxes), 1 for dish, and 2 for analog. Is it possible to have a seperate EPG for each type of source? Or am I better off building 3 seperate systems? If I go the 3 system route, I assume that I will be 3 sagetv licenses in addition to the 5 clients he wishes to have. Furthermore, can a sagetv client deal with multiple servers? Will the client see just one EPG which combines all sources and sends recording requests to the proper server?

Thanks in advance...

BTW, because of sagetv, I have gained 10 pounds by being a couch potato, "she who must be obeyed" is not happy

[Narflex]

If you put it all on one machine, then it'll be one big integrated guide. Overlapping channels will only be shown once; SageTV will autoselect the source to use for those.

If you really want separate EPGs for each, currently you'd need to have a separate system for each. Currently, the client only supports connection to a single server (unless you restart the client, then you can specify a different server). In the future we'll expand it so the client can deal with multiple servers better.

[jmeeks]

What motherboard will you use that has at least 7 slots if you put it all in the same server?

I've seen 6 pci slots but not 7.

Are you planning on using another server as a file server? With that much recording capability, you would seem to run through hard drive space fairly quickly.

[-LD]

sweet lord who has time to watch that much TV?

[Sailn]

actually it will run on the primary server, home automation, cad machine. He has (from memory so I might be off)

Dual Xenon 2.4 g
Super Micro mother board (can't remember which) with a second PCI board.
22 bays (10 15k rpm 37 gig ultra wide scsi drives (raid 5))
4 gig ram (forget the speed)
nvidia 850


there is also an old 486 in the case as well - stateful packet inspection firewall - I runs off of a floppy
anyway, the machine is quite fast, and big as a small frig. and makes as much heat as a toaster oven.

The real crux of the question was, when I set up the multiple tuners, am I able to specify the source for each tuner? Obviously you wouldn't want the tuner connected to analog cable to be assigned to record a channel that is only available on the dish.

[Sailn]

EH, thanks for the reply. BTW, is it possible to set up a pecking order for the tunners. For example: First look on digital cable, then analog, then dish. That way I wouldn't waste the single dish feed on a program that was avalable elsewhere. Or is it based on the order the cards are in the pci slots?

TIA

[jmeeks]

I believe the priority order is setup in Sage as the order in which the cards are setup with their specific source. If they are different, you can tell them apart when selecting sources.

I guess that's where EncoderHouse was going, because I don't think you can tell one card from another or in which PCI slot they are in if they are all the same card. By just putting a single card in at a time, you would ensure which card you were setting up next. (Is that what you have found EncoderHouse?)

I do think that Narflex was aware of this issue and was going to see if the card being setup could be tracked and specified in the setup of sources.

[Narflex]

There is a 'merit' property that's attached to each capture device in Sage. You can assign values to those which will prioritize which source Sage should use first when it needs to decide which to use.