HD 200 question

[Gregavi]

I have not purchased the HD 200....yet.
I have a PC desktop Pentium 4, 3.20 GHz, 1 Gig RAM & ATI Radeon HD 2400 video card. The 1080i .ts files I have made with Hauppauge HD DVR will barely play (Stops & Starts) using VLC and/or SMPlayer. I'm thinking my PC doesn't have the horsepower to play these files. The questions: Does my PC have the HP and if not, will these files play OK using something like Sage TV? I remember reading about Sage TV in one of these forum and I got the impression that when using Sage TV, you didn't need a PC with a lot of horsepower because the Sage TV does all the heavy lifting. Is this not true. Someone on one of those forums stated that he used an old Pentium 3 as his server along with Sage TV and everything ran smoothly. Do you even need a video card when setup this way? I confused about how Sage TV works. Comments? Thanks in advance.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by Gregavi

I have not purchased the HD 200....yet.
I have a PC desktop Pentium 4, 3.20 GHz, 1 Gig RAM & ATI Radeon HD 2400 video card. The 1080i .ts files I have made with Hauppauge HD DVR will barely play (Stops & Starts) using VLC and/or SMPlayer. I'm thinking my PC doesn't have the horsepower to play these files. The questions: Does my PC have the HP and if not, will these files play OK using something like Sage TV? I remember reading about Sage TV in one of these forum and I got the impression that when using Sage TV, you didn't need a PC with a lot of horsepower because the Sage TV does all the heavy lifting. Is this not true. Someone on one of those forums stated that he used an old Pentium 3 as his server along with Sage TV and everything ran smoothly. Do you even need a video card when setup this way? I confused about how Sage TV works. Comments? Thanks in advance.

You don't need the heavy horsepower for recording with SageTV. You need the heavy horsepower for playing the files with SageTV on a PC client. That being said, the HD200 plays those same files without even breathing hard. So you can use your current PC to record them and the HD200 to play them back.

Gerry

[loonsailor]

I agree with gplasky. The hard work is in encoding / decoding / transcoding. If you use video sources with hardware encoders, and you're viewing the video on an HD-200 which (I guess) has a hardware decoder, the server is basically acting like a store-and-forward switch. For instance, I have two video sources - an HDHomeRun, which delivers two streams of digital video via ethernet, and an HD-PVR which delivers an H.264 stream over USB. The server provides video for an HD-200, with another HD-200 or two to be added soon, and an occasional sage client or placeshifter. The CPU (an AMD X4 905e) usually runs 1-3% busy, almost never as much at 5%. However, it does use a lot of network bandwidth. It's OK for now, but I may add another ethernet card at some point - at $30-$50, no worries. Also, I have 4GB of RAM, and when I check it's mostly allocated, though I haven't done any investigation of who's using it. Also, I'm using Ubuntu Linux, so it may be that, if you're running XP or Vista or whatever, you may have a somewhat different experience re: server efficiency.

So, if you're not planning on watching video on the server very much, your server should be fine. You may need to add some memory, but maybe not.

The HD-200 is a black box that just works. Tiny, very low power, no fan, no worries.

How many video sources, and what are they?

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by Gregavi

I have not purchased the HD 200....yet.
I have a PC desktop Pentium 4, 3.20 GHz, 1 Gig RAM & ATI Radeon HD 2400 video card. The 1080i .ts files I have made with Hauppauge HD DVR will barely play (Stops & Starts) using VLC and/or SMPlayer. I'm thinking my PC doesn't have the horsepower to play these files. The questions: Does my PC have the HP and if not, will these files play OK using something like Sage TV? I remember reading about Sage TV in one of these forum and I got the impression that when using Sage TV, you didn't need a PC with a lot of horsepower because the Sage TV does all the heavy lifting. Is this not true. Someone on one of those forums stated that he used an old Pentium 3 as his server along with Sage TV and everything ran smoothly. Do you even need a video card when setup this way? I confused about how Sage TV works. Comments? Thanks in advance.

Everyone is right. Your computer would be fine for a back end server. I would recommend going up to 2GB of RAM if possible. That way you can increase your java heap size which can help keep your HD200 running smoothly.