building a sage box

[bud]

well i decided to get into the pvr market. Im going to build a machine with parts I have laying around but need a little help. I have a box with amd 1900+, 512mb pc 3200, 20gb hd, 9200se, win xp pro and soon to have 2 pvr-250 tuners. Heres what i would like to do but not sure how to set it up so please help me. I want the machine to be able to record tv and watch a different channel while recording (thats why I got 2 tuners), I have a file server with 500GB of data mostly movies in .vob format that i would like to watch through the sage box, also I would like to able able to use a different machine with the sage client (i think) to watch live or recorded tv or and movies on my file server through a wireless g (108mbs) network connection. Is this setup possable? thanks guys for any help.

[korben_dallas]

Sounds like you got most of it figured out right. The SageTV manual (thanx Andy!) details the playing of DVD file structures. Per the wireless.. some people report great success with recording/playback over wireless.. and some people just resign themselves to running Cat5 cable. There is no right answer when it comes to networking.. you'll just have to experiment and way the benefits against the costs and issues. Is your source going to be analog cable? If not, you'll need an infared emitter to change the channel on your satellite or cable box.

[mdmint]

Where do you plan on recording to? You mentioned parts for Sage HTPC and a 20G HD, that's fine for boot partition etc. but not for recording, two or three hours at best after OS & Sage. If planning to record to the file Server you mentioned you'll want a paritition with 64k clusters and figure on needing 2 to 5G per hr recorded depending on quality you can live with.

[bud]

i was going to record to the file server cause the main box that will have sage on it will be close to my file server and will be run with gigabit and the server is in a raid 0 setup now There is enough space on the file server right now to record at best quality i have 1tb of storage but 500gb is used so I will have to add some drives soon. The thing the makes me wonder is using a machine with the sage client to stream live tv and recorded tv over the wireless.

[salsbst]

If your wireless card works well and consistently, you should be ok with a wireless client. But if the card hiccoughs like our Dell Inspiron's does, you may have problems with wireless streaming.

[mikejaner]

Yeah, I agree with salsbst. My wireless cards higgough like his. G is the lowest bandwidth you want to mess with , so you should be good. I wouldn't expect it to be to much of a hassle, but if your client loses it's connection with the server one or two times a day it's probably the wireless acting up.

as for playing VOB files, it works, I have done it. All you have to do is add that extension to the list of recognized extensions in the sage config file

[mdmint]

Originally Posted by bud

i was going to record to the file server cause the main box that will have sage on it will be close to my file server and will be run with gigabit and the server is in a raid 0 setup now There is enough space on the file server right now to record at best quality i have 1tb of storage but 500gb is used so I will have to add some drives soon. The thing the makes me wonder is using a machine with the sage client to stream live tv and recorded tv over the wireless.

Wireless G has the bandwidth for the Client to receive the stream. I wouldn't and don't use it for my main HTPC client because of issues with it intermittently getting knocked off by wireless phone usage that happens to grab same wireless channel. (Neighbors) Went throught the hassle of running Cat5e under the house from Sage Server (actually gigabit switch) to main HTPC Sage Client. Hassle once, rock solid network connection always.

[cmaffia]

I use wireless with no problems as long as it is wireless G

Originally Posted by bud

i was going to record to the file server cause the main box that will have sage on it will be close to my file server and will be run with gigabit and the server is in a raid 0 setup now There is enough space on the file server right now to record at best quality i have 1tb of storage but 500gb is used so I will have to add some drives soon. The thing the makes me wonder is using a machine with the sage client to stream live tv and recorded tv over the wireless.

[bud]

what is sage server?

[korben_dallas]

Originally Posted by bud

what is sage server?

That's just forum talk for the main recording PC. SageTV is what you will have on your PC where you will be connecting to the cable/satellite feed and recording the shows. SageTV Client is what you would have on any other PC.

There are more complex setups, but it's adviseable to do all your recording on one PC to its local storage.

[silkshadow]

It might go better for you if you setup sage on your file server and use Sage client. Of course this requires more $$ investment into Sage. Recording via UNC is hit and miss. I've seen people post that it works fine for them but when I tried it, back with Sage 2.0, it caused alot of skips and stuttering. That was over 10baseT.

As for the wireless, I switched from 802.11g to Dlinks xtremeG wireless equipment. Never had a wireless problem since. Highly recommned it for HTPC use in general.

[bud]

well there is one problem with that my file server has server 2003 on it would sage work with that?

[Crashless]

Originally Posted by bud

well there is one problem with that my file server has server 2003 on it would sage work with that?

Yes. I believe there are a couple of people running their sage servers using that OS.

[silkshadow]

*hand up* I do . Yup, Sage works on Server 2003 just fine. Actually, I recently discovered that it is more stable, I think, on 2003. I started with Sage on Windows Server (besides my initial demo install on my HTPC client running XP) but my server died a few weeks ago so, till I get the new parts, I had to put Sage on XP. Since I put it on XP its crashed twice and I have to use Sage service instead of running it 24/7. On win server, Sage crashed on me only twice in the many months its been running. Both times I think it was comskip's fault it crashed. Of course, YMMV .