Sage looks cool. What is my best way to do this?

[Canar]

I have like 5 TV's. I have one super PC that I leave on all the time with a ton of HD space. I am using Comcast standard cable because I do not want a box on any of my TV's. Most of them are LCD panels hanging on the wall like a picture. The main TV is a 45" LCD sharp HD.

My goals for a system like this.

Some way to connect the TV's to the main PC with an interface that is simple to use for my family.

I am willing to run Cat5 to every TV but would prefer 802.11.

Interactive TV guide that can be controlled by any of the TV's at the same time without effecting each other.

The ability to record programs with Tivo like features. Pause live TV etc.

The ability to have a directory on the PC that is organized with photos that can be brought up on any TV

The ability to watch mpeg1 mpeg2 divx and mp4 that are sitting on the HD of the PC would be nice too

the ability to do the same thing with MP3's like I want to do with the pictures.

I am having a real hard time trying to figure out what my options are to pull this off. I posted this here in hope that someone might have some ideas.

[jominor]

Originally Posted by Canar

I have like 5 TV's. I have one super PC that I leave on all the time with a ton of HD space. I am using Comcast standard cable because I do not want a box on any of my TV's. Most of them are LCD panels hanging on the wall like a picture. The main TV is a 45" LCD sharp HD.

My goals for a system like this.

Some way to connect the TV's to the main PC with an interface that is simple to use for my family.

I am willing to run Cat5 to every TV but would prefer 802.11.

Interactive TV guide that can be controlled by any of the TV's at the same time without effecting each other.

The ability to record programs with Tivo like features. Pause live TV etc.

The ability to have a directory on the PC that is organized with photos that can be brought up on any TV

The ability to watch mpeg1 mpeg2 divx and mp4 that are sitting on the HD of the PC would be nice too

the ability to do the same thing with MP3's like I want to do with the pictures.

I am having a real hard time trying to figure out what my options are to pull this off. I posted this here in hope that someone might have some ideas.

I have 3 clients. My main PC using a 21" monitor, our main TV using a Micro-ATX PC, a older laptop(P3-500) using a 19" monitor in our daughter's playroom. I currently connect the main tv and playroom box using 802.11g Linksys devices. The micro-ATX box, by the way is new. I used to have the Sage server connected directly to the TV.

What I've found after testing this configuration for a week is that while movies play without problems, I inevitably start to get stuttering on the wireless main TV box for Sage. Also, I've tried different channels and while my phones are 5ghz, the microwave CAN cause problems.

TV should be pretty stable. The question to ask is do you want the microwave, another network, or other interfering with the TV. Today, I'm going to go ahead and run a cat5 line to the micro-ATX.

When running directly on th server, I had a problem with fastforwarding occasionally causing a gui-lockup. I've never had the problem with the clients. Also, I can run the clients with basically the OS, Sage client, anti-virus, MyHTPC front-end, Aquarium screensaver(good when playing just music) pretty much nothing else. Because of this, I can now turn of the client at night because I can go from a cold boot to having sage and myhtpc up in less than a minute.

My server has 3 tuners(2xPCI 250,1xUSB2), 4 drives(1x250g,2x200g,1x160g) dedicated to TV, 3(3x200g) dedicated to Divx movies. All the drives are USB2 based and all of this works very well.

[michelkenny]

If you can, I'd run Cat 5 instead of going wireless... you'll thank yourself you did. While wireless may work (at times), you'll probably get stuttering or interference which will degrade the video stream... plus if you have 5 clients going over wireless it probably won't be a pretty sight

If you have 5 TVs that you want to use Sage from, you will basically have to have 5 computers, one for each TV. You could maybe get away with using MVP's (search the forum) but I think they are limited to what they can do. With 5 computers you will be able to do everything on any TV, independantly of what other people are doing.

Also, you'll probably want one TV tuner for each simultaneous stream that you will be using. If all 5 TVs are watching Live TV independantly, you'll need 5 tuners (Hauppauge PVR-500's are great because they are 2 tuners on one PCI card).

[Canar]

There has to be a way to do it without a computer for every TV. That would be such a waste.

[ke6guj]

Look into an extender like the MediaMVP, Matt has a cool plugin that will let you use the MVP now, and it is supposed to be natively supported in Sage3 in the future.

edit: oops, saw that you wanted divx and mp4, the MVP doesn't do those. If you can find them at Radio SHack you can set them up for $40 a piece and have limited functionalbility and can determine which TV's need all the features and which can suffice with the MVP. Then in the critical locations, you can set up a small form-factor PC or replace the MVP with a possible "better" extender that Sage may announce later.

[Canar]

I guess I will buy a couple MVP's and play a little with them. What is this plug in your talking about? Where can I find info on it?

[ke6guj]

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...light=MediaMVP

[nielm]

be aware that MVPs can only play MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video and Mpeg audio (MPA or MP3)

ie no DivX/Xvids, and no ripped DVDs (as the audio is AC3 not Mpeg audio -- but some people have managed to convert AC3 audio to MP3 during CD rip.

[Canar]

Looks like it plays DIVX now.

http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/produ..._mediamvp.html

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by Canar

Looks like it plays DIVX now.

That has been on the Hauppauge site for a long time & as far as I know, the MVP plugin for SageTV doesn't do that transcoding.

- Andy

[jquinlan]

Opus4 is correct, the MVP plugin for Sage does not attached to the Hauppauge trans-coder, but GB-PVR does, it will only send to the MVP the correct files it supports natively. You will have to do the trans-coding yourself and then make them available to the Sage clients.