Mini-iTx Systems & SageTv/Recorder

[bboldschool]

Do these systems work well for SageTv/Sage recorder software?
Do they have enough cpu power with a pvr 250 card? Does anyone have experiences with these units and could give some advice good or bad? Thanks

[dkardatzke]

I know someone will respond but there has already been a lot of discussions around the Mini-ITX and SageTV. Try doing a search to gather everyone's feedback.

[sub]

I've got both a M10000 and ME6000. Both work fine with my PVR350 (which includes a hardware decoder), but are a little underpowered to do software playback. Some people are doing it, but in my experiences you also need a hardware decoder.

[falchulk]

I have the m10000 (ezra) and the pvr250. Sage record only uses about 5% cpu. Live TV uses 45% to 50% when using the built in mpeg2 acceleration of the m10000. No other PVR comes close to the performance I have with Sagetv now. I have tried showshifter and Snapstream.

[rrussell]

I have an M9000 and the PowerDVD decoders to use the hardware MPEG2 decoding feature. Works beautifully!

[fidget]

Originally posted by falchulk
I have the m10000 (ezra) and the pvr250. Sage record only uses about 5% cpu. Live TV uses 45% to 50% when using the built in mpeg2 acceleration of the m10000. No other PVR comes close to the performance I have with Sagetv now. I have tried showshifter and Snapstream.

What chassis do you use? I am looking at building a PC for putting next to the TV set.

[falchulk]

This is what I use:

http://www.caseoutlet.com/NWPc/2699-VIA-M/2699VIA.html

But I bought it from outpost.com The case was $74 and the board was 140.
Of course this was the ezra core not the Nehemiah. I have been using it as a view only settop box since April. I was using showshifter and recording in divx pro. My quality taste kept going up and up. Finally at 704 x 480 and 4mb/s divx the box was maxed out and would freeze a lot. I decided to find a way to make it work like I originally planed. I almost went with record/playback only with snapstream as live TV was a slide show. Then I found an old download of sage 1.3.8 I downloaded a while ago before I knew it required a mpeg encoder card.
The ability to do live TV time shifting really suprised me with this box and sagetv. Now that I have it stable and the picture looking good, it must pass the wife test tonight and I purchase it on Thursday!

[msm]

I have the M10000 Nem core and its works perfectly. I house mine in the new C137 case (my old case i built myself but when my power supply failed i got the C137).

All-in-all i had my doubts intially, but everything worked out great. Just a word of warning - if you are using a full sized HD and the PVR card then the 55W power supplys you get in some cases will probably not be enough. Add a CD-ROM drive to it, and definately not. The C137 case has a 120W varient, which is the one i got. Just a word of warning for you,

Cheers,

Matt

[falchulk]

I use the 55 watt power supply. I boot of an older 10 gig regular size harddrive that does not suck so much power. When using the slimline dvd player, the power brick gets very hot after about an hour. For my main sage drive, I use a 120gb USB harddrive with its own power supply. When recording/watching using sage, the brick is cooler then most laptop power supplys.