Sage TV Media Extender?

[lackmaster]

Can someone tell me, does the SageTV media extender actually deliver the SageTV UI to your TV set or does is deliver the Hauppauge MVP UI to your TV set?

So I'm wondering if the device is just the MVP or does SageTV run something special on the Linux kernal?

I'm trying to determine if the SageTV media extender capability is worth switching from BeyondTV to Sage for, or should I just buy the Hauppauge MVP and use it with BeyondTV.

Thanks

[TakeFlight]

You can either buy the offical media extender (which is just an MVP with a bundled extender license) or buy a regular MVP and a separate extender license. Either way, it's running the full SageTV UI on the extender/MVP. It doesn't look any different than the SageTV client running on a Windows PC.

[blade]

Also the video and the UI are both rendered using the MVP's hardware so it takes very little power from the computer to run. Many other solutions render the UI on the server.

[joe123]

Originally Posted by blade

Also the video and the UI are both rendered using the MVP's hardware so it takes very little power from the computer to run. Many other solutions render the UI on the server.

Being new to all of this, and reading multiple posts, there is a LOT of documentation that is needed as to how the SageTV Media Externder works from the point of view of a NOVICE.

I can think of dozens of questions from just the basics I read here about SageTV ME. For example, how many concurrent users (TV's) can it stream to effectively?

What is a reasonable hardware setup needed to stream 2 TV's? To stream to 3 TV's, 4 TV's and so on.

Who has control of the scheduler when multiple people are trying to record shows. Can end users on TV's even schedule recordings?

What happens to media content as it is being archived/removed/displayed by various users on SageTV ME's. How are these conflicts handled?

What happens when one person tunes to a channel and the other person tunes to another channel? Who has ultimate control?

Questions about this are endless...

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by joe123

I can think of dozens of questions from just the basics I read here about SageTV ME. For example, how many concurrent users (TV's) can it stream to effectively?

Since the UI & video are rendered/decoded directly on the MVP, it uses very little processing power on the server, so you should be able to use quite a few MVPs... though I don't know of any testing to connect as many MVPs as possible.

The server usage would go up when the transcoding that was said to be in testing becomes available, but that would be for playing DivX or something, not MPEG2... since MPEG2 is played natively.

What is a reasonable hardware setup needed to stream 2 TV's? To stream to 3 TV's, 4 TV's and so on.

Probably pretty much any fairly modern system... and even some that are a few years old. (See above.)

Who has control of the scheduler when multiple people are trying to record shows. Can end users on TV's even schedule recordings?

What happens to media content as it is being archived/removed/displayed by various users on SageTV ME's. How are these conflicts handled?

What happens when one person tunes to a channel and the other person tunes to another channel? Who has ultimate control?

The UI is the same, so you can schedule, delete, mark watched/don't like, etc., on any client or media extender. In terms of scheduling, deleting, & so on, it is pretty much first come, first served. If another client adds a show to the schedule after someone else adds one, they might get a conflict notification & choose to override the first show. The same goes for watching live TV -- whoever grabs the tuner first sets the channel... but then if multiple people are watching the same live show, I don't think anyone can easily change the channel... but it has been a long time since I watched anything live on 1 or more clients.

- Andy

[joe123]

Originally Posted by Opus4

The UI is the same, so you can schedule, delete, mark watched/don't like, etc., on any client or media extender. In terms of scheduling, deleting, & so on, it is pretty much first come, first served. If another client adds a show to the schedule after someone else adds one, they might get a conflict notification & choose to override the first show. The same goes for watching live TV -- whoever grabs the tuner first sets the channel... but then if multiple people are watching the same live show, I don't think anyone can easily change the channel... but it has been a long time since I watched anything live on 1 or more clients.

- Andy

The more answers I see, the more questions I get in my head. There needs to be better documentation about this product. I think it's great and more people would probably buy it if they understood what it can do.

Also, I have more questions to your answers. If you have multiple TV turners on the SageTV server, can each person on their SageTV Media Extender tune to different shows? If one tuner has control of my TimeWarner box with the IR thing controling it, can I specify which tunner I want to use? I mean, the questions are endless here.

[Opus4]

Other than how many MVPs you can use, what you are asking applies to any client -- the MVP is really just another type of client. With multiple tuners, multiple clients can watch live tv... but again: it is first come, first serve. SageTV automatically chooses the tuner according to what channel you want to watch. If the channel is available on multiple tuners, the 'first' tuner is used. You can change the tuner priority via a property setting, if you wish. If the next client wants to watch a different channel, they can do so if that channel is available on one of the remaining tuners.

But, after using SageTV for a while, many people decide that it is much simpler to watch prerecorded shows & ignore when things are actually airing.

- Andy

[flavius]

Originally Posted by joe123

The more answers I see, the more questions I get in my head. There needs to be better documentation about this product. I think it's great and more people would probably buy it if they understood what it can do.

Also, I have more questions to your answers. If you have multiple TV turners on the SageTV server, can each person on their SageTV Media Extender tune to different shows? If one tuner has control of my TimeWarner box with the IR thing controling it, can I specify which tunner I want to use? I mean, the questions are endless here.

There's a lot of documentation coming with Sage, there's also a lot of information here in this forum. In short, you can have as many different LiveTV sessions as you have tuners. However, what channels are eligible, depends on what's connected to the tuners. So, if user a want to watch ch 875 which is only available on tuner 3 which user b is already using, user a is going to switch channel on user b. Sage TV, client or extender can not *clone* STB's or standard cable outlets, they just make them available, or a recording of it, some place else.

[TakeFlight]

I think the key here (and it was said a couple of posts ago) is that the MVP acts like any other client. So, if you have a question about how multiple MVPs work, it's the same as it would work with multiple Windows based SageTV clients. They work exactly the same.

[that_kid]

I have three mvp clients running and it's a wonderful thing.