Advice for returning to Sage

[mikesm]

Folks, I tried Sage sometime ago but couldn't get my wife to convert over from the ReplayTV for PVR use. We now run MCE on the HTPC, primarily for DVD (ripped and stored on the disk array) and Music playback (FLAC and streamed radio), as well as pictures etc... With plugins like My Movies, it works reasonably well for this purpose.

We also have a Comcast HD DVR, which the Replay controls via IR, and with the use of ondemand and HD DVR on the comcast box, a number of programs have been missed because my daughter was watching Dora ondemand while the replay was trying to record Oprah, etc... This has caused some frustration, and made my wife willing to look at some new technology.

With the new Music features in Sage V6, and the HDhomerun able to decode QAM from the cable network (all our analog tier channels are simulcast digitally, and without encryption), I am thinking about moving to Sage for PVR and media center functions, and to use MVP's as extenders to replace the XBMC systems that currently provide access to SD TV's for stored programming. We wont cut everything over at once, but I would like to get some feedback on my proposed configuration.

I'd like to run Sage server on my Suse Linux server. It has a terabyte RAID5 filesystem on it, and is up and running 24x7. It would have 2 HDHomeRun's and a PVR150 analog caputure card on it. 3 Of the HDHomeRun's connected to the Cable system, and 1 connected to an OTA antenna, to enable capture of OTA HD programming that is not carried over my local comcast system.

This would drive 2 MVP's acting as extenders for 2 SD TV's, and the current main HTPC, which is a dualcore AMD system with an 7900GTO video card connected to a Sony 1080p SXRD, and my audio rack with SPDIF. The interface on all systems would be SageMC, since it's close to the existing MCE interface.

I would have an existing windows server (that runs my HA system) running Showanalyzer, doing commercial marking on the recorded programming. I would love to have this running on the Linux system too, but SA is windows only, but all these machines are hooked together with Gigabit ethernet, and the Linux server has enough I/O heft that it can pretty fill a gigabit ethernet under load. So it should have plenty of I/O for SA to access the videos remotely.

Am I missing something here? Will the joint linux-windows operation work as I have intended?

My goal would to be get all the backend stuff running, then install Sage client on the MCE machine, and if it works, cut over HD DVR duties to the new system, and then SD DVR duties and retire the Replay from DVR service.

I'd probably wait until production V6 release to do this, but want get get started soon.

Thanks,
Mike