How many tuners are people using with acceptable performance?

[Fountainhead]

Though Sage supports any number of tuners, at what point does performance suffer? My Sage box isn't all that mighty. A Pentium 4 2.8 ghz (ASUS P4P800 Socket 478), 2 GB RAM, the OS (WinXP) and Sage (6.019) install is on 7200 IDE drives, my recording disk is a SATA drive.

I have 2 tuners, a Haupaugge USB2, and a Haupaugge WinTV 150PVR. My recordings default to DVD (Great) 2 GB per hour. If I added two more tuners can they really all run at once? Say three people watching live TV and another one recording? How many tuners are you guys running all at once with no effect on quality?

[dvd_maniac]

I had 4 tuners running on a similair system a little over a year ago.
P4 2.8 (478), only 1GB ram, with XP, 2xUSB2 and 2*PVR250 recording at Max 5.9GB/hr. I've had all 4 going at once quite often without issues.
But I did have a Raid-5 4*400GB SATA partition as my recording drive.
But at DVD great which comes out to about 4Mbits/sec*4 tuners = about only 16Mbits/sec, you will be fine with a single 7200 SATA hard drive.
I had 6 tuners going on that old system without issues for about a month. 2*250, 2*USB2 and 1* PVR500 dual tuner.

[NEOSG]

2 Hauppauge USB
2 PCI HD OTA
2 R5000

run on server that is not used as client

[evilpenguin]

I have...

2xPVR-150 recording SDTV
1xHDhomerun (2xQAM) recording HDTV
3x300 gig SATA drives in standalone configuration

When I'm watching a show and recording 4 others at once everything is fine, however if I i'm watching a show, recording 4 others, and have 1 show running comskip then things start to skip a little bit. I've been considering upgrading to a RAID5.

[insomniac]

2- pvr250's
2- pvrusb2's
2- dvb-s pci
1-twinhan DVB-S USB
1- A180

In a server/client config. Server is a 2.8/1gig ram w/ 5 drives in standalone. Stats are in my sig.

The server never really gets too busy due to the fact that its not displaying video. Could probably run quite a bit more and be ok.

[blade]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

2xPVR-150 recording SDTV
1xHDhomerun (2xQAM) recording HDTV
3x300 gig SATA drives in standalone configuration

When I'm watching a show and recording 4 others at once everything is fine, however if I i'm watching a show, recording 4 others, and have 1 show running comskip then things start to skip a little bit. I've been considering upgrading to a RAID5.

On a similar note I have:
1 PVR500
1 HDHomeRun
(2) 200 gig ATA100 drives (no raid)

I have no problems capturing 2 HD and 2 SD shows while running comskip on all 4 shows as they're being captured and streaming to a client.

If I tried to run comskip after they were finished recording I might run into problems.

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by blade

On a similar note I have:
1 PVR500
1 HDHomeRun
(2) 200 gig ATA100 drives (no raid)

I have no problems capturing 2 HD and 2 SD shows while running comskip on all 4 shows as they're being captured and streaming to a client.

If I tried to run comskip after they were finished recording I might run into problems.

I had live comskip running for a while, but it stopped working for some reason. Now if I start comskip before the show is done recording it zooms through what has already been recorded and quits. I need to get that fixed.

[blade]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

I had live comskip running for a while, but it stopped working for some reason. Now if I start comskip before the show is done recording it zooms through what has already been recorded and quits. I need to get that fixed.

It might help. As powerful as cpus have become they can process the shows pretty quickly, which I imagine requires a good bit of disk speed to read the file. I would think processing over the course of an hour or two as they record shouldn't require as much throughput as blasting through them in a couple of minutes after they're done.

[Fountainhead]

Cool, thanks. Sounds like a couple more tuners would be just fine.

I guess I was just recalling my first foray into PC-based DVR a couple of years ago with an ati AIW9700. Even running by itself it'd drop frames if you so much as looked at it funny.

[salsbst]

I have 5 "tuners" in my setup, three HD (running on my file server, which is a different machine than the Sage server) and two SD (running on the Sage server). Each records to drives that are local to the machine on which they are running.

We get some playback hangups from the HD drive when there is heavy use of the HD tuners. I think this is a bottleneck on the file server's RAID array.

I may try moving one of the HD tuners to the Sage server to see if I can avoid this.

[ybrew]

I've got 2 Hauppauge 500's (4 tuners) and getting ready to add my HD Homerun (2 HD Tuners) to the same Sage Server (AMD XP 2600, 512ram, WinXP, 3 - 250gig drives no raid)

Shortly after adding the HD homerun, I expect I'll need to up the disk space. I'll probably replace my 250s with 400 or 500 gig drives as my budget allows and move these 250g drives to another PC. Or maybe I'll just add external HDs.

And eventually, I might even upgrade the memory, but it hasn't really been a bottleneck yet.

[Steve52]

I have 3 VBOX Cats Eye 150s in my STV server. I had some problems getting them to work correctly at first but no problems now.

[FidgetyRat]

though most peoples setups are better here is mine:


Celeron 3.2 Ghz
768 MB RAM
3x Hauppauge PVR-150
2x 80GB 7200 in Raid 0
Show Analyzer Realtime
MVP Streaming As Well

No real problems to report. Celeron turns out to be plenty powerful and damn dirt cheap to boot. (Quite unlike their old PIII predecessors)

Oh forgot I had it all in my SIG. Oh well.

[heffe2001]

Running a Dual Xeon 2.8, with 3 PCI tuners, 1 HD Homerun (2x QAM) + 1 Firewire STB, and a seperate PC running a pair of DVB-S tuners. I'm thinking that I may end up dumping one of my single Analog tuners in favor of a Nvidia Dual, as the quality from that one has degraded quite significantly (the other 2 are connected to STB's via svid, and get excellent quality). The rest of the specs are in my sig (although may not still be 100% correct, need to work it over a bit ).

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by Fountainhead

I guess I was just recalling my first foray into PC-based DVR a couple of years ago with an ati AIW9700.

That's why you want to avoid software encoders like the plague. With hardware encoders, the demands on your system while recording are pretty minimal.

For the record, I have two different recording rigs. Once is analog-only and contains 2 PVR-500s (4 tuners total). This is not an especially powerful system; it's an old Athlon XP 2000+ (1.6 GHz single core) as I recall.

My other rig is DTV-only, with 3 FusionHDTV5 RT Lite tuners, 3 Vbox 3520 USB tuners, and one R5000-modded satellite box (7 tuners total). CPU is an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (2 GHz dual core). This machine does playback as well as recording, using a GeForce 7900GT.

Never had any performance issues with either rig.

[garyellis]

I think at first it really comes down to signal strength...I had 1 PVR 150 that worked fine, then I bought a PVR 500 (dual tuners)..and I got terrible reception.. I tried everyting to fix it...After failing on everything, I called the cable company. They came out and measured signal strength and realized that their signal strength coming to my house was very low. They fixed it at the street, ran a new and better cable to the house and all 3 tuners have been excellent ever since..

So, I just ordered a HDHR today..when I get it, I will have 3 analog tuners and 2 HD tuners.

Gary Ellis

[AngelofDeth]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

I have...

2xPVR-150 recording SDTV
1xHDhomerun (2xQAM) recording HDTV
3x300 gig SATA drives in standalone configuration

When I'm watching a show and recording 4 others at once everything is fine, however if I i'm watching a show, recording 4 others, and have 1 show running comskip then things start to skip a little bit. I've been considering upgrading to a RAID5.

I wouldn't expected RAID5 to help much. Write performance will likely be slower than individual drives due to parity overhead.

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by AngelofDeth

I wouldn't expected RAID5 to help much. Write performance will likely be slower than individual drives due to parity overhead.

Its not so much the writes that concern me as the reads that are going on while the writes are happening.

[salsbst]

With enough drives in the mix, a good RAID 5 card should be faster than a single drive, b/c party calculations (if done on fast hardware) won't be nearly as expensive as the savings that come from simultaneously writing to many disks.

That said, my own RAID 6 array is overwhelmed when recording 3 HD streams and playing back 1. This is an Areca card, a very good RAID card. Apparently, 6 drives in a RAID 6 configuration are not enough for my use.

[Diginerd]

For pure speed raid 0 is still the way to go, though you don't get ANY redundancy. Loose one drive loose the whole array.


I have a very fast SCSI raid with 3 x HD streams going to and from it. I also run a batch job to regularly copy files to another couple of standalone drives that are still visible to sage as recording drives.

This solves a couple of problems for me:-

1. SCSI is expensive, so my raid isn't that big, but boy is it FAST and I have no issues when using it (other than space)

2. When you copy the files from the scsi to the regular drive you are actually defragmenting each file as you go. Think about it, if you have three HD streams going to disk the files are interleved on the disk forcing the heads to thrash more than they need to. One contiguous file on a drive that is mostly used for reading, or lights comskip if it didn't get done on the scsi drive is a nice place to be..

4. This reduces load on sthe scsi disk though for what I'm doing it doesn't really matter.

My actualy setup = HD Home Run & FW STB on the server to local scsi RAID. Client PC with 2 x Analog tuners to a separate drive, and aonther server with a USB GT going to a dedicated drive.