Anyone Clientless? and other Ramblings...

[edbmdave]

I have been using my HD Extender for a month now, think I am ready to make the next leap. Going Clientless. (ie No SageTV Client PCs). I was wondering what other peoples experiences were. I only have one client now, the rest are all MediaMVPs. My ClientPC runs my Plasma in the Media Room. As soon as the HD Extender is back in stock I think I am going to buy one more and displace the PC Client. I am planing on getting a seperate upconverting DVD player so I can still play the ocassional DVD as well.

This will bring my house total to 5 MediaMVPs and 2 HD Extenders. Sage Server running on WindowsXP MCE, with two Hauppauge 500 PVRs and one Hauppauge 250 PVR, AMD X2 4800 Dual Core, 1 GB RAM.

I was considering having AutoCompress automatically compress all shows into H264 (IPOD format) to save space, but noticed that even with the dual core I can quickly see 3 or 4 SageTranscoder sessions running in the tasklist and the system can appear to be non-responsive at the MediaMVP level. Struggling with this a little. I use my iPod as a mobile client and sync shows to them daily (Via iTunes and Neilm's WebServer) and really like having all the content in H264.

I have also been thinking of throwing in a HD tuner now, but wonder if I can handle the load. Finally was curious for someones take on running the server on Linux verses Windows, any impressions if you get better or worse us of system resources?

[mattdcknsn]

I am running clientless now. I have 2 SD and 1 HD extender. I got rid of my client when the HD extender came out. So far I havent noticed any problems. I transcode all of my favorites into mpeg4 to save space. I am re-structuring my setup for when the HD capture card comes out. I'll need to add a good amount of HD space for all the shows out there.

[Berg]

Originally Posted by edbmdave

I have been using my HD Extender for a month now, think I am ready to make the next leap. Going Clientless. (ie No SageTV Client PCs). I was wondering what other peoples experiences were. I only have one client now, the rest are all MediaMVPs. My ClientPC runs my Plasma in the Media Room. As soon as the HD Extender is back in stock I think I am going to buy one more and displace the PC Client. I am planing on getting a seperate upconverting DVD player so I can still play the ocassional DVD as well.

I have gone client less ! Three MVPs and one HD Extender and I could not be happier. The only needs that were keeping me from getting rid of my client was HD and DVDs which have both been resolved. The next challenge will be HD-DVDs or/and BluRay DVDs, but I am still a few steps from this anyways.

I am very, very pleased with playing DVDs from a hard drive through the HD Extender and I am far from convinced that I would get a better picture from a dedicated player. That being said, there is still a few bugs playing DVDs with the HD Extender but I trust Sage will resolve this.

Given some CES demos involving Sage, I suspect/really, really hope that Sage will have a hardware extender that includes a high def DVD player (BluRay) available at some point. That would be a perfect extender to add to my current system.

Originally Posted by edbmdave

Finally was curious for someones take on running the server on Linux verses Windows, any impressions if you get better or worse us of system resources?

My server is still running Windows primarily because I also use ShowAnalyzer to do commercial detection.

I hope this helps.

[talbot3]

I do not transcode my recordings, but I thought there was an option to limit the number of jobs running at a time. If you could limit sage to only 1 or two transcodings, your extenders should not slow down.

[bradsjm]

My plan is to go clientless too by having Sage running on my HP MediaSmart server (upgraded to 2GB of RAM w/2TB of storage), the HDHomerun (until the HD capture device comes out) and then use HD Extenders for the projector and bedrooms.

[IVB]

bradsjm - does that mean me&beelzerob can count on you to help us with the CQC HA control inside Sage STVs

Once I can do that, the need for clients dimishes greatly. There's still some stuff that I need a PC for, but a wifi UMPC would suffice as it's not video streaming.

[gblinckmann]

Originally Posted by bradsjm

My plan is to go clientless too by having Sage running on my HP MediaSmart server (upgraded to 2GB of RAM w/2TB of storage), the HDHomerun (until the HD capture device comes out) and then use HD Extenders for the projector and bedrooms.

I've been "clientless" since 5.0. I've been using a couple of MediaMVP's and I've added an HD extender. I'll add another when they are back in stock. I now have even my bedroom TV covered with a MediaMVP. My next upgrade will push a MediaMVP into the guest room.

I guess that I'm not really clientless if you count PlaceShifters. I use a laptop occasionally to watch TV. My computer is really just acting as a server.

I've been thinking about moving to a Windows Home Server, but I'd like to hear how someone else makes out with that. I was originally thinking that I wanted cardslots in the server and more horsepower. It sounds like this might not be necessary with the new Hauppauge HD PVR's. They are USB attached. The horsepower might be an issue for transcoding to the MVP's, though.

[exdirtfarmer]

I've been running Sage on WHS with 3 mvp's (transcoding divx) and the CPU usage graph is under 9percent on a Core2quad Q6600 (4GB RAM). No skipping yet. Homeseer is also running and responsive while Argosoft email and mail exchange plug away.
I'm planning on getting ShowAnalyser up and running for comskip and will add the HD analogue capture device when it materializes.

[Mitch G]

I have a few questions about this sort of setup - specifically with HD support.
(If I'm hijacking the thread, just say so, and I'll start a new one or find a better home for my questions.)

As I understand it, most basic example of this setup would essentially be as follows:

- Server box sitting somewhere/anywhere in the house with tuner cards connected to my cable and/or antenna coax feeds and connected to the ethernet network.
- HD Media Extender in the TV room connected to the ethernet network.

Is this a valid HW configuration?

If so, does this configuration need the full blown SageTV software running on the server at all? Or, is there just a server software component running on the server and the HD Media Extender has the front end stuff built in.
If the SageTV software is needed on the server, then am I right in understanding that the SageTV software is rather underutilized in this setup since the HD Media Extender is doing the user interface bits?

Also, are there tuner cards that work with SageTV in this configuration that support: analog cable, clear QAM HD cable, and OTA HD? If so, which one(s)?
(Based on some earlier comments, it sounds like the answer is no, but I know there are HD tuner cards out there, so I must be missing something.)

Thanks,


Mitch