Several extender questions for noob

[ChubbyTiger]

I've been running a stand alone SageTV client for several years and it's great. Lately, I've been thinking about turning it into a server and running extenders to all of the house TVs. So, I've got a couple of questions that are probably answered elsewhere, but I can't find.

1) Do you lose anything by using the extender as opposed to a client PC (except for the DVD thing, which I know about)?

2) Do the extender boxes put any stress on the server CPU? I know that more streams would tax the HDDs and Ethernet more, but can I run a wimpy CPU and still serve several Sage streams?

3) How much bandwidth does the SD and HD extenders really use? Can you run >1 HD extender off a 10/100 network or do you need a GB setup?

4) How crash prone do the extenders seem to be? I've read the posts around here and there seem to be some problems with the HD boxes, but it's hard for me to tell if those problems are really wide-spread or really rare. The WAF would really suffer if they crash.

Thanks for any and all info or advice.

[BFisher]

I only use extenders (1 HD, 4 MVPs). I think this is a great solution and have been very happy.

1 - on an MVP, you lose the animations. Also, some DVD menus don't work properly and require a little finesse to get what you want (vast majority work fine... just a few don't).

2 - if you are transcoding HD to SD (for an MVP), this taxes the server. If you use only the HD Extender, very little server work.

3 - no idea. I use 5 and have tested all at once without issue. As I add more HD extenders, I may run into trouble... I don't know yet.

4 - I've had very few issues with extender/MVP crashing. My setup is very stable and WAF is good.

[carlgar]

3. When viewing a 1080i program on the HD extender, I see about 2.5% usage on my 1 Gbps card. I would expect about 25% usage on a 100 Mbps card.

4. I also have seen very few issues, I see a hang caused by the Vista TCP stack issue, which forces me to reboot. I see this on average about once every couple of days. Last night I saw a issue I had not seen in a while, the HD extender would not reboot (just black screen), I could not start placeshifter or the MVP extender (I think it is a license related issue). I had to reboot my system which corrected this issue.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by ChubbyTiger

1) Do you lose anything by using the extender as opposed to a client PC (except for the DVD thing, which I know about)?

You lose some flexibility, but with the HD extender, I have yet to find anything I miss.

2) Do the extender boxes put any stress on the server CPU? I know that more streams would tax the HDDs and Ethernet more, but can I run a wimpy CPU and still serve several Sage streams?

They don't if what's being played back is natively supported by the extender. For the SD extender that's basically just MPEG2 video (SD), anything else requires the server to transcode (CPU hit). For the HD extender, it's not really a problem.

3) How much bandwidth does the SD and HD extenders really use? Can you run >1 HD extender off a 10/100 network or do you need a GB setup?

It depends on the setup, HD is usually 20Mbps or less (depending on channel), and SD is 10Mbps or less (depending on recording settings).

If you figure 50% network efficiency, that's about 2 HD streams or 5 SD streams on a 100Mbps network. Gig-E is better, 10Mbps won't work probably.

4) How crash prone do the extenders seem to be? I've read the posts around here and there seem to be some problems with the HD boxes, but it's hard for me to tell if those problems are really wide-spread or really rare. The WAF would really suffer if they crash.

Can't say I've ever seen the HD extender crash with recordings. I've seen it get tripped up by some of my imported media, but that's rather rare and 99.999% of the time, it can be "fixed" by powering it on/off with the remote. Beyond that, SageTV has been really good about looking into issues, they really want to make it bulletproof.

I don't have any reservations about recommending the HD100.