Laptop server

[hb4]

Is is possible to use a laptop as a server for Sage, with the HD100 extender as the output device? I will be using an Genpix USP tuner? The purpose is to be able to easily move the setup between sites, using a dish and screen at each site.

If so, any thoughts on the minimum specs for the laptop?

[Sam]

Originally Posted by hb4

If so, any thoughts on the minimum specs for the laptop?

It sounds like you only care about using a single tuner for SD material. Provided you use a tuner with hardware encoding, the laptop isn't doing much more than writing the stream to disk. You want to avoid any tuner which must make the laptop perform software encoding of the signal.

The HD100 will also merely require the laptop to play back the recording with no transcoding, so you're good there.

I'd say the biggest thing is that you want the recording drive formatted to 64k clusters, but don't want the OS boot partition that way. You may be able to get by with splitting the internal drive to two partitions, and formatting the second to 64k.

Ideally, you'd put the recordings on a separate physical drive so the heads don't have to move back and forth when applications or the OS need to access the boot partition. So if I were you, I'd consider using an external drive connected by USB or firewire, then formatting it to 64k blocks.
But you could try the dual partition of the internal drive first and see what happens.

You can probably even run SD commercial detection concurrent with the recording, but if you are doing this for playback at another site, you may not care if the commercial detection is not run while you are not recording.

As always though, more cpu and memory is always better, and YMMV.

[hb4]

Sam,
Thanks for your suggestions. I have the Genpix, which is just a tuner, and which can tune DBS HD. I don't have a laptop yet, and need one for other reasons. I was hoping that I could find one that I could move, along with the Genpix and the extender (and now an external HD) back and forth between two locations. If it's impossible or requires a very expensive laptop, the alternative is a laptop and two other machines.

There's an $850.00 HP laptop with a P7350 Core 2 Duo processor at the local Fry's.... would that work?

[Sam]

Originally Posted by hb4

Thanks for your suggestions. I have the Genpix, which is just a tuner, and which can tune DBS HD. I don't have a laptop yet, and need one for other reasons. I was hoping that I could find one that I could move, along with the Genpix and the extender (and now an external HD) back and forth between two locations. If it's impossible or requires a very expensive laptop, the alternative is a laptop and two other machines.

There's an $850.00 HP laptop with a P7350 Core 2 Duo processor at the local Fry's.... would that work?

I'm really not a position to say. And I don't want to give the impression that an analog tuner without a hardware encoder would be impossible. It is just the norm to want a hardware encoder.

I know nothing about the Genpix tuner, but if it can tune satellite HD then it will almost certainly be providing it already encoded. Thus the HD signals probably just need to get written to disk, and that puts very little demand on a system.

Googling the Genpix tuner, it appears it is conceptually similar to a HDHR for cable or OTA signals. I think it just gives you access to the digital stream. So it really won't take much CPU horsepower at all, unless you are wanting to do commercial detection too.

You do realize don't you that you can only et the unencrypted channels? It is like a clear QAM tuner for cable -- to get encrypted channels you need to use something different such as the HD-PVR.

I have no idea how many channels that may be for various satellite providers.