HP Mediasmart, WHS, Sage and USB tuners

[hjalmar]

Hi! I'm trying to help a friend set up a Windows Home Server system, with TV recording capabilities, and of course we want to use SageTV for recording (not watching) on the WHS.

Our first choice would be the HP Mediasmart because of size, design, price, and general WAF, but my worry is that the HP won't be able to drive the system.
1. Sage recording/viewing takes it's toll on the CPU
2. USB tuners are much more CPU-intensive than PCI or Firewire tuners, but the HP does not have PCI or Firewire.

Has anyone built such a system themselves, or knows of anyone that has tried? I have trawled the forum, but it seems that Sage/WHS users are using home-built servers and not the HP? Some has written about their plans to do so, but no one seems to have taken the jump, not with USB tuners anyway.

What's your experience?

/ Peter Hjalmarsson
P.S. I've found out the "separate drive for Sage" issue, and we could solve that.

[gplasky]

The HDHR is a network encoding device and shouldn't really cause an issue. The digital stream is goes straight to the hard drive with no encoding. The HD-PVR does hardware encoding and again shouldn't cause any CPU issues with recording. Many of the USB tuners have hardware encoding.

Gerry

[stefam]

I am building an HP WHS Sage system, but still waiting for the last component - need the Extender!

I upgraded the memory to 2GB and upgraded the CPU also. Added a 750 GB drive formatted at 64KB and did not add it to the storage pool.

It is shared though and I use it to store video and other items. It is also a handy backup of my WHS backup drives (yes a backup backup!).

The HD Homerun is awesome and I'd do that. I was thinking about USB tuners, but I just got the HD homerun and am impressed by how well it works with Vista Media Center.

Of course, I don't have my Sage setup working yet, but as soon as the extenders are out, I'm ready to go.

BTW: You probably don't need the CPU upgrade since all the encoding and decoding is done at the endpoints - but it was easy and cost $50 for the new CPU. Memory Is a must though as I've seen a big improvement in my Home Server since I installed it.

-Mike