Potential Buyer...Questions

[jrdavis80]

I've been researching my options when it come to a HTPC/PVR solution. I've been using the trial SageTV software and I'm much more impressed with it -vs- Vista Media Center. Plus the hopeful upcoming support of HULU is awesome.

I'm looking to purchase the HD Theater and have a couple questions regarding my setup and if it will work. I'm hoping to add a TV Tuner and SageTV to my WHS and then be able to watch and record TV via the HD Theater in my living room (hooked up via component cable and SPDIF).

I'm looking for the HD Theater to act as a PVR. I know the HD Theater will not actually do the recording, but be schedule and watch my recording from my WHS. I'm aware of the 64k cluster size issue with WHS and SageTV. Plan is to add a hard drive outside the managed pool of drives in WHS and have SageTV record to it.

If I added a HD Tuner into the mix would I be able to watch the HD feed through the HD Theater. I'm guessing the live TV is "streamed" via the network connection. I'm confused when the minimum system requirements state: For HDTV Playback: 3Ghz processor or higher or a slower processor in combination with a video card utilizing DXVA support and using a decoder which supports DXVA

The setup I'm looking at (HD Theater + SageTV License) $250 for the combo looks to be the best value I've researched when it comes to this type setup. Will the SageTV MC license that comes with this combo be transferable to the WHS version of SageTV MC? This would defiantly be a much much cheaper option compared to building a full blown HTPC with the same capabilities.

MY WHS Specs:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200 Brisbane 2.7GHz 2 x 512KB L2 Cache Socket AM2 65W Dual-Core Processor
ECS BLACK SERIES A780GM-A AM2+/AM2 AMD 780G HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard
2GB of RAM
I plan to add a Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2250 Dual TV Tuner and one of the WD Green Hard Drives. Possibly a second Hauppauge or HD Homerun later down the road.

Any thoughts/help/advice is much appreciated.

[Opus4]

The HDTV playback requirement you quoted is for playing HD recordings on the PC; when using the HD200, it handles all the decoding for playback instead of the PC.

The SageTV software on the PC would control the tuner, then the HD200 connects to the SageTV server and acts as a client w/the full SageTV UI -- control what gets recorded, play recordings, etc.

A Windows SageTV license is usable on any version of Windows that can used with SageTV - WHS, XP, Vista, etc.

- Andy

[freedml]

If you're not watching on the PC, the CPU usage for recording or for sending HD to the HD Theater is generally very small.

[dgeezer]

Plus the hopeful upcoming support of HULU is awesome.

I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think that this will ever happen. Surely, SageTV would have introduced this by now since it was demoed months ago.

Your server should be more than powerful enough assuming it doesn't do any playback. I have an athlon 64 single core based system running XP and it will record 2 hd shows at the same time while serving up an HD show to my HD200.

[pjpjpjpj]

Originally Posted by freedml

If you're not watching on the PC, the CPU usage for recording or for sending HD to the HD Theater is generally very small.

+1.

See my sig.

P.S. This might help: http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=41428

[Suntan]

Using the computer as a server (to serve the media to the extender and not actually play it back) is truly minimal from a resources standpoint.

As it is, I can record 5 HD streams while playing one back on the computer and serving another to the extender. All from a single HDD (single drive for TV recording, with a separate drive for the OS) running on an old, single core A64 1900+ machine with a 7600GT gfx card.

-Suntan

[impro]

Make sure you buy 2 extenders in case one of them fails, your not going to be the most hated person in the house.

[thomaszoo]

Originally Posted by impro

Make sure you buy 2 extenders in case one of them fails, your not going to be the most hated person in the house.

So long as your soldering skills are adequate, total time to fix should be minimal. For me it was < 1 hr. including the trip to Radio Shack. I had the part number and so the trip to the store was maybe 15 minutes. Unhooking the HD100, removing the case screws, desoldering the old capacitors, and then reversing everything took the rest of the time.

On the subject of server requirements, I recently bought this which is based on the Intel Atom processor:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16856107043
and am very happy with the results. I put 2 gig of RAM in it and it just hums right along. It replaced an AMD 4000+ single core and seems more stable. It is a little slow on comercial detection (especially from the HD-PVR) but with the dual cores it is absolutely more stable. The dual cores show up as 4 cores in task manager and each instance of Comskip uses ~25% (I have it limited to 3). The HD recordings from my HDHRs take just slightly longer to process than real time; the HD-PVRs take about 5.5 hrs for a 1 hr show. But since I seldom watch anything real time it doesn't make a difference. Everything is played back via HD-100s.

Hope this helps.

Wayne