New guy with some questions

[erdocdan]

I just rebuilt my crappy little house from the ground up. Been saving 20 years. We love it. I planned the network/entertainment aspects for at least 2 years prior to the project start. My wife thinks all the electronics is stupid and is perfectly happy watching her soaps on a 27 inch CRT TV with rabbit ears. She might even be color blind and has no apperciation for 5.1 surround. That said, I could care less about the gourmet kitchen and hickory cabnets and would be happy storing dishes in boxes and cooking on Sterno.
What I have so far is limited DSL (512kb), wireless router n draft, 8 port switch with gigabit network (cat5) to essentially everywhere but the bathrooms. Dish Network HD with all kinds of stuff I have no clue what it does (injecters and multiswitches). Five basic HD211 recivers two of which I had to buy. HD OTA antenna in the attic and HD Home Run tuner which I don't need since I get my local channels in my DN package. Five HD 1080p flat panels, a 24 inch HD 1080p monitor in my office and 16 inch HD laptop. I use my SageHD and Sony PS3 for extenders in the greatroom and bar/gameroom. I built a media server/hybrid which I have in my office. It is built on an AMD crossfire chipset, quadcore, 8gig , WD Velociraptor boot drive, and 4 WD RE3 1TB hotswappable drives in raid5=4TB strictly for storage. I shoot HD video with my Cannon vid cam and also take a fair amount of stills with my dig 35mm. Edit with Sony Vegas and photoshop. We have alot of grandkids. Surround sound in 4 rooms and stereo everywhere else including bathrooms.
Now to the point: What I would like to do is be able to have all my media on my server and access it any where in the house and on wife's laptop when away where wireless is available. I don't want it all over the place on a bunch of Dish Networks DVRs. I want to be able to record the sat source to my server. My main problems are that I don't understand all of the different video formats, I don't want to break the law, and the HD-PVR won't work cause it outputs to USB and I don't want to buy a 6th sat reciever. The closest one to my server is upstairs well over 20 feet of USB cable run. I was told Slingbox might be a solution but I want something that works and will give me a good HD format that will work on Sage and Sage Placeshiffter and Win Media Center. What tics me off is that Dish could easily output to ethernet and they control the DRM so what difference does it make if I record to their vunerable harddrive or my redundant array? They are retards but they call us enthusiasts like we don't matter. I don't think my upload bandwidth will allow me to stream movies to my boat but I would like to download a movie to the laptop from my server. I just figure that since I'm paying for the content I should be able to watch it when and where I want to. Love my Sage and am going to buy 2 more.
Your thoughts and suggestions and any links to help me understand the formats and limitations and possibilities would be greatly appreciated. I'm a fast learner but need some direction. Sorry this was so long a post.
Dan

[Fuzzy]

You have options. I'll talk about them in different stages.

First, Recording:
If you are looking to go the whole-house DVR route, your best bet would be to move the Dish receivers to a central location, and interface them directly to a the sage computer. The boxes will be controlled by sage, tuned to the channels that are wanting to be recorded, and stored on the hard drives. You won't be personally interacting with them anymore. They can be controlled with an IR blaster (USB-UIRT). As for getting the video into the computer, there, again, are options. You can use the HD-PVR, which has Component inputs, encodes the video to H.264, and connects to the server via USB. If you DO have Dish ViP-211's (not the ViP-211k), you also have the option of using the R-5000HD modification to bring the actual digital stream broadcast by Dish into the computer over USB. This is particularily nice for your situation, since you already OWN 2 of your boxes. The final option is to record from the Dish receivers with a standard SD capture card over S-Video. The nice thing about sage is this is all scalable. You can easily go with just a single HD-PVR and a couple SD capture cards to start. The HD-PVR would have the preference, so most your recordings would be done with it, but if there is a conflict, the rest would be recorded in SD.

Second, Server:
I would recommend building a separate system for your server. You'll end up being happier in the end if your sage server does nothing but sage. Move the RAID array to it, since it will be up 24 Hours. Sage really doesn't require much processing power just to record and serve up files, therefore you can build it on the cheap, and using low-power components. This also would allow you to position it in an out of the way place (closet, utility room, etc) along with the Dish receivers. I'd recommend using either Windows Home Server, or waiting and seeing when Sage releases their 'Server-on-a-stick' (USB Thumbdrive preloaded/configured with a linux based Sage Server).

Third, Playback:
Best option would be HD Extenders (either HD100 or newer HD200). Another option would be PC based clients, though only if you already have unused PC's in the proper locations (cheaper to go the extender route).

Fourth, Rollout:
You don't have to go whole-house to start. You can even go just one location at a time, if you so choose. You could, for instance, get a single Extender, and an HD-PVR. Move a box from your primary viewing location (family room, home theater, whatever) to your office, and replace it with the extender. In your office, setup the HD-PVR to the moved dish receiver and to your existing computer, and run Sage on that PC for starters. It will only be able to record a single show at a time, but it would let you get a feel for Sage, and it's features. It is then a trivial matter to slowly roll it out to the rest of the house.

[matt91]

Nice post fuzzy. I agree with everything.

[davephan]

Judging by the number of Dish Network boxes and surround sound systems, it does not sound like your house is little.

The HDHomeRun is still useful. Dedicate the two HDHomeRun tuners for over the air digital TV. Exclude the local channels from the Dish Network boxes. This will give you two benefits. During rain events, you will still have local television. This is especially important during severe weather to get weather information. The other benefit is less recording conflicts.

I also recommend using a dedicated system just for SageTV. Use HD-200 extenders on each TV. Don't bother with MVPs, since they are junky compared to HD-200s.

Take periodic images of the C drive. Store the images on another drive and copy the image files onto a normally detached USB hard drive. Do not bother copying to DVDs or imaging directly to DVDs, since DVD recoveries sometimes fail. If you system quits working, you will be able to quickly recover back to a point-in-time when the system was working.

A nice benefit of the Dish Network boxes is they can be set to different IR channels. With one USB-UIRT, you can control up to three boxes. With Dish Network boxes, the total number of boxes you can control is the number of IR channels times 3. Do not attempt to use Hauppauge IR devices, it will not work or lead to frustration and annoyance.

How do you like Sony Vegas? I briefly tested it for editing the TS files created by the HD-PVR. I don't know if I can trust Sony software, since they were caught putting malware rootkits on their media.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_So...ection_scandal


Dave

[mikejaner]

If money is not a factor, you could go the route of using the ZvBox
Info Page: http://www.zeevee.com/connected-home/zvbox150
Online Store: http://www.proflixsales.com/products...tribution.html
This will take a component output of your satellite box and put ATSC or QAM over your RG6 (Cable) lines in the house. Then you can use your HDHR box/es to tune the channel, while using the USBUIRT to tell the cable box to change channels. You would need one ZvBox per Sat box, and two would fill up your HDHR, but it should work.

Now this solution is 5X the price of buying an HDPVR from Hauppauge, but a little more flexible in how you wire your house, and server etc.... It also does not break any laws since you are using Analog inputs etc... Note HDPVR does not break any laws either.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by mikejaner

If money is not a factor, you could go the route of using the ZvBox
Info Page: http://www.zeevee.com/connected-home/zvbox150
Online Store: http://www.proflixsales.com/products...tribution.html
This will take a component output of your satellite box and put ATSC or QAM over your RG6 (Cable) lines in the house. Then you can use your HDHR box/es to tune the channel, while using the USBUIRT to tell the cable box to change channels. You would need one ZvBox per Sat box, and two would fill up your HDHR, but it should work.

Now that is an interesting thought....

Doesn't appear to support 1080i though.

[rerooks]

Question about the statement below. I don't need much CPU power for SageTV, but I have a more powerful machine due to running comskip on the H264 files. Any further comment about that?

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

Second, Server:
I would recommend building a separate system for your server. You'll end up being happier in the end if your sage server does nothing but sage. Move the RAID array to it, since it will be up 24 Hours. Sage really doesn't require much processing power just to record and serve up files, therefore you can build it on the cheap, and using low-power components.

[davephan]

You'll need some CPU processing power if you use the older MVP boxes and playback anything other than Mpeg2. The H.264 video will need to transcode on the fly to playback on the MVP. You would probably be better off using HD-200 media extender boxes.

You could use a second computer to do the Comskip processing. The Compskip computer will need to be a fast dual or quad core computer to keep up with the processing. I don't know if an SSD would help speed up the comskip processing much.

Dave

[Fuzzy]

an SSD might help speed up processing of MPEG2 recordings, which pretty much end up being limited by drive i/o. H.264, on the other hand, is CPU limited, so the SSD won't relaly matter. In the end, teh MPEG2 files analyse so quickly, it's not worth the increase in cost to run SSD for their speed improvement.

[MitchSchaft]

Real men cook!