Mac guy switching for sage

[Email68]

I'm seriously looking at going with a windows machine just to run sagetv 7.

I'll be needing 4 of the HD300 extenders, and plan on two dual HDHomerun receivers for OTA digital broadcast as well as DVD rips, Netflix, Hulu, etc.

My question is will a machine like this handle recording multiple streams and serving up 4 TV's at the same time?

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produc...705AA_ABA.html

This would give me some added benefits of integrated backup for my multiple macs time machines and itunes integration.

But the main reason to purchase would be for sagetv.

Thanks

-Tim

[Email68]

Guess my first question was too much info.

Will a 2.5Ghz Intel Dual Core EX495 HP MediaSmart server handle SageTV 7 with 4 extenders and 4 digital tuners?

[jpwegas]

Originally Posted by Email68

Guess my first question was too much info.

Will a 2.5Ghz Intel Dual Core EX495 HP MediaSmart server handle SageTV 7 with 4 extenders and 4 digital tuners?

If you are using 4 HD300 extenders and 4 digital tuners (OTA/QAM cards or HDHR for example), the CPU on your Sage server is doing almost nothing because it's not doing any encoding or decoding - it's just pulling data from the tuner card (or USB) to disk for recording or disk to the network for the extenders.

The only thing that might have concerned me is what speed bus are the USB ports attached to internally, since you will be pulling all your recordings over the USB bus. It appears that system has an Intel G33 Express Chipset which has it's USB ports on a 480Mb/s bus to the southbridge chip.

So that seems fine to me.

The question is, what else are you planning to do?

--John

[Email68]

Thanks John.

As far as Sage goes, I'll be ripping my DVD's, and I'll be using Netflix and Hulu.

So thats about it.

I'll also use the HP's ability to be used as a time machine backup drive for all of my Mac's and the iTunes sharing.

If it can handle all of that, then comskip and transcoding for iphone/ipad.

Thats all I can think of.

[jpwegas]

Originally Posted by Email68

Thanks John.

As far as Sage goes, I'll be ripping my DVD's, and I'll be using Netflix and Hulu.

So thats about it.

I'll also use the HP's ability to be used as a time machine backup drive for all of my Mac's and the iTunes sharing.

If it can handle all of that, then comskip and transcoding for iphone/ipad.

Thats all I can think of.

Ripping DVDs will only happen once and shouldn't be CPU intensive.

Netflix and Hulu via PlayOn? That system is probably ok for PlayOn use if the machine isn't doing anything else, but I'm not sure how well it would do when it's running the Sage server and doing other things.

iTunes and Time Machine shouldn't require too much. Although the initial Time Machine backup will take a while.

Running comskip on HD shows might be a little CPU intensive. You might have to test this one to see how it impacts things. If you start comskip right when the shows start, it sort of self-limits how much CPU it uses since it does detection faster than realtime, so it idles on and off as the show records.

Transcoding for iphone/ipod/ipad should normally be a one time operation, but it likely will be CPU intensive. Of course, you can control when you do that.

--John

[Email68]

Thanks John.

I appreciate it.

-Tim

[tmiranda]

From what I've seen you need to be more concerned over disk I/O than CPU speed. If you have 3 or 4 HD shows recording and 2 or 3 extenders playing back video, that's a lot of disk throughput.