Need Advice on large multi-card system

[cyberibe]

I am in the design stage of a large multi-card video capture system.
What I need to know is how many tuner cards can I contro with one PC.

My task is to test 32 video set top boxes at once. They don't all have to stream at once, but all of the connections must be made once.

I am looking at multiple PCs to control this but I'm not sure how many PCI cards or USB (or firewire) tuners I can control with a single PC.

Any suggestions or help would be appreciated.

[Crazedz]

Boy not sure jeff would probaly be best at answering this one.

As i recall though their was a guy who had 4 or 5 tuners in a pc with at least 1 usb tuner on his systyem for a total of 5 or 6 tuners on one system.

Sage also supports aditional tuners running on other systems using sagerecorder to link them to sagetv so the number could be much higher.

I did hear from my brother who read an artical in one of the magazines (probably maximum pc as he tends to buy and read that most often) about a 7 tuner system (probably running 3 hauppaugge pvr 500 mce's and a pvr 150 or 250) that is being tested in japan right now but he couldn't tell me what software was running it, Though he kinda doupted it is running mce, Not sure if he's right or not but if it ins't then it's useing other tuner drivers than what comes with the cards. Maybe it's running sage or another propriatary software program.

I haven't run that many cards in one system but i did for a time run 3 tuners on my box and didn't notice much of a performance increase with 3 tuners as apposed to 1 or 2 tuners. With a hardware assisted video card the main part of the cpu cycles don't generally go over 50% depending on if the system is setup right or not.

Useually with 2 tuners in my system i peg around 5% to 6% with both recording at once without viewing any of the shows. But ths system isn't a low end one (athlon 64 2800+) nor is it a high end one so i can't be positive how many one could handle.

So from what i have been hearing at least 5 to 7 tuners should work in a single setup without killing the system.

[Grey_Goose]

I'm currently running a six tuner system; 4 PVR-250s & 2 PVR-USB2s.

I'd imagine you could readily do 8 tuner systems, either w/ more USB devices or using the PVR-500's.