Five Tuner System Works Great - Issues to Watch For

[sshapiro63]

Hey Folks,

I finished my setup of a SageTV 5 tuner (PVR 250's) system. I have been able to watch TV from the various PC locations in my house with very few problems.

The way I got the system most stable was to stop using the SageTV system for viewing, and just run it as a "backroom" server. When I used the system for viewing I ran into random problems that impacted SageClients.

One very strange problem was that adding/removing removable drives (Firewire) on the server while SageTV was running casued at least 1 tuner to stop recording audio. I assume this is some kind of bug with the Hauppauge PVR 250 driver. So now I know to shutdown the Sage environment before attempting to add/remove Firewire drives to the SageTV server.

I also found that the most stable decoders for use on SageClient systems is either Elecard or Cyberlink (PowerDVD). I think that the filters from NVDVD look best, but they caused random lockups/freezes in SageClient.

I tried both AMD and Intel based solutions for my SageTV environment. I found Intel chipsets such as the 845 and 865 to be very stable. I had problems using AMD CPU's with both NFORCE2 and SIS 735 chipsets. I'm not saying that the AMD based systems won't work, I just had bad luck with them.

If you are installing multipe PVR 250's, make sure they all use the same chip. I tried mixing ITVC15 and ITVC16 based PVR's and I had all kinds of trouble. Switching to the newer ITVC16 solution resolved the conflicts (as did using all ITVC15's) and the heat generated by the ITVC16 is much less than that of the older ITVC15 based PVR's.

The five tuner solution is nice to have. Since we have 3 kids and 2 adults in the house I don't have too much concern that we will run out of tuners.

My next step is to get IRMAN/Girder/Remote Control working on my 2 SageClient systems that output to TV's. Not much fun trying to use a keyboard while sitting on the couch.

[sshapiro63]

I have a couple of Western Digital 250 GB drives. I originally had them set up in RAID 0 configuration for a single 500GB disk, but I found this overkill. Now I just have them configured as 2 disks.

Disk storage isn't a big problem since SageTV manages the space. I have not yet scheduled many shows for recording. I hope to work on that later this week.

[edmc]

Hmm... With all this talk about reformatting our HDs for 64K clusters, I am surprised at your statement that RAID 0 was overkill. But perhaps the fact that you only have two spindles and multiple readers & writers makes the two (i.e. RAID 0 and just 2 Disks) equivalent.

At least it's good to hear that 5 tuners recording and ??? clients playing back is possible on just 2 spindles. Have you tested this out much? And, re the above, did you format with 64K clusters?

[sshapiro63]

My disks are formatted with 64K clusters. I have not run into any problems using the standard parallel ata connection. I have not tried accessing evey tuner at one time yet. I think the most I have tried is 3 or maybe 4 at one time. Recording/playback worked fine.

I might switch back to RAID at some point but I need different cables because of the location of the board connectors; I'm running a full tower case. Also, my RAID configuration option is SATA RAID with PATA to SATA adapters attached to the PATA disks.