7 Media Centre Extenders & 3 tuners

[srcurtis]

Hi

I need to find a solution capable of running 7 Media Centre Extenders (with component out) and support recording from 3 tuners.

With no hint of Sage V3 on the horizon I looked at MCE but my brief research shows that there seems to have a limitation of 2 tuners and 5 Extenders.

If I go for two MCE servers is it possible to share content between the two boxes?

Are there any other solutions that I can use until the next release of my beloved Sage?

I've been planning on using the Linksys WMCE54AG, does anyone have any experience with this?

Cheers

Steve

[mikejaner]

There is a hack to add more tuners to MCE, but I don't think you can get more extenders. You can look for both at http://www.thegreenbutton.com

[heffe2001]

One thing to definitely remember about MCE, the extenders are actually running in terminal services on the main MCE server, so that machine needs to be a heafty one. During beta the designers said more than 5 were possible, but due to bandwidth, they were going with a 5 max reccomendation. SO if you were running the latest 4ghz PC, with a ton of ram & a gigabit connection, more than 5 may work (not really sure if they set it at a hard-limit of 5 or not). As for tuners, you can get 3, but one has to be a HD tuner. That was my real main complaint with MCE though, the tuner limit.

I know this doesn't exactly answer your question, but I knew there was the possiblity to go with more than 5 initially (although I can't swear that anymore).

[Ryokurin]

another thing you have to remember about MCE is that the tuners all have to equal. I just helped out a friend with it and ran into that. with sage I have one tuner on the cable box and one on normal cable and its smart enough to know that tuner #1 can get this channel but not tuner#2 with MCE you either have to have a cablebox for all of them, or none of them no splitting. thats like the ultimate dealbreaker there.

I just noticed too, that router is wireless right? that 54m is going to be kind of tight with all those streams no matter what you use. if you can wire some of those connections.

[Crashless]

I'm not sure if anyone here is running 7 of them, but at $100 a piece the MVP would be a nice extender for a Sage based system. You'll have to go with gigabit no matter what you do. I would definitly consider basing the server on at least a dual-core solution, if not a true SMP system using opterons, or xeons. When you think about the sheer bandwidth numbers involved with 7 streams of mpeg 2, you run into all kinds of bottle necks.

Since this IS a Sage forum:

Server w/:
3 or 4 PVR500s
SATA RAID5 card (at LEAST 4 channels, 8 would be better)
Pentium D, Athlon X2, or dual Xeon CPUs
AT LEAST a gig, probably 2 gigs of memory in dual channel mode.

Switch - need a good 1000/100/10 switch w/ load balancing, I don't know of any off hand...check out cisco - they're always reliable, but not cheap.

7 Hauppauge MVPs, and a giant roll of Cat 5e or 6e. Wireless shouldn't even be considered except for 1 or 2 hard-to-reach locations. No current wireless technology could handle 7 streams realiably.

I would stay away from the MCE solutions for a system this size. They have too much overhead for each extender, and at $2-300 for each extender, you're only about $100 shy of building an entire computer for each extender - which you should look into BTW.

I don't know how MCE would handle 2 servers on the same network, I don't think the infrastructure is in place for that kind of thing. Plus, they you're out $2000 just for the second box. I bet w/ a solid server, a Sage system could be built with 1 server and a lot of cat6. But seriously, don't even attempt a 7 client video system without some serious hardware at the server point. Standard single CPUs just can't handle the multiple requests fast enough.

my $.02.

[stanger89]

Do you have HDTVs? If so, consider full PC clients, they are much more powerful/flexible, and will likely have better PQ. If not, I'd got with the MVPs.