How best to implement SageTV

[acater]

I am new to SageTV and I'm looking at how to make best use of it in a large house with several PCs.

The hardware is going to be bought for the job so we have some flexibility, but what is certain is that there will be a desktop PC in each of five rooms, all of which are networked and all of which have access to an external aerial connection from which we could get UK terestrial or Freeview TV. There will also be a a cinema room with a bigger PC in it (call it a server if you like).

What I want to do is share media around the house (CD/DVD/TV/etc) using (I assume) central storage. Other than that I really just want to know what the best setup would be and what I can bring to the house using SageTV.

Assume for the sake of keeping it simple that money is no object (it is, of-course, but I think SageTV will be a minor part of it).

Some thoughts: Can I put TV cards in each of the PCs and share whatever they record to all the other PC's? Can I use NAS or a Linux server for the central storage?

[GKusnick]

You can put tuners in each PC if you want to, but that makes for a more complicated setup. The simplest approach is to put all the tuners in one machine running SageTV in server mode, and install SageTVClient on the other machines to pull streamed video from the central server. If you run out of PCI slots in the server, you can use USB tuners. The number of tuners you need is not directly related to the number of clients, but rather to the number of programs you like that are on at the same time. (So for instance if you want to watch/record a maximum of three channels simultaneously, you need three tuners, regardless of how many clients you have.)

You haven't said anything about how many TVs you have, or how you're going to recorded content from Sage onto those screens. Or is the idea to put a full client PC next to each TV? For standard-definition TVs, you don't need to do that; you can use Extender boxes instead. (For high-def, you will need a real PC at each HD screen.)

For storage, you can use any internal or external drive or network appliance that's addressable by UNC path from the server doing the recording.

[acater]

Thanks for your comments Greg.

There are only a couple of ocatios which will have TV's in the same room as the PC's, in this instance the idea is to link the TV to the PC but also have a TFT on the PC so that the TV can be watched normally whilst someone is using the PC, but when needed the TV can view the Sage output.

There are 8 people in the house so I am guessing I probably ought to go for 5 tuners in the server (1 for each PC) just to be safe. Are there any limitations with using extenders that you are aware of I guess they use the processing of the server rather than anything on board.

I think I am going to need to go with a Linux server with 5 Freeveiw TV cards feeding the 5 PC's around the house, I will then have 1 extender in the Living room and possibly 1 in the cinema room. What spec server do you think I will need in order to handle the demand of the 5 PC's and 2 extenders? And for comparison what spec server would I need if they were all extenders?

Andrew