How to do this?

[chip33az]

I have a "server" downstairs with the TV tuner card in it. I have a TV in the kitchen and one in the family room. I assume that I would install SageTV on the "server" and possibly use the extenders for the kitchen and family room since I don't have equipment in there.

Can the extender watch DVD's that are copied to the server?

Also, is there any solution if I wanted to have something at my girlfriend's place? Will the extender work over the Internet? We both have high speed (her - DSL, me - cable), but she doesn't have any computer equipment.

Thanks for any guidance you can give.

[hemicuda]

I can tell you right off that the extender will go "belly-up" on a connection less than 54g wireless and it's flaky at best on that; so you'd probably want to go with Placeshifter @ your g/f place. Yes, broadband is a "fast" connection, but not yet fast enough to handle mpeg2 streams of decent quality. Specially since your outbound speed is on average 20-30x slower than your inbound.

MVPs and DVDs are getting ironed out in v6. I've read on here that v5 can do it, but I haven't gotten it to work on my setup yet.

Yes, you'd probably want to use MVPs for those 2 rooms. Be aware and do some research about the wireless MVP if you don't already have cat5 in the house. It's a hit/miss arrangement.

[AngelofDeth]

This is a bit old now, but the MVP works perfectly fine over wireless. From what I have read here, it seems the wireless "card" in the wMVP is rather weak. My MVP is a wired unit plugged into a bridge. It works just as well as real wired, upto 3.2G/hour. I bet even MPEG2-MAX would work if I wasn't 200+ feet from the access point. (get about 13Mbit sec max)

[stevech]

I run the Sage client on a PC that connects to a wired port on my wireless router. From there, it connects to the Sage Server which has only wireless LAN. That seems to work fine. I have things arranged to get a strong signal so the max bit rate can be run. Based on the time to do the weekly disk image of the server, I think the wireless link is sustaining at least 15Mbps at the application (TCP overhead plus WiFi overhead) level. I use WEP128, not WPA due to the antiquity of the devices and concern that WPA has more overhead.

Of course, one should use wireless only if the entity is mobile or if there's just no way to get a LAN connection to an immobile entity.

[PGPfan]

Originally Posted by chip33az

I have a "server" downstairs with the TV tuner card in it. I have a TV in the kitchen and one in the family room. I assume that I would install SageTV on the "server" and possibly use the extenders for the kitchen and family room since I don't have equipment in there.

You are absolutely correct on your assumptions. The extenders are great, but I wouldn't use wireless unless you had to.

Originally Posted by chip33az

Can the extender watch DVD's that are copied to the server?

Yes, but only with version 6.x which is still in beta. Version 5 could sort of do it by creating a playlist consisting of each .vob file but it didn't support any DVD menu navigation or anything like that - which 6.x does VERY well.

Originally Posted by chip33az

Also, is there any solution if I wanted to have something at my girlfriend's place? Will the extender work over the Internet? We both have high speed (her - DSL, me - cable), but she doesn't have any computer equipment.

The extenders will NOT work over the internet. What you need is the "Placeshifter", which should work well for you over the internet. You will need a pc (laptop is okay) that has some sort of TV-out since she doesn't have some already.

Originally Posted by chip33az

Thanks for any guidance you can give.

Never a problem!

-PGPfan