Pre-Purchase Questions

[wvpolekat]

I am currently trying to determine if SageTV will meet my needs and live up to my expectations. Most of my questions have been answered by the documentation, but I wanted to see what feedback the community had on my proposed setup. Details and questions below:

Current Setup:
2 TV's each with required STB from cable co.
No HD content
DVD player at each TV

Proposed Setup
2 TVs with Media Extender at each TV
1 Dedicated SageTV box with 2 tuner/capture cards. Dual PIII 733 box with 2 GB RAM, basically unlimited storage (500+ gig now, willing to add as needed)
STB connected to each card
IR blaster to each STB
Wired Ethernet to each extender (no wireless)

Expectations

Ability to watch one show while recording another. 99.5% of the time only one TV is in use at a time. 2 cards with 2 STBs should meet this requirement except for the .5% of the time for my setup. Correct?

Ability to playback unencrypted DVDs/mpegs on either TV. This does not appear to be a problem. I realize all the legal bits around streaming DVDs/protected content. Preferred format?

Ability to play MP3 collection from a UNC share on another machine. This also appears to be a no-brainer.

Concerns:

My "server" is somewhat dated/slow:
From what I have read, all the encoding and decoding takes place on the capture card or the extender, making this into more of a scheduler and file server and less of an encoder/decoder. I would like to minimize my startup costs until I establish if I want to put that much money into my Sage setup.

LAN bandwidth:
While the whole house is 100 megabit, I regularly use 70-80% of that for non Sage or A/V purposes (iSCSI primarily). Should I segment the Sage bits onto it's own subnet/infrastructre (cheap 10/100 switch or vlan)? QoS? Do the extenders need to phone home or just connect to the "server"?

Set Top Boxes:
I more or less understand the concept of the IR blasters and how via them it can change channels and such. With identical STBs, what is the best way of "IR isolating" them from each other so that they behave as expected? Crazy as it sounds, I am considering a card board box over each of them. All this is in the basement, so looks aren't a big concern.

Watching recorded content without Sage:
Is recorded content in a portable format? Meaning if I want to throw a stack of shows on the latptop for a road trip, is it just a matter of copying the files and watching them in Winodws Media Player or would I have to put the Sage client on them to do this? I have basically zero interest in watching TV on the computer, but may have times that I want to take recorded content with me.

I believe that is all of my immediate concerns, although I am sure others will come up.

Thanks in advance for your "Sage" advice.

[sainswor99]

The initial question that popped into my head was: are you planning to only watch live TV through Sage? If not, you'll need two more STB's.

Watching live TV through Sage is OK, but one side effect that most people don't realize is that SageTV records everything you tune the card to (including live TV). And (AFAIK), if you are using Intelligent Recording, live TV doesn't get deleted automatically. There are also other use-case scenarios where this could be a problem (see this thread: http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...ording+delete). If you keep the STB's at your TV's, and add two STB's for your SageTV server, this minimizes the problem.

Of course, since I installed Sage, I don't watch live TV; you may not, either.

Just a thought.

[jimmyb]

On the topic of "watching Live TV while recording another". I utilize the fact that the TV can have multiple sources in. If you have cable or multiple satellite boxes, consider putting one to av1 input and the other to av2 input.

I then just watch the regular broadcast while my computer is recording shows for future playback. This eliminates the need for multiple cards and overhead.

Just my 2 cents.

[wvpolekat]

The plan right now is to watch live via Sage. I really don't want to get 2 more STBs if I can avoid it.

The goal here is to make maximum use of my 2 current STBs and take advantage of the one that is idle 90% of the time.

I am still a wee bit up in the air about the live tv via Sage. I suspect I won't know 100% how I feel about that until I do it for a little while. So, I will have to accept that risk up front and see how it works.

When we had our DVR from Time Warner before, we really liked the pause aspect of it and the ability to record an entire series of shows. That is one of the things we want to get back in this.

So, one limitation of the current plan seems to be that we will be required to watch live TV via Sage and that may not work out entirely. If it does not, we will have to investigate either more STBs or other live TV options.

Eventually, there may be additional cards added to the Sage box for other functions as well like cameras and satellite.

I should probably draw up a Visio diagram of this as well, some of this is kinda hard to put into text.

[bcjenkins]

If you can use serial ports for tuning, use those instead. OOC how many channels do you lose by bypassing the STB and just pull in an analog feed? How much do you watch in the upper channels? Might be easier.

Server will be fine as long as you stick to mpeg-2 media.

B

[wvpolekat]

I lose basically everything but the locals and the "typical" cable networks going analog. So, thats pretty well a deal breaker.

I suspect that I will still run analog to the TVs as a "backup" so the option is there if needed.

I will look into serial control. Thought crossed my mind, guess I need to look into what hacks are out there for my particular boxes.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by wvpolekat

Ability to watch one show while recording another. 99.5% of the time only one TV is in use at a time. 2 cards with 2 STBs should meet this requirement except for the .5% of the time for my setup. Correct?

Yes, you can record one & watch another at the same time with 2 tuners. You could also record 2 and watch a pre-recorded show.

Ability to playback unencrypted DVDs/mpegs on either TV. This does not appear to be a problem. I realize all the legal bits around streaming DVDs/protected content. Preferred format?

Appendix I in the PDF manual found in your SageTV install dir shows how SageTV expects to see hard drive based DVDs.

Set Top Boxes:
I more or less understand the concept of the IR blasters and how via them it can change channels and such. With identical STBs, what is the best way of "IR isolating" them from each other so that they behave as expected?

Serial was mentioned above, but if you need to use an IR blaster with identical STBs that can't be set to use separate IR codes, you can use the USB-UIRT and its 3 zone support -- you'll have to get a couple extra emitters to plug into it & secure them to only send signals to a specific STB. There is a sticky topic in the hardware forum section that links to more of this info.

Watching recorded content without Sage:
Is recorded content in a portable format?

Recordings should be playable using other players.

- Andy

[wvpolekat]

With 2 STBs going into 2 cards on the Sage "server", will each extender be able to watch live TV if nothing is being recorded?

Thanks for all the info sofar, it helps alot to have user perspective available before getting started.

[GKusnick]

Yes, each extender is an independent client with its own playback stream of live or pre-recorded content. If you have at least as many tuners as clients, then each client can channel-surf live TV independently (provided the tuners aren't otherwise in use). However there isn't a one-to-one relation between tuners and clients. If two clients tune the same live program, only one tuner is needed to record that program, leaving one free for other recording tasks. The two clients can still pause and rewind playback independently; they're not slaved to that tuner. They just both happen to be playing back the same recording (which happens to still be in the process of being recorded).

[wvpolekat]

Ok, ordered almost all the bits. The USB-UIRT unfortunately uses the craptastic PayPal shopping cart that is puking and not giving an error message. So, I will fight with that tomorrow.

But, the capture card is on it's way from newegg and the extender from Sage.

I will go with the 14 day trial version of Sage to make I am happy with things before doing that. Everything else is pretty easy to reuse or resell if things just don't work out.

Thanks to all of you for your helpful feedback.

[lobosrul]

basically unlimited storage (500+ gig now

Hehe I got a chuckle out of that. I guess if your just doing SD, then 500 gig's is a lot. I have 1800GB in the server, not including the boot drive.

LAN bandwidth:
While the whole house is 100 megabit, I regularly use 70-80% of that for non Sage or A/V purposes (iSCSI primarily). Should I segment the Sage bits onto it's own subnet/infrastructre

I also have 100mbit, I dont run any extenders, but I do have one client. I have problems if I'm transfering a file from one pc to another. But then I'm usually trying to watch HD.

Oh and just to make something clear (I'm not sure if someone else mentioned this), you can have mutiple clients watching the same tuner. So both TV's can be watching a channel, while you record a second channel.

[wvpolekat]

500 G isn't a ton for either SD or HD. But, it's a starting point. Seems wasteful for me to spend $500 on storage at this point in the game. In 6 months, I can probably pay significantly less for the same storage, that will only sit empty until then. So, I picked an amount to start with and will add to that as usage demands.

I am very curious to see how much traffic the extenders generate.

[Menehune]

I have my sage servers and my main PC which I transfer files to and from for editing on a separate downstream switch from my router. That way when I'm transfering my videos after having the commercials removed, I don't swamp the network for the other users.