Using sage to distribute tv to a residence network at a university

[rschellenberg]

Good day.
I am looking at implementing a tv distribution system, and being a huge fan of sage, I thought it might be interesting to leverage it if possible...

I was thinking of haveing a set of capture servers that recorded 40 or so chanels, and wrote to a shared nas.
Having the residences wired to allow the students to browse the chanels or recorded shows, but not allow them to watch live tv.
The data store would be in the neighborhood of 30 days...
has anyone implemented anythign like this before?

[sainswor99]

I'd think that you'd run into some licensing issues at that point; recording media for your personal (or family) consumption definitely falls under the concept of "personal fair use". I think you'd have trouble extending it to 30 or more unrelated individuals living in a residence hall, especially if the presence of that distribution network is seen as selling point to encourage people to pay to live in that particular residence hall.

On the technical side, you could use Sage as the recording tool, but you'd need some other client to access the content. Sage is geared around watching both Live TV, and making it relatively easy to record new content (which you wouldn't want your audience to have).

Stu

[rschellenberg]

My manager told me to look into options, and that he'd deal with the licensing if ti was possible... We are already grabbing our satelite feeds and muxing them into our own cable network, so I think he has soem pull in that area...

I have been doing some reading in these forums, and it seems like the disk storage would be the biggest bottle neck. That is a point I hadn't concidered. My gut was to run 4-8 servers to capture ~40 chanels...(need some room to grow, and for maintenance)

use dirmon or a derivitave to copy the files post recording to a shared nas, and whip up some interface to parse out the chanel name/ recording time/ episode time from that...

I know it is getting a bit crazy at that point, but like you pointed out, restricting the pause adn replay live tv is already modifying the ootb sage...

thoughts... Does anyone have any idea how many people can watch the same live feed at the same time?

[davephan]

If you are setting SageTV on a large scale, you need to include redunancy, such as using clusters or doubletake. You might need to use VMware to recover quicker. At the mimum, all servers should be imaged regularly.

You probably won't be able to use file compression with Xvid or some other video compression, since the load to playback 30 instances at once would be huge. In my case, an Althlon XP +2800 was barely enough CPU for playing back one Xvid AVI stream to an MVP. Since your won't be compressing video, you will need many TB of disk space to store the video files, unless you set up the system for lousy video quality to save disk space. You might need to attach the storage with fiber if copper isn't fast enough.

You might run into problems with your network capacity. I don't know how many 100 meg MVP streams you can run though a network segment at once.

You'll have to decide if the system should be setup for standard definition or high definition. Standard definition could be obsolete in a couple more years, depending on how fast people switchover to high definition.

Someone on the forums should know how large SageTV can be scaled up to help you decide if it feasable.

Dave

[scavenge]

Hey Ryan

Wow an impressive and demanding idea.

As suggested in the other posts the full sage client and/or mvps is going to be far too massive a resources hog processor and network wise. I don't imagine Sage is scalable to residence hall levels.

However, as you suggest using Sage as the central capture server feeding it's recorded files to a NAS seems very doable. I would imagine a custom web interface could then allow students access to recorded shows, track favorite requests, and track usage/licensing.

This said your challenge is still the delivery of the video. I could easily imagine 50% of your audience wanting to watch the same show at the same time ... American Idol!! ... Feeding this many clients reliably will be challenging. Perhaps a streaming media server would be the answer ... there's darwin:

http://developer.apple.com/opensourc...ing/index.html

There's a lot of custom coding that would have to go into all this though to get it working together seamlessly.

Cool idea though

Perhaps a more manageable pilot might be a "favorites" channel. Poll students for favorite shows via a web portal ... set sage server to record said favorites. Make a weekly playlist of favorite shows that plays out to your traditional coax video distribution system ... In other words make your own custom compilation program (say 6 hours of programming) that plays 4 times a day using traditional video/TV distribution equipment across your halls. Not VOD but a small step in the right direction

Originally Posted by rschellenberg

Good day.
I am looking at implementing a tv distribution system, and being a huge fan of sage, I thought it might be interesting to leverage it if possible...

I was thinking of havening a set of capture servers that recorded 40 or so channels, and wrote to a shared nas.
Having the residences wired to allow the students to browse the chanels or recorded shows, but not allow them to watch live tv.
The data store would be in the neighborhood of 30 days...
has anyone implemented anything like this before?

[mickp]

There's a good thread here from someone who has done something similar for distribution in a school environment already.

To the naysayers I'd suggest considering that with professional level networking and fast storage this kind of setup is conceivable.

From memory, If the sage client can reach a file that it is trying to play back directly from an unc path \\server\share then it will play the file directly rather than relying on any streaming from the server.

If your storage server has plenty of bandwidth, say a few teamed gigabit adapters trunked into any decent switch (I like Cisco gear with Intel server adapters for this) and a high performance disk subsystem, I reckon that you could pull this type of configuration off using regular SAGE gear.

Modifying the standard stv or sagemc to remove options for Live TV, deleting shows etc shouldn't be too taxing. It's almost always easier to remove features than add them in.

Mick.

[wvpolekat]

IMO, the only use any Sage bits will have in this is in capture. Don't mess with Windows at all, just go Linux.

Save them to an NFS mount point or NAS and let sage keep the last X recordings of favorites. How to determine what to record is a whole different story. But, I am thinking basically one or two channels per tuner, with 10-12 tuners per capture server you would have 4-5 capture servers.

Storage would have to be accessed via fiber, and spread over LOTS of drives to keep speeds good.

MVPs or Sage are out for playing to clients. MVPs don't play well if at all in routed environments. Sage client is out because then you get into a whole support nightmare. And, both of them would need a sage server to connect to, and you will have multiple servers and people will get confused about which server has which content.

I would use some type of web frontend to the storage, letting them access them with VLC or something to watch them.

You should be able to get approx 20-25 streams on a 100 meg network. Using DNS round robin to balance amongst multiple webservers or interfaces on one server could easily increase that.

It would be fairly trivial to build a PHP front end to this that would generate thumbnails and possibly get episode info as well.

You will, without a doubt have to do something to prevent from killing the network for other uses. Depending on your network gear QoS is a possibility.

Something else to think about is how to prevent users from saving the shows and putting them up on bittorrent. Not sure how big of a deal this is.

Basically, you will only be broadcasting to PCs. Sending to TVs from this setup will require some pretty custom work. If someone wants it on their TV, they can hook the PC to the TV.

Oh, and forget any transcoding. Your servers will get quickly overwhelmed. If you want to compress, leave decoding to the clients.

[rschellenberg]

wow... so many responses...


the disk space issue... we are setting this up in the middle east, and the budget is incredible, so we'll be doing fibre channel arrays... not sure of that side of it, smarter people than I will be doing that(along with the networking side of thing)
it is my job to see if this is possible.
we have fiber laid to the residences, and are running gig e inside each house(family based residences)

Now the trans coding stuff... Yah, I can see that the bottleneck will probably lie in the server in that case, so clients would be the way to go...
Crap... this is getting bigger and bigger...

I am pretty comfortable with vm ware, so I'll start out with that plan, to keep the servers(capture servers) nice and clean...

now as for the linux version... I was soo unhappy with the variant that I bought a windows license to replace it... the install and driver issues I went through were horrendus... Posted a few posts on here, and got a "reinstall" answer from a tech here... not a happy camper about doing that remotely a whole country away... it'll be a while before I trust linux with my tv watching...

linux runs pretty much everything else in my house... but not sage...

Thanks a lot for the suggestions... Not I have to go get some budget for a proof of concept.

[roxy99]

Better check with your TV service provider for any legal issues.

[wvpolekat]

I doubt VMWare will be able to access your capture hardware.

Best thing to do is build the box, get it just so and take an image of it. You can lay that back down just as quick as restoring or rolling back a vmware machine.

[rschellenberg]

Originally Posted by wvpolekat

I doubt VMWare will be able to access your capture hardware.

Best thing to do is build the box, get it just so and take an image of it. You can lay that back down just as quick as restoring or rolling back a vmware machine.

nope, tried it, and it worked... I have been exceedingly happy with the support of hardware devices under vm ware... But, I do think it is a bit of overkill... the image is probably closer to the right tool for the job...

I have procured some hardware to do a simulation of this setup... I'll let you guys know how it turns out...

Still not sure on the front end... But, that'll come after this proof of concept.

[megamojo]

With a system that large, as much as I love SageTV, it might be better to go with MythTV. Myth is designed from the ground up to be modular, meaning that integration of multiple backend servers as well as multiple clients is included. With the ideas mentioned in the thread so far, you'd be integrated all the different capture streams manually, a large chore for anyone. I believe with Myth you can easily integrate multiple capture servers and multiple clients into one smooth system.

[megamojo]

Changed my mind after reading the other thread mentioned. You should be fine if you have 1 beefy central server and multiple network encoders, and very important, use unc paths for everything. With the unc paths, the clients will stream directly from each individual network encoder rather than having everything go through the central server.