Sage TV Media Extender, CPU Utilization

[rethdog]

It’s a great programme, may be if you are listening sage? hide the customization settings with alt + F1 key stroke.

I can see myself installing a few of these in friends houses as those HD Tivo’s are expensive!

OK my question - How much extra load on the host / server CPU; will the SageTV Media Extender impose? In fact, I would like to connect two if possible. My server is an Athlon XP 2800, Hauppage 1600, 1GB ram, 6800GS, currently 160Gb 72k drive., plugged into a 50” plasma (720p) display. The reason I ask it took quite of a bit of messing playing around to get over the air HD running smoothly. I'm at 30-35% CPU utilization now , although I see quick spike of 60-70% utilization when I first press play.

If the Media extender accesses a HD programme, does it convert, or does it use the server CPU? What about DVD ripped Divx films?

Speaking of installing at friends house? – what CPU do you recommend for a newserver? A Dual Core x2 3800 ish? (cheap & cool!) or a faster single core? And is the Linux version faster? as I presume it’s a 64bit compile?

[bialio]

Watching HD source on my extender puts about a 30% load on my server CPU. So figure at least that much. I've got a blazing fast server, so it might cost more on lesser machines.

I built a Sage Client with a 3800+ - it was just barely adequate. I recommend getting the fastest multi core processor you can justify buying.

btl.

[FidgetyRat]

This information is based on SD recordings:

3.06 Celeron + 768m Ram.

Obviously watching standard mpeg2 video poses very very little to no CPU use. Memory seemed to increase about 100m or so per MVP

Transcoding DivX works perfectly fine, FF/RW works as well. CPU use for DivX seems about 20% per active stream.

Transcoding of AAC music is about 5% of cpu.


My MVPs have handled everything I have thrown at them.