Setup Help...

[robhix]

Hey all,

Just wanted to run this by you to see what you thought about my options.

A friend recently gave me an older 1.2 GHz Athlon machine with 1.5 GB of memory that he no longer wanted. My other machine is a 3.0 GHz Pentium with 1.0 GB of memory. We are about to upgrade the Sage system to put a television in our bedroom. It will be a new television, probably wide screen 720p. I wanted to see what the wisdom here thought of my options for the sage system.

Right now I have a WIN-TV-PVR-150 connected to a Dish 301 receiver and I am using the infrared receiver on the WINTV card in the Pentium machine and it is our main computer running the Sage server software. We have one Hauppauge MVP set up as a Sage extender.

Option 1:
The Pentium machine remains the Sage Server as well as our main family PC. I would add a WIN-TV-HVR-1600 card to this machine and it would be connected to the second Dish 301 receiver so (no high def for now). The new television would be connected to the new high definition media extender. Both televisions would be using the media extenders for viewing. I know I would have to upgrade to the USB-UIRT for both receivers on the same computer. That is ok.

Option 2:
The same as above, but the 1.2 GHz Athlon is used in the bedroom instead of the high def extender.

Option 3:
Let the 1.2 GHz Athlon be the Sage server with two capture cards (with hardware encoding). The bedroom will have the high def media extender, and the living room will remain with the standard def extender for now. This has the advantage of freeing up the Pentium machine for the family computer. My only concern here is will the Athlon machine be good enough to support two capture cards and two extenders at the same time.

Keep in mind that all of my archived shows are in DIVX format. This means most of what my kids watch is in DIVX.

Please help me here. I have some money to put into this, and I need to make sure I get it right. My preference is Option 3, but I am concerned abot the capability of the 1.2 GHz Athlon. If I go with this option, it will only be a Sage server.

Thanks in advance for the help. Sorry for the long read.
Rob Hix

P.S. Any other suggestions would be appreciated.