SageTV for Enterprise/Large environments?

[mr_lore]

I work for a Major Leauge Baseball team and for the past 6-8 months we have been getting bids to supply HD IPTV to various locations throughout the stadium. All of which seem ludicrously expensive and twice as complex as they need to be compared to Sage. Having sage, and a few clients at home, I was wondering would it be possible to have say, 50 or even 100 HD clients on a sage server given you provide proper bandwidth across the network? Seems to me if you could use multicast services on windows server 2008 it would work rather well with very minimal bandwidth.


just thinking out loud....

[dravenone]

Not to take away from Sage and not knowing what your requirement are, I've recently looked at a digital signage solution from a different vendor that sounds like it can provide what you need at what to me is a reasonable cost. PM me if you would like more details.

Edit: I do not make, sell or have any personal or professional affiliation with this product either.

[evilpenguin]

I'm confused, are you trying to enable timeshifting at all of those 100 clients or just distribute the same video to them? If its just distributing then it sounds like you just need a QAM modulator with HD input, a shit load of coax, and a bunch of monitors with QAM tuners. Hell, if your looking to do it on the cheap, you could even use a ZvBox (http://www.zeevee.com/overview) and some nice distribution amplifiers.

IPTV is great when you want to have a lot of clients able to watch a wide variety of on demand programming, but if your just broadcasting the same thing to everyone, there's no need to get fancy IMHO. (FYI - I used to write software for CATV and IPTV test equipment)

[mr_lore]

Possibly, the greatest limiting factor in our specs is that we need latency to be within 1-2 seconds at most because watching a live game in the suites and then having the HD version on the TV next to you being 5 seconds or later behind is incredibly annoying.

[mr_lore]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

I'm confused, are you trying to enable timeshifting at all of those 100 clients or just distribute the same video to them? If its just distributing then it sounds like you just need a QAM modulator with HD input, a shit load of coax, and a bunch of monitors with QAM tuners. Hell, if your looking to do it on the cheap, you could even use a ZvBox (http://www.zeevee.com/overview) and some nice distribution amplifiers.

The same video, I figure if we have 5 or 6 HD PVR's to carry ESPN ESPN2 FSN ESPNEWS, and some other stuff that should keep everybody happy (1 PVR per channel offered).

Problem with distributing over RF is our current RF network sucks balls (no hd) and all the amps and taps are in random undocumented locations distributed to over 600+ end points, the quote to upgrade the just RF network to HD spec was a little over a quarter million dollars.

[thomaszoo]

I am speaking beyond my knowlege level here, but it seems that you should be able to set up a multicast server and use the HD200 in standalone mode to access it. I just don't have the details.

There are probably other (non-sage) solutions such as the WD box that may also work.

Wayne

[evilpenguin]

I'm curious what "HD Spec" means. There's really nothing special about HD QAM signals, they just need a clean 6mhz of bandwidth just like any regular analog channel you're already broadcasting. In fact, QAM is actually more resilient to low signal strength and interference than analog channels so it could actually handle a crappy RF network better.

But I'll stop talking, as I'm woefully under qualified to give advice on a pro-grade setup

Edit: I did some googling and found these guys, I bet they'd love to give you a sales pitch

This solution would work...
http://www.computermodules.com/broad...D-encoder.html
+
http://www.computermodules.com/broad...dulators.shtml

or this by itself...
http://www.computermodules.com/broad...Modulator.html

[mr_lore]

I am not up on my RF science as much as I should be but for grins I actually did try a zeevee box because I figured it should work too, however it would only distribute to about 3 nearest locations anywhere I plugged it in which included our modulation points at the head end. My goal was if that worked, just re-modulate some QAM like you guys suggested but I could never get it to work on more than 3 sets and I figured that was a limitation of our existing RF system and why it was so expensive to replace.

Another thing that turned me away from RF was during research we visited another team that did just re-modulate their own QAM and they had a world of trouble with signal strength and pixelation during fast motion and they were using some high end name brand stuff.

[mayamaniac]

I say go with your initial idea. Get like 10 Windows PC running with SageTV server installed on each. And each feeding to 10 SageTV HD extenders. With the webserver, you can even remotely control the extenders, at least the old extender, not sure about the new one.

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by mr_lore

Possibly, the greatest limiting factor in our specs is that we need latency to be within 1-2 seconds at most because watching a live game in the suites and then having the HD version on the TV next to you being 5 seconds or later behind is incredibly annoying.

Then I don't think you're going to get a satisfactory result from Sage or any other PVR-based system. These systems are all about time-shifting and independent playback control, not synchronization and low latency.