streaming

[sflamm]

I've configured my SageTV setting so that resources like RecordedTV and Videos are using UNC locations.

My questions is, which of the locations are used directly by clients, extenders, encoding servers etc, and what is streamed (proxied) by the server?

It appears that Music and Photos are proxied, and RecordedTV and Videos are directly read from the shared storage...

Is this correct? Can someone give me a definitive answer?

[stanger89]

Software clients will pull everything (I think) directly, if they can access the path, otherwise they will stream it through the server.

Extenders "proxy" everything through the server.

[sflamm]

Can anyone verify that SageClient will pull directly from a network location (NAS) if they can see the UNC location?

This would be a signficant performance improvement... I am trying to figure out my Sage topology now and would like the clients (I dont have extenders) to pull directly from my NAS if possible.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by sflamm

Can anyone verify that SageClient will pull directly from a network location (NAS) if they can see the UNC location?

They do, some stuff has to be pulled directly from the network path (DVD rips for example).

This would be a signficant performance improvement...

Why is that?

[sflamm]

It is a big improvement if you have a standalone NAS that has significant I/O performance (mine does 70-100MB/s sustained read and 50-70 MB/s sustained write)

With a good NAS the Sage Server does not act as a bottleneck to the clients (no information proxied for Sage Clients)

The Sage Server already proxies the I/O for all the tuners (HDHR, local HVR2250) etc... and serves as a client itself. That's a lot of I/O activity for that box...

In my config, I have several Sage Clients (software), the Sage Server (also acting as a Client) and the NAS Server.

Do the Clients also direct tune network tuners like the HDHR? No need to proxy the tv stream through the Sage Server?

[Folkboat]

OK.............I have to ask what NAS device are you using??

Thanks

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by sflamm

With a good NAS the Sage Server does not act as a bottleneck to the clients (no information proxied for Sage Clients)
?

I'm confused by this statement. You do realize that even a 1080i recording uses less than 20mbps right? That's only 2.5MB/s of Data (for comparison with your NAS box). You would have to stream 50 HD streams before you would completely use up a GB Ethernet NIC. Further, your hard drives (from your NAS) would be the bottle neck if it was trying to stream 28 different streams (70GB / 2.5GB per stream). Hard drives can not handle this sort of thrashing. Trust me, passing the audio/video stream does not tax your server. Watching TV on 3 different HD100/HD200's at my house and my server barely hits 20% CPU usage and never more than 10% network utilization even when I was using a seperate box for housing Media (which had to send the data thru my Sage server to my HD100's/HD200's).

Now yes if you used network encoders, you might see your network utilization rise, but you are still not going to be maxing your network or your server.

[sflamm]

Win 2003 R2 Server server as NAS (quad core - xeon, with 8 GB, and 4TB in hot-swap RAID 5 using Adaptac 3405 SAS/SATA raid)

Yes, I realize that full 1080p is less than 20 Mbits/s ... that's not the issue. The issue is if the SageServer sits as a middle-man proxy, then no matter how good the NAS you will be limited by the I/O capabilities of the SageServer.

With that said, my current windows VMC unbelievably can have bandwidth issues reading/writing to the NAS. Apparently is it by design -- microsoft throttles the network bandwidth of background process etc when you are actually watching a show (they thought that would be smart to keep your watching seemless)... this is NOT a NAS problem.

My initial testing, on much lower class hardware seems to show that Sage's performance is pretty awesome - and 10x VMC. But with that said I want to make sure I have the best information and the best topology in place.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by sflamm

Yes, I realize that full 1080p is less than 20 Mbits/s ... that's not the issue. The issue is if the SageServer sits as a middle-man proxy, then no matter how good the NAS you will be limited by the I/O capabilities of the SageServer.

But that's not an issue, unless you're using 100TX for some reason, your Sage server isn't going to be a bottleneck. Of course the whole thing is moot, you're already using UNC paths so there's really nothing more you can, or need to do

[sflamm]

That's what I wanted to hear from the forum of experienced users.
I'm happy to hear that you dont expect problems. Like I said my initial experiments showed very strong SageTV performance...

No 100BT on my network. Backbone is 2 aggregated Gbit line (802.11ad for > Gbit) and NAS has dual teamed Gig NICs as well. All clients have hard gig lan.

Like you said, already using UNC for everything so transition should be hopefully very smooth

Looking forward to a Media Center that is reliable. Very tired of every MSFT update breaking the VMC.