Best way for multiple viewers & multiple tuners?

[heffe2001]

I plan on setting up several tuners in my house, with clients on each TV. What my goal will be is to have at least 4 clients (or 3 clients and the main server machine) connected to TV's throughout my house, and have the ability for everyone to watch different stuff on live TV, or record. I'd really like to be able to record at least 3 shows while watching at least 2 live feeds. Would I do best to have 2 machines with tuners, or one with all the tuners, or several with 2 or 3 on each?

I currently have a single tuner machine (Adaptec VideOh! PCI), which is a 2.6Ghz Celeron, 256mb ram, 240gb storage. I plan on upping the memory to at least 1gb soon, and adding tuners (need recomendations on boards that will work with multi-tuner setups, I'm looking at the E-Homes). My motherboard has 4 PCI slots, and I have USB ports to spare (Abit IT7 Max2, has 10 USB 2.0 ports on it).

For my clients I'm looking at the small-cased Via ITX machines, probably 256mb, with most likely CF drives for HD's, and DVD built into each box (going for a DVD player replacement type arrangement).

[salsbst]

Cayars has 8 tuners in his system... might want to look at this thread: http://forums.sage.tv/forums/showthr...&threadid=3758. It looks like he's running them all under SageTV.exe -- no SageRecorder, yet.

Who knows, it's been almost a month since he posted. He probably has 16 tuners now

[Cayars]

I've since changed my system around so I could test more functionality out. I'm now running 4 tuners in the Sage Server and have the rest running via SageRecorder. I also use the SageClient. They get used about 50-50.

The .14 release has solved my remaining conflict problems. The scheduling has been improved.

Carlo

[TunaBoo]

Originally posted by Cayars
I've since changed my system around so I could test more functionality out. I'm now running 4 tuners in the Sage Server and have the rest running via SageRecorder. I also use the SageClient. They get used about 50-50.

The .14 release has solved my remaining conflict problems. The scheduling has been improved.

Carlo

How can you ever watch what 8 tuner's record

[Cayars]

Honestly 4 tuners seem to be the sweet spot as I'm finding out. I previouly had two BTV boxes setup with a tuner in each. I also had a SageTV 1.4 box with 3 tuners in it. Different programs were setup on different machines for recording. This got old quick!

When Sage released the 2.0 beta I moved everthing over to the Sage machine (5 tuners). Then a guy on E-bay sold me a PVR-250 for $50 so that made 6. I picked up a PVR-350 to see if it was "everything" people claimed it was and also picked up the E-Home pvr card for a total of 8 tuners.

Once I installed .14 release my recording schedule got much better and i no longer needed the extra tuners.

I didn't particular think the output on the 350 was any better then my nVidia card setup so I just sold that along with the E-Home card to a friend last night. Now I'm down to 6 tuners. 2 are PVR-250s and they are internal and 4 are the USB2s.

I just moved things around last night and now have 1 PVR-250 and 2 USB2 attached to the Server and have 1 PVR-250 and 2 USB2s attached to a SageRecorder machine.

I could probably reduce this to 4 tuners and be quite happy most of the time. It's not uncommon for me to have 3 or 4 shows on at the same time that are favorites (wife, kids and me).

When the system isn't recording a favorite it is normally happy to record programs using IR.

Carlo

[Cayars]

Originally posted by TunaBoo
How can you ever watch what 8 tuner's record

After .14 release 4 tuners were mostly just doing IR all the time. I constantly had 3 to 5 shows recording around the clock. It wasn't so much that I'd watch them all but more that I had a selection of shows/movies to choose from. Sort of like "Carlo's On-Demand" entertainment system.

300 channels and nothing on. <--- Not in my House!

Carlo

[heffe2001]

I'm ordering a 64mb FX5200 card today (getting it for 44.95), and a 200gb Maxtor drive to stick in the machine now, that'll take me to 320gb total storage. I'm planning on moving the 80gb out and getting an additional 200 at some point. May also drop my 120 out of my main machine in it as well... Gotta have the storage space .

Now I wonder if I should order a couple of those E-Home's and see if I can get it running with 4 total tuners (3 E-homes & the Adaptec). It'll be running 2 Dish & 1 direct and local cable (we watch alot of TV, I like dish, GF & Kids like direct & cable, so we spend a ton on TV/month).

Now I just need to get an IR blaster of some sort so I can actually use the system like I want.

[jominor]

You may want to consider the Windows XP dynamic disk for your smaller drives. I've taken a 60, 20, and 30 and combined them into a single 110 gig partition.

I've got Sage using this as my E: drive. This feature really breaths new life into older or smaller drives. Caveat, if you lose an older drive, you lose the partition, so either back up or use it for data that's transient like....Recorded shows!

[heffe2001]

The 200 & 120 may very well be done that way, but the other 2 drives I'll leave as is (they are older drives, and if they were to fail in a striped array, you'd loose the data on them). Most likely though, I'll use the raid controller on the motherboard to link the 2 drives together, less overhead for windows to worry about.

The board I'm using has 4 IDE spots, and 2 SATA-150 controllers, so I should have plenty of room for drives in the system. I'll be more limited by the Overture case then the controllers. After adding these 2 drives, I will most likely set up a 2nd machine for storage. If my server's drives weren't so dang expensive, I'd just dump a ton of space in that machine. (It's a Dell Poweredge 2400, hot-swap drive bays, those drives don't come cheap :P).

What I'm wondering is if I should put 4 tuners in this one box, or set up another machine here and put 2 tuners in it with Sage Recorder on it. My main goal though is to get at least 4 different LIVE shows on at a time, AND be able to record stuff as well. Won't need that functionality for a while though, so I'll probably just stick another tuner in the Overture case, and do dual tuner until after we get moved in the new house and all set back up.