Network Traffic Flow Question

[dgeezer]

My sage TV setup consists of a SageTV server with a couple tuning cards and an HDHomerun located in my wife's office here on the farm. It's close to the road and has Time Warner cable access. Our house is about 800 feet from the road and is connected to the office with fiber optic cable and 100mbit fiber converter boxes. We have an HD300 and HD200 at the house. I currently store all our ripped movies and music on the SageTV server. I also have a linux "server" located in our house. I use this to backup her and my office pc's so as to have readily accessible storage kind of offsite.

Here's my question: If I store my rips on the linux server in my house would this create more traffic over the fiber link or less? In other words would the movies travel directly from the Linux server to my HD300 via my gigabit switch in my house or would the stream travel up the fiber link to the sagetv server in the office and then back down the same link to my HD300? Any ideas how I could test this?

I haven't noticed any problems, but I worry that as we add more devices the fiber connection may become a bottleneck.

Simplified diagram (doesn't show printers, wireless access points etc.)

[PiX64]

Originally Posted by dgeezer

My sage TV setup consists of a SageTV server with a couple tuning cards and an HDHomerun located in my wife's office here on the farm. It's close to the road and has Time Warner cable access. Our house is about 800 feet from the road and is connected to the office with fiber optic cable and 100mbit fiber converter boxes. We have an HD300 and HD200 at the house. I currently store all our ripped movies and music on the SageTV server. I also have a linux "server" located in our house. I use this to backup her and my office pc's so as to have readily accessible storage kind of offsite.

Here's my question: If I store my rips on the linux server in my house would this create more traffic over the fiber link or less? In other words would the movies travel directly from the Linux server to my HD300 via my gigabit switch in my house or would the stream travel up the fiber link to the sagetv server in the office and then back down the same link to my HD300? Any ideas how I could test this?

I haven't noticed any problems, but I worry that as we add more devices the fiber connection may become a bottleneck.

Simplified diagram (doesn't show printers, wireless access points etc.)

I am quite certain that sage will pass of the network path to the item by which your traffic would go directly to the source. So in your example if you have your sage server local ont he same switch, the request would go out to sage, then sage would tell the hd300 where the media is when a playback is requested. hd300 woudld then go directlyl to the network path to access the media, not a round trip back to the sage server

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by PiX64

I am quite certain that sage will pass of the network path to the item by which your traffic would go directly to the source. So in your example if you have your sage server local ont he same switch, the request would go out to sage, then sage would tell the hd300 where the media is when a playback is requested. hd300 woudld then go directlyl to the network path to access the media, not a round trip back to the sage server

Sage Streams to the extenders only PC Clients read the file directly... if using UNC Paths or mapped drives.

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by nyplayer

Sage Streams to the extenders only PC Clients read the file directly... if using UNC Paths or mapped drives.

That's what I though as well.

[dgeezer]

Thanks for the replies. I havent had time to look into this much further. I did start a video playing on my HD200 which originated on my linux server and then shut down my SageTV server. The video stopped playing about 30 seconds later which is about how long it takes for the SageTV box to shut down and close my Teamviewer session.

[PiX64]

Originally Posted by BobPhoenix

That's what I though as well.

Seems odd, and i don't buy it. Completely unecessary to broker a file that hd300 or hdx00 can play directly through sage server.

If that is in fact how they do it, it would be interesting to talk to Jeff et. al. on why the hell that decision was made.

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by PiX64

Seems odd, and i don't buy it. Completely unecessary to broker a file that hd300 or hdx00 can play directly through sage server.

If that is in fact how they do it, it would be interesting to talk to Jeff et. al. on why the hell that decision was made.

That is easy to test when you using an extender you will see the Sage Server CPU usage go up... when using a client you will barely see cpu usage.

[reggie14]

My understanding is also that only PC clients will pull files straight from the source, if using UNC paths or mapped drives. I'm not sure why extenders don't do the same.

[BobPhoenix]

The UI is run off the server for an extender when in extender mode. So the file then has to be streamed from the server. How would the UI runnning on the server know where you are in the file if it played it back directly from the file on the extender when you brought up position bar? Granted that could be worked out in the protocol but I doubt it is.