Multiple SageTV Servers

[mightyt]

I have thinking about this now and then ... I just ran Cable TV all around my house, thus have cable access from several rooms. If I wanted to leverage other computers, I could set up additional servers. The question is this. Can SageTV Clients access more than one server at a time? I know you can switch servers in the Setup, but I was wondering since a client can access multiple normal Windows / Novell servers, can a SageTV Client access more than one server at the same time?

I'm not sure I can even wrap my brain around this yet myself or if it is logical, but thought I would ask rather than hurt myself thinking about it too much!

Thanks, T.

[fidget]

You can load SageTV Recorder on the encoders that you have in the other computers. I have three USB based encoders in my main server and one PVR-350 in my STB, which I have integrated via SageTV Recorder. You don't have to spread your encoders around the network, you can put them all in one PC and use the drive space that is available on the network for storing the resulting MPEG files.

[sleonard]

No, clients only access one server. Only one server is needed anyway. If you want to use other tuner cards in systems other than the server you can set them up as network encoders using SageRecorder.

For example, you have a main system w/ 2 tuners in the living room, one system w/ 1 tuner in the bedroom, and a 3rd system with 2 tuners in the den. SageTV in server mode would go on the main system, SageRecorder and Sageclient both on the other two systems. This would give you a total of 5 tuners accessible by any of the 3 systems.

[mightyt]

Got it ... So I can use the CPU and Tuner from multipe PC's and see them all via Network Encoding from any Sage Recorder or Client. Can those PC's control what is recorded on their drives? So, if my kid wants to record One Tree Hill, he can use his own storage rather than the storage on my Server??

Thanks, T.

[sleonard]

Client pc's can control what is recorded, watched, or most everything that the server can do. What they cannot do is make the choice of which tuner is used nor can they choose the storage location. Only the server makes those two choices.

What you do for storage is to specify what storage location(s) you want available to the server. You can specify local (to the server) storage or shared network drives. You can specify multiple locations as well.

For example, you could tell the server to use the local D:\sagerecordings in addition to \\sageclient1\sagerecordings and \\sageclient2\sagerecordings. It would be the server, however, that would make the choice as to where to store a particular show.

[briands]

The drawback to client machines running with network encoders in your configuration is network traffic. Even if you are watching something on one of your client machines that is being tuned by a network encoder in that machine, the data is traveling to the server and back... This seems like an inefficient operation. I have installed all of my cards on the server machine for this reason.

[fidget]

Originally Posted by briands

The drawback to client machines running with network encoders in your configuration is network traffic. Even if you are watching something on one of your client machines that is being tuned by a network encoder in that machine, the data is traveling to the server and back... This seems like an inefficient operation. I have installed all of my cards on the server machine for this reason.

On a related note, if you have a file located on remote (to the server) storage, data is transferred from that remote computer to the server and then from the server to the client (doubling the network bandwidth). This is one of the reasons that I would like to see more of a peer relationship between the client and server. The server could tell the client where the file is located and the client could play it on its own. Unfortunately, the true solution is not that simple (but it sounds nice ).

[dvd_maniac]

I do not understand why Sage does not have a location property in the Record/Favorites Options.

I have to move files from my 400GB raid-0 drive to archive them and then I lose info even if I import it. Also would seem to solve this network issue...