HD Component Capture Card @CES?

[IVB]

1) Sage blows VMC or MCE out of the water.
2) Power Consumption is my big trigger point - my electric bill is currently $330/month. I believe the extender is a 7W device. Try doing *that* with your HTPC

But yes, I do use an HTPC for the H/T room, so I can render a custom CQC screen or Sage. I only use an extender in the MBR, and soon the kitchen.

 

[bfisher]

Most of your functions I don't want on a TV Some of them I can do now (HA interface, view security cameras, burn content, etc). The proprietary comment is valid... but if Sage does everything I want (and then some) - it's not an issue. My wife has told me several times that our Sage setup has been well worth the money - picture quality, flexibility, etc. Very high WAF project for me

 

[Steve]

I agree with points that Vaughn is making, but he must realize he has very specialized needs. Many of us, even techie diy'ers just want a tv to be a tv. Actually I want to be able to record multiple streams of sd and hd and be able to play them back anywhere. That's it... I don't care about any of the other stuff a pc will give me. And proprietary? Well, all of my DirectTV receivers, the standalone DVR, etc are all proprietary. I do agree it would be nice to have an extender that worked on Sage, but if you decide to go to some other system then the extender would still work. But at $200 a tv for HD it is probably worth the risk, especially if Sage if half the product that Vivek and Collin say it is. When Sage gets their 'teaser' box, or D* releases their HD USB/PC box that was announced I will be very quickly looking at building a Sage solution. I just hope I don't have to invest alot of $ in another high power pc to drive it.

 

[IVB]

From a post from a Sage'er @CES:

I stopped by the Echostar and hauppauge booths today and got a good download. It was a little hard to find someone who knew what they were talking about, but I managed to get some good info.

The Dish box was streaming encrypted video to Sage running on the blue ray player using DTCP-IP. The sage player was not recording it, just playing it. From the conversation with the echostar guy, it sounded like they were not going to let another device record content, but rather provide it to a device that could display it in whatever UI the device wanted. This is unlike the cable guys who will allow other devices to display content, but only if they control the UI completely.

This is not the dish box acting as a tuner to Sage.

The hauppauge box was quite interesting. USB connected, it has a analog component encoder that can encode 720p, 1080i, and yes, 1080p content in an H.264 format at data rates of 5 to 25 Mbps. This allows for pretty good quality, though not as good as an R5000. The HD-DVD disk they were encoding looked very good at 9 mbps.

The h.264 profile they are using is blue ray compatible, so a codec that can playback BR content should be able to play this back too. They also can take in SPDIF for multichannel audio recording, which is synced in software to the video. It's fresh out of the engineering lab, but they claim it will be in production and distribution in a couple months for $250.

A friend of mine said a bunch of companies are working on this same type of product, some farther along actually, and so we will likely see a number of such products soon. The BOM for such a card is likely sub $50, so the $250 price is high and is likely to come down soon after there is more competition.

The Dish guys thought the Sage guys were at the show, maybe in a suite, but I couldn't find it on any of the show documentation. They must be in stealth mode. I wonder what they are cooking up... Must be good if they don't want to share.

Hope this helps answer some questions.

 

[bfisher]

I just hope I don't have to invest alot of $ in another high power pc to drive it.

If you use the HD extenders, the server requirements are much less. Basically you need to be able to record lots of data fast (depending on how many tuners, etc) and stream data fast (depending on number of extenders). If you use HD extenders, they do all the converting and scaling - the server is just sending the raw data. The only other thing your server will be doing is processing commercial skipping and those requirements are minimal (2-4% per show in real-time, higher if you do batch processing because then the analyzer is crunching as fast as it can... real-time is much easier on the CPU)

 

[Mike]

Going back to the Xbox 360/MCE comment: Compare the features, you can do more than MCE can with 360 extenders and teh extenders (HD ones even) are less than a 360.

Look closely at what you want to stream as MS does not allow the full range (and most likely will not) whereas Sage does. I also see (maybe my perception) more efforts going into Sage than into MCE from their respective companies (at least in looking at changes).

I started out with MCE and abandoned it. I'm real happy with Sage though (so I am biased towards it).

On Pc's in every room, don't forget you need the IR integration as well, which will add to that cost, wires, etc (a PC in every room hooked up to the tv is far less aesthetically pleasing than a small box. Edit: There is something very cool about being able to add the power of sage to a room with only a network jack and a box the size of a small paperback.)

On doing work: In my living room (which has my Sage server) I can bring up the desktop and start typing away and see things on the 61" monitor. However, I typically just watch tv and break out the laptop (and if you are thinking the power cord is a pain, I have plugs in the floor near my favorite chair for just that purpose).

 

[ver0776]

My 1st Tester has been a big Sage fan for a long time, he has really pushed me to integrate vCrib with sage. So since everyone likes it so much, I will try it on a couple boxes, AGAIN.

I always hear everything blows MCE away, yet I have tried MediaPortal and Sage. Sage drove my machine to 100% cpu so I ripped out the box, bought another Turner I know works well and loaded MCE on it.

Sage as failed me one the 3 occasions I have tested it now, but I will load it again on my strongest MCE box and hope the CPU is under 100% =) ....


Vaughn

 

[bfisher]

Much of the CPU usage depends on what you want it to do... if you use it as a headless server (not connected to any tvs) and use extenders - generally your CPU utilization will be pretty low. The exception to that is if you are transcoding HD to SD in real-time (that process usually adds about 10-15% on my box) (if you are using SD extenders instead of HD... and if you are recording in HD). If your CPU can't handle real-time transcoding, you can schedule automatic transcoding while everyone is asleep.

I can't speak to watching Sage on a PC connected to a TV. I don't do it that way

 

[IVB]

My 1st Tester has been a big Sage fan for a long time, he has really pushed me to integrate vCrib with sage. So since everyone likes it so much, I will try it on a couple boxes, AGAIN.

you mean this guy

Both of us gave you props on the Sage forum. After all, the more products that support HA, the bigger the market, the better we all are!

 

[Mike]

I can't speak to watching Sage on a PC connected to a TV. I don't do it that way

In case this helps: I use it this way (the pc drives the living room directly, the rest of the house is extenders). I use a P4 3GHZ with 2GB of RAM and a 6800GS (I think that was the model video card) 2 Hauppuge PVR 150's and I've never noticed a problem to go look at utilization (although at the same time I never checked as even when I went to do something in the background it was fine).

 

[ver0776]

Ok, maybe I will try some advice to make this a better experience. Let me know the best way to use Sage in my situation. I have 4 media centers, each with a hybrid tuner, 3 run Plasmas and one is a bedside computer, two more boxes have tuners but TV is not watched on them as they are my Dev machines. Each has TW cable ran to them. I have each of them mapping to files servers for Divx & XVid content. I bought an HD OTA house antenna and a 4-way amp that I plan on running to each of the 4 main boxes, but contemplating an HDHomeRun unit instead.

If I wanted to abandon MCE on all of my boxes, what kind of Sage setup would I want? I don't think I need extenders as each box can run the main Sage client, but I also want each box to be able to play recorded content (TV) from the other boxes. So I would have a distributed DVR system. Would I have to buy Sage times 6 copies at $79 each (or whatever the price is)?

I think my 100% CPU may have been the cheap Pinnacle DVR. BTW, I am using NVidia cards in most of the boxes and have NVidia PureVideo MPEG2 Decoder.

I have ran the Windows MCE Diagnostic app on all of my boxes and they are fully compliant.

Vaughn

 

[IVB]

1 SageServer $80, 1 SageClient @($30?).

BTW, given that you are the vCrib god and vCrib is an open-source and free solution, check with the Sage heads to if they'll cut you a break. They're generally great guys to deal with, they're the anti-microsoft in more ways than one.

 

[ver0776]

1 SageServer $80, 1 SageClient @($30?).

BTW, given that you are the vCrib god and vCrib is an open-source and free solution, check with the Sage heads to if they'll cut you a break. They're generally great guys to deal with, they're the anti-microsoft in more ways than one.

I guess I don't get the Server Client difference. My 4 MCE boxes all do the same job (they all record shows, etc) Do I really want to make 1 a server, or just put Sage on all of the boxes and then I don't need a server?

BTW I at least got the trial version running on the machine that was giving me CPU troubles. It works fine with the new tuner card..

I will read more, I am on the Sage forums now...

Vaughn

 

[IVB]

In a network-distributed architecture, there can only be 1 ra (Stargate reference :lol: )

One machine will coordinate and drive the recording schedules, etc. The others will have a damn similar UI, but will request the server to coordinate such things. You can now centralize all your tuners into one box and make this client/server, or leave your tuners in each box and use SageRecorder to have client machines also do recording.

 

[CollinR]

1 SageServer $80, 1 SageClient @($30?).

BTW, given that you are the vCrib god and vCrib is an open-source and free solution, check with the Sage heads to if they'll cut you a break. They're generally great guys to deal with, they're the anti-microsoft in more ways than one.

I guess I don't get the Server Client difference. My 4 MCE boxes all do the same job (they all record shows, etc) Do I really want to make 1 a server, or just put Sage on all of the boxes and then I don't need a server?

BTW I at least got the trial version running on the machine that was giving me CPU troubles. It works fine with the new tuner card..

I will read more, I am on the Sage forums now...

Vaughn

Depends...

There must be a primary server that determines what recording hardware will be used to capture the video.

The normal SageTV server package ($80) includes the backend server and a frontend client.

You can install the server on 2 machines however the second will become a slave to the first any recording devices it has can be used by the primary server as a network encoder. This means you are not limited in the PCI bus for analog capture, you can take an old P3 800 and load it up with PVR500s and as long as it's disk IO and network can handle it you can use it.

On most PCs all you need is the client, it is basically the same as the frontend used on the server.

SageTV has a true client/server relationship, there is 2 applications in use. The server is mearly the logic behind the recording and transcoding and it keeps a database of your viewing history and preferences. The client is mearly the interface it is dependent on the server for content but it's interface is its own and can be modified indepently of all others. If you install Sage on a single machine you will still use both server and client.

Extender clients are different (MVP, HD Extender and placeshifter)... They use a client interface rendered on the server this is very different from the MS Client application.


To build an interface to SageTV you are primarily interested in the client interface used by the server as it can also be used by all others. Your interest in the server application would be to interact with core recording functions, for instance ring a bell when X has finished recording.