TV Tuners

[Mike]

I love the idea about tying Jukeboxes into Sage via tuner cards and have been working on moving my Sage machine to the basement where the rest of the equipment is.

My problem is I'm going to run out of PCI slots. I have two fios boxes using two 150mce's now and had to put a network card in as the onboard died. I have to open up the machine as I don't remember how the slots were configured but when I put the network card in I remember I was out of slots.

Now I can move the network to usb I believe but I may be hard pressed to go beyond that.

Assuming that is the case (and assuming I don't want to replace a motherboard at this time) are there other options?

What about USB tv tuner cards, are there any that work well and will have the right inputs (s-video, etci). I saw this one:

http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/products/data_pvrusb2.html

which looks suspicously like a sage extender...

The other thing I could do is try a HD Home Run for the fios HD box which would give me standard channels and the unecrypted hd ones, right? That would give me HD recordings and free a slot which would be nice. Planning on adding HD extender(s) when they come out so would be nice to get appropriate content. While I had started a component video distribution system, I never finished it to all rooms, so frankly, if I can tie in the jukeboxes and distirubte HD.

I also considered adding another sage server, but I suspect that may get complicated from a content perspective.

Anyone else been through this before and have any recommendations?

 

[dkemme]

Know nothing about the subject but check out Woot today.
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[IVB]

I got an HDHomeRun, which hooks up to the network, works great with SageTV. I'm using it for digital OTA, but I *think* you could use it otherwise. It has 2 tuners, so you're set there if that does work.

 

[Mike]

I had it on my list to look at that to try and get HD from FIOS, it was just lower priority. A network based encoder would be real cool. That would essentially be my cable/fios box then, and I could also get unecrypted QAM channels for HD, right? It would work for the standard channels, right?

If that is the case then this sounds like it would cover it and I just need to buy one and make time for testing.

 

[nightwalker]

I'm using 2 of the Happauge pvr usb2 boxes with no troubles here, I'm using them with GB-Pvr but i would think Sage would handle them equally as well. I think the extenders for sage are really just Happauge MVP's with a different name.

 

[bfisher]

The SD extenders are just relabeled Haupaugee MVPs running Sage software (they work real well... I have 5 of them). The new HD extender was released today - and it's a Sage specific box (not relabeled).

 

[CollinR]

Replace your PVR150s with PVR500s, buy them from PCAlchemy or another whom supplies the add-on ports.

This will provision 4 hardware encoders with the ability to mix and match:

4 TV tuners
4 Composite video sources
4 Svideo video sources


The catch is you can only watch 4 at any one time and the analog audio channels are the same for composite as S Video.


IIRC FIOS uses QAM so the HD Homerun is a go, but for the FIOS and ATSC OTA HD only.

I use the TV tuners for basic cable.
I use the composite video for CCTV multiplex, doubled one to each PVR500.
I use the Svideo for the DVD changer.

Since you have 2 digital boxes I would use an S-Video from each PVR500 for those too.


Basically you want the two cards to be mirrored so you don't have to have 1 specifically available to watch a DVD.

 

[felixrosbergen]

I got an HDHomeRun, which hooks up to the network, works great with SageTV. I'm using it for digital OTA, but I *think* you could use it otherwise. It has 2 tuners, so you're set there if that does work.

How does that actualy work if you are viewing via a media extender. Is Sage smart enough to tell the extender to get the stream from the HDHomeRun or would the data flow from HDhomerun into the sage server and from sageserver to the extender??

As a seperate question is a 100mbit network generally sufficeint for all the SageTV crazyness i can imagine? How many extender can you run on 1 server with a 100mbit connection?

 

[IVB]

technically, you never watch "live" TV with Sage. It's all recorded, but live TV is played back 1s after it's recorded. hence, it's always HDHR->Sage->Extender.

For the 100mb stuff, it's 10GB/hr for HDTV, that's 2.7MB/second, or 22mbit/second. Seems like plenty of overhead to me...

 

[CollinR]

The only time you need to be concerned with network bandwidth right now is between the master server and sub servers or HD Homeruns if connected to a switch. Then you will need gigabit to bring the video into the master server.

 

[felixrosbergen]

22mbit/sec per HD stream. So if you have several extender running one could easilly run into limitaitons with 100mbit/sec connections between SageServer and the switch. Due to some overhead i would say maximum of 4 extenders could be running at the same time.

However if you are using HDHomeRun and viewing/recording 2 channels via them then you're maxed out at 2 extenders (2*22mbit in and 2*22mbit out = 88mbit).

I thnk i'll go with a small 8 or 16 port gigabit switch. Even if only the server connects to it at 1000mbit/sec then it's already a penformance boost, a single extender woudl ofcourse never exceed the need for 100mbit.

 

[bfisher]

I've had 5 extenders all running at the same time - some HD, some SD, some DVD. 100MBit dedicated network (not used for my PCs)