[megacrypto]

Hi all,

I have a friend of mine who has a client of his that is building right now his house and wants to install 34 points to watch TV. They alread covered the DVB-s part (which i really don't understand ver weel) but in a nutshell they will put 4 dishes with each ahving 4 lnb's which is all then connected to some sort of a machine that will distribute the signal to all 34 points in the house. In addition to that they want to have a media server serving the entire house. So, my friend was asking me if i know of anything that can do that all in one place. Right now im looking at STBs that will be put in the 34 rooms, something small but can support everything (i found this Amino product which is used for IPTV in hotels). Another choice was to put small dreamboxes (DM500) in each room, but when it tested running videos (Divx and so) usinf VLC frontend, it did not look that good and the app does not run very well. Now Im going back to using MP in the 34 points using small boxes.

Well, my questions are:
1. How many servers do i need to server 34 points smoothly (ofcourse not all of them will run at the same time, but one has to be on the safe side ) ?
2. Can I setup only one TV server? that is, if i dont need 34 tv tuners in the STBs then i can get any of those miniITX and only run MP on it (there is a couple of VIA boards that wont take much footprint yet can handle HD decoding)

Basically thats it, any thoughts, suggestions ?

[MoPhat]

I have no answer for you, but...


WOW!

greetz
MoPhat

[rtv]

Even power users rarely have more then 4 or 5 clients therefore I guess this would be the largest install. I guess with a fast Quad-Core and two Raptor-HDDs there's still room for some more clients but you'll have to find out if they all can be handled by one server alone. At least we'd be very interested in a photo story

If some database accesses would be the bottleneck I can offer help to optimize those occurences... Keep us updated

[Hetfield]

I don't understand, how database is often considered as a slow part in MediaPortal. With application and amount of data in database like this, I don't belive it should be slow. So there is something wrong with MediaPortal database or queries. I have also wondered the "SQL Server vs My SQL optimizations". Maybe some time I'll trace the queries to see what kind of SQL Media Portal produces, and if there is anything to optimize. I have worked almost 10 years with way bigger databases and with thousands of users for the database (SQL Server).

Questions:

- What kind of technology / components MediaPortal uses for data access? NHibernate???
- What functions in MediaPortal are the slowest?
- Is there loading of large objects with many dependencies ==> I recommend to make for heavy searches simple objects with only the fields which are displayed in search.
- Are there internal selects is SQL statements ==> should not be, question of optimization.
- What isolation level you use? With many users the isolation level should be "read uncommitted", because this software is not critical with committed / uncommitted data (not saving million EUR sums to database). With this isolation level updates/commits by other users wouldn't slow down.

But anyway, hopefully the database structure is OK, queries are easier to optimize.

[mbb]

Hey guys, sorry to go back to basics.

You say "4 dishes with each having 4 lnb's"
Is there any switches or each lnb is connected to a tuner.

If it's the 2nd case, you need 16 tuner cards.

The problem with one server is the limited number of slots.
Motherboard with more than 4 pci slots become difficult to find, I don’t know if there are dual dvb-s card supported by MP.
even so => 4 x 2 = 8 tuners
maybe you could add some usb and firewire cards.

And after all of that what’s about cam for your subscribe channels?

[megacrypto]

Well, this is a project still in the making, and i'm supposed to tell my friend whether it will work or not. Me myself i have not yet tried the tv server, i use a DM600 for my DVB-s and MP for my movies and music, the problem is that whatever i'm going to suggest based on that there will be machines to buy and money to be spent, so i was hoping that i could get your opinion on whether or not TV server (not necessairly 1 server, they could be as many as 4 servers) will be stable enough to provide high quality service to the end points, or maybe this is a bit experimental to have these people spend so much money on somtheing that maybe will not work. Just for your info, these people are clients of my friend who works in high-end home entertainment solutions and he is supposed right now to provide them with the solution for their entire house (which is a 3 floored villa built on 500m2) they already established the plans for the audio and data wireing of the house and now its only the equipment to set. the building of the house will still finish in like 3 months from now, so there si still some time to research this.

Anyways, im planning to setup a tv server in the next few days and try working with. i have 4 PCs to test. And deffinatly if this thing goes through, i will get you pictures of the entire network

mbb:
i really didn't understand that part when my friend explained it to me, but from what i understood is that the 16 lnb's are connected to some sort of a switch which then can double it to support 34 (or i guess 32) outputs which then are connected to the internal wiring of the house via one rf cable coming out of this switch ... something like that. i will try to find out more about this and try to get the brands of these devices

[Marcusb]

Isn't this getting over complicated?

Will there ever really be a need to stream 32 different TV stations to 34 different clients at the same time?
I think they need to think about the most different TV's that will be connected and in use at the same time.

I would guess that 34 clients would be fine, but the performance may deteriorate as more and more clients are running unless you do some optimisations by assigning different hard drives to different timeshift and tuner cards.

Cheers,
Marcus.

[charli181]

Also consider bandwidth on your network. Each stream will be take upto 13 Mb/s for HD streaming. I think SD & DVD is about 6-7 MB

[limpwhizkid]

Originally Posted by megacrypto

Hi all,

I have a friend of mine who has a client of his that is building right now his house and wants to install 34 points to watch TV. They alread covered the DVB-s part (which i really don't understand ver weel) but in a nutshell they will put 4 dishes with each ahving 4 lnb's which is all then connected to some sort of a machine that will distribute the signal to all 34 points in the house. In addition to that they want to have a media server serving the entire house. So, my friend was asking me if i know of anything that can do that all in one place. Right now im looking at STBs that will be put in the 34 rooms, something small but can support everything (i found this Amino product which is used for IPTV in hotels). Another choice was to put small dreamboxes (DM500) in each room, but when it tested running videos (Divx and so) usinf VLC frontend, it did not look that good and the app does not run very well. Now Im going back to using MP in the 34 points using small boxes.

Well, my questions are:
1. How many servers do i need to server 34 points smoothly (ofcourse not all of them will run at the same time, but one has to be on the safe side ) ?
2. Can I setup only one TV server? that is, if i dont need 34 tv tuners in the STBs then i can get any of those miniITX and only run MP on it (there is a couple of VIA boards that wont take much footprint yet can handle HD decoding)

Basically thats it, any thoughts, suggestions ?

For a realistic answer.. you first need to answer some questions..
34 points is not really a problem if you have wireless draft-N everywhere..
However.. 34 points watching HD at the same time.. 15-35mbps transmission will go just over the limit of 1 gigabit connection on the server side
max of 30 people watching hd transmissions.. as your networkcard on windows wont be stressed (a good one) more then 60%..

I even watched TV in my neigbors house wireless 300 meters away on my own tvserver (my neighbour was in shock
THe point is.. how many people can max use it at the same time.. that really dictates how much power or harddisk speed is needed.. ive actually had up to 9 clients connected on the same time.. tvserver only running at 20% cpu ..

does he really have 34 TV or computers in his house . i dont think so .. or it is a hotel or something.. which this product in the current state cant be used fo , you will have to wait untill its finished

[rtv]

Originally Posted by Hetfield

Questions:

- What kind of technology / components MediaPortal uses for data access? NHibernate???
- What functions in MediaPortal are the slowest?
- Is there loading of large objects with many dependencies ==> I recommend to make for heavy searches simple objects with only the fields which are displayed in search.
- Are there internal selects is SQL statements ==> should not be, question of optimization.
- What isolation level you use? With many users the isolation level should be "read uncommitted", because this software is not critical with committed / uncommitted data (not saving million EUR sums to database). With this isolation level updates/commits by other users wouldn't slow down.

- Gentle.NET 1.2 & native .NET
- Configuring channels in SetupTV
- No - just very inefficent loops in the code behind
- No
- Sorry about your experience but without knowing the current workload and db specific limitations this recommendation isn't useful


To sum up: Our O/R mapper is slowing down each db access. Combined with some code with could be converted from row-level to batch action MP did suffer unnecessarily at places where many sequential queries happen.

Therefore the DB isn't bottleneck at all - it's just the code..