Few questions to see if Media Portal is right for me (1 Viewer)

[elsmandino]

Hello,

I have been referred to Media Portal from another forum as the solution of what I am trying to do.

I have three TVs to which I am going to add an Acer Aspire Revo to each. I want freesat and freeview on all the TVs and the ability to watch live TV any of the TVs plus watch recorded TV on any of the TVs.

I have been advised to build a server with loads of TV tuner cards in (rather than add a usb tuner to each Revo) and then add Media Portal to the server and the Revos.

To give me a good mix of options of live TV/recording, I was thinking of adding two Blackgold BGT3595 cards - Dual DVB-S2 and Dual DVB-T on each, giving eight overall.

In addition to the above, I shall use the server for storing all my media and using it to download podcasts from itunes, which again can be streamed to any of the three computers.

I have a few preliminary questions and would be grateful for some advice:

1. In general, would Media Portal do what I am asking?
2. What is the maximum number of TV tuners that Media Portal can handle?
3. In terms of the server, what OS should I be using (I want to run the server "headless" and connect to it via remote desktop from my laptop for any maintenance).
4. What sort of specs am I going to need for such a server running Media Portal? Realistically, I am never really going to be utilising all eight tuners at the same time - perhaps three recordings going on plus playing recorded media/watching live telly on two of the three revos all at the same time.
5. How does Media Portal deal with time shifting? - will the hard disks on the Revos be responsible for storing the time shifted material or will this have to be done on the hard drives in the server?

I would really appreciate some feedback on the above to see if this is something that might work.

Thanks v much.

 

[pilehave]

1. In general, would Media Portal do what I am asking?
2. What is the maximum number of TV tuners that Media Portal can handle?
3. In terms of the server, what OS should I be using (I want to run the server "headless" and connect to it via remote desktop from my laptop for any maintenance).
4. What sort of specs am I going to need for such a server running Media Portal? Realistically, I am never really going to be utilising all eight tuners at the same time - perhaps three recordings going on plus playing recorded media/watching live telly on two of the three revos all at the same time.
5. How does Media Portal deal with time shifting? - will the hard disks on the Revos be responsible for storing the time shifted material or will this have to be done on the hard drives in the server?

1. Yes I don't have much experience on how to cleverly handle podcasts, but I'm sure it can be done.

2. As many as you want, but you are restricted by the load that timeshifting and recording will pose on the harddrives in the TV-Server. This is variable, but I would suggest using a RAM-drive for timeshifting - but only if you have enough RAM, 8 GB should be sufficient for three clients...are you thinking RAID 0/RAID 10? RAID 0 will increase performance but double the risk of total failure of the system.

3. I would skip Windows XP and use Windows 7 x64 if possible, unless you are bound by driver restrictions. a 64-bit OS will allow usage of RAM greater than 4 GB.

4. Again, you could probably run TV-Server on an Atom board if the harddrive setup is fast enough to no be the limiting factor. TV-Server doesn't encode or decode the streams, it pretty much just records it to the harddrive/timeshift-file.

5. If you run multi-seat (one server, multiple clients) your TV-Server will be timeshifting and therefore storing the files. If you run single-seat (TV-Server and client on same machine X 3) the Revo will be used to handle tuners, recording,t imeshifting etc.

Now...these are MY answers, others may think otherwise

 

[revs]

Yes its definitely possible.

1. YES
2. Lots.
3. just moved from WinXP to W7 on my machine, W7 x86 is workign great.
4. Youy dont need anything too fancy, unless the server will be doing encoding or something CPU intensive. Just make sure you have a seperate HD for timeshifting,recordings and the OS.
5. The TV Server will have the timeshifting file, the Revos will access that.

 

[Mike Lowrey]

revs
Do you have any details on how podcast are best handled with MP?

 

[revs]

Afraid not - never used podcasts - although I did see something in OnlineVideos plugin about podcasts.

https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/...opodcast-youtube-playlists-users-video-73249/

I know its referring to video, but may be worth looking at.

 

[elsmandino]

Fantastic - thanks very much for all that.

I note your points about time shifting. So ultimately, for the best performance, I need to avoid putting the time shifting on a different place to that of the recordings.

I note that say that this can be done in different ways - either put time shifting on a dedicated hard drive or use RAM Disk. Can anyone recommend which might be the best option?

As far as I can see:

RAM DISK - much quicker than hard drive though much more expensive than a Hard Drive per GB - cooler, less noisy and uses less electricity than hard drive, limited in terms of how much RAM motherboard can take.

Hard Drive - Opposite to the above.

I also note that if I went the RAM DISK option, 8 GB should be enough overall to include three client's - how much of this would be dedicated to RAM DISK?

I am proposing to have a trial run with my current HTPC, connected directly to my main telly, to see if Media Portal all works out - until I build a new server.

Athlon II X2 240e
M4A785TD-M Evo
NSK2480 Case with PSU
4GB TW3X4G1333 C9A Corsair Ram (2x2GB)
1.5TB WD Green (AV-GP version)
Windows 7 (64-bit)
Hauppage HVR-220 twin freeview tuner card
Nova S2 freesat card

As I only have one hard disk, I shall try the RAM Disk option - will there be enough RAM (only 4GB in total) to watch live telly straight of the machine and also stream to one Revo or is this pushing it?

Thanks again for all your help, it looks that is gonna be a great set up.

Sorry one other quick thing about RAMDISK:

Is this a pool of memory that can be used by any of the tuners or do you have to proportion a tuner a set amount of the RAMDISK space? (sorry - hope that makes sense?).

If I, for example, have four tuners and 2GB or RAM space, is it the case that:

1. the tuners all share the 2GB of ram, so if two people are watching live TV, they get 1GB of buffer each

or

2. You have to preset a certain amount of space that each tuner can use for buffer - i.e you would allow 512MB for each of the tuner).

At a guess, I think (he says) that it must be the second option because (with option 1) if you have a single tuner using the full 2GB of RAMDISK and then suddenly a second live TV stream comes in, is Media Portal sophisticated enough to suddenly halve the buffer being used by the first tuner and allow it to now be used by the second tuner?- I might be absolutely wrong about this!

I would appreciate confirmation as to which option it is.

Sorry that my questions on this are getting a bit technical - I note that there is a bit of a trade off, in switching from Media Centre to Media Portal, in that it is a little more complex to set up given the additional options.

Hopefully it will be all worth it in the end!

Thanks again

Sorry one other quick thing about RAMDISK:

Is this a pool of memory that can be used by any of the tuners or do you have to proportion a tuner a set amount of the RAMDISK space? (sorry - hope that makes sense?).

If I, for example, have four tuners and 2GB or RAM space, is it the case that:

1. the tuners all share the 2GB of ram, so if two people are watching live TV, they get 1GB of buffer each

or

2. You have to preset a certain amount of space that each tuner can use for buffer - i.e you would allow 512MB for each of the tuner).

At a guess, I think (he says) that it must be the second option because (with option 1) if you have a single tuner using the full 2GB of RAMDISK and then suddenly a second live TV stream comes in, is Media Portal sophisticated enough to suddenly halve the buffer being used by the first tuner and allow it to now be used by the second tuner?- I might be absolutely wrong about this!

I would appreciate confirmation as to which option it is.

Sorry that my questions on this are getting a bit technical - I note that there is a bit of a trade off, in switching from Media Centre to Media Portal, in that it is a little more complex to set up given the additional options.

Hopefully it will be all worth it in the end!

Thanks again

 

[revs]

Wow - big post - i'm at work, so a quick reply.

No need for a RAM disk for timeshifting - a normal hard drive is plenty quick enough. Hard Drives can do many MB per second, and TV streams arent that big!

 

[miroslav22]

Yea if you use a dedicated hard drive you should be able to timeshift at least 10 SD channels or 4-5 HD channels at once quite reliably. RAM drives are overkill but you could use an SSD drive which would let you timeshift as many channels as you'd ever need (within it's space available).

 

[pilehave]

I will still promote RAM-drives over SSD-drives, even though some fails to see the advantage

SSD-drives are expensive and wears out considerably faster than SDRAM, but maybe you should just start by timeshifting to the harddrive and then take it from there.

8 GB of DDR3 SDRAM can be had for ~ £60, and you need some RAM for the server anyways...

 

[miroslav22]

The latest SSD drives are pretty much impossible to wear out