State of network streaming in MediaPortal (1 Viewer)

[Matthew Houston]

Afternoon guys,

I've been successfully running MediaPortal for years now on a single instance PC. Never really had any issues with it. I currently have a 4 x Tuner PCIe card and it never misses a beat.

In about 3 months my new house will be completed and I'll be really beefing up the media capabilities. What I'll be looking at is 4 x i3 based systems running as MediaPortal clients over gigabit with my single server with 2 x 4 tuner cards to cover them. So because I haven't really had a chance to test it (and probably wont until I already purchase my gear) I thought I would put it out there:

1. How robust is the client / server capabilities?

2. Would running 4 clients of a single server have any detrimental effects?

3. Has anyone set this up and have it working well?

Anyway, as always, good job guys, keep up the good work!

 

[4Fred]

A few years ago I tested running five clients towards my old single seat tv-server. So four clients watching tv and the fifth running on the single seat, it all ran just fine.
The only thing that I feel is a big differance when it comes to getting a rapid responce from clients and the single seat is using a SSD disk for operating system and MePo installation and timeshift. Dont really know what part does the differance but this was a hughe performance improvement for me on the single seat and how fast I get EPG up on clients and how "snappy" everything feels. If you measure it it's probably not a big thing but the overall feel surly was.
Wireless may sound like a good idea for the clients but if you can go for a wired network.

 

[mbuzina]

Should be no problem (I just have 2 clients + an ipad). Network is one important factor, 100MB or 1GB is enough for HD, Wireless is not so good (even with modern HW).

I 2nd 4Fred in recommending an SSD for timeshift (a quick thumbdrive USB 3 might work also).

 

[porky996t]

Hi Matthew,

I currently run three clients and a Samsung Tab2 from my server. I have had all three wired clients running at the same time, plus a wireless laptop and the Sammy tablet and there were no issues. I have 2 x quad cards and have been watching 1 channel and recording 6 or 7 at the same time too, without any problems. As 4Fred says, an SSD is useful on the clients - all my clients have SSD's in them, and also try to make sure you use the same remote control on all clients for consistency and a high WAF. Oh! BTW, the server uses an SSD for the OS and a 12Gb RAMdisk for timeshifting.

My setup is here

My setup is in my sig' below.

 

[4Fred]

What I meant was when switching from normal sata disk to ssd disk for the parition where operating system and MePo is all installed I noticed a quicker responce when bringing up TvGuide and changing channels from a client, you know using the tv-server part from a MePo client.
The old disk was a wd green, they are a bit slow but great for storing media, but somewhat slow for os and other things I guess.

So today I use a 60gb ssd and on it is windows+antivirus+other apps+MePo w TV-Server+timeshift, media is located on other local disks along with recorded tv.

 

[Neild7744]

I have 2 clients essentially, however 1 is installed on the tv server. I learned yesterday the bottleneck in the whole setup is the network speed. I've also been told using dedicated drives for timeshift buffer and recorded tv also helps so I have created a ram drive for the timeshift buffer. I ran into problems when streaming HD TV with poor network performance.