I have now got a Windows 7 Pro (Intel I7 4770k, 8GB RAM, Asus H87M-E motherboard) system working with MediaPortal 1.6 using two Hauppauge Colossus cards doing HD capture over component video (stereo audio) from two Motorola DCX3200-M cable set top boxes controlled by a USB-UIRT blaster box.
There were a lot of twists and turns on the way to getting this working, so in this thread I will attempt to document the issues I encountered and record the various solutions I found, along with screen captures of the relevant settings pages so that others might travel a smoother path in the future.
But first: was it worth it?
Yes, I think so, and I'm planning to add a third Colossus card to the TV Server box in the near future. I'm a refugee from the "killed-by-Google-SageTV" system. I really like my SageTV setup, I've got three tuners in it, but only standard def. If Google hadn't killed it I would probably have tried to do this with Sage instead. The Sage achieved a very high WAF (Wife Approval Factor), I think MP will too with a bit more work.
I'm going to split the saga into multiple postings to this thread, so read on for more.
Regards,
Stephen[DOUBLEPOST=1389569544][/DOUBLEPOST]Some might ask why I decided to use an Intel i7 4770k chip, as that seems like a lot of CPU for this sort of application.
Well it came down to two things really:
1. cost, the i7 chip is about the same price as one Colossus card and cable box pair, so it's not really a significant cost increment (as a part of the total system) over something like a high end Athlon chip.
2. performance, while my initial tests convinced me that a much smaller CPU would do just fine for the HD recording task, I wanted to have more CPU available to future proof the system (I don't want to change this for at least 5 years) and I wanted to be able to run COMSKIP for commercial detection and VIDEOREDO for editing and transcoding at the same time that recordings were taking place. This i7 chip is capable of transcoding a 2 hour (10GB .ts file) movie down to a 1GB h264 MKV file in about an hour (while my older desktop Athlon x6 1090T takes twice as long).
There were a lot of twists and turns on the way to getting this working, so in this thread I will attempt to document the issues I encountered and record the various solutions I found, along with screen captures of the relevant settings pages so that others might travel a smoother path in the future.
But first: was it worth it?
Yes, I think so, and I'm planning to add a third Colossus card to the TV Server box in the near future. I'm a refugee from the "killed-by-Google-SageTV" system. I really like my SageTV setup, I've got three tuners in it, but only standard def. If Google hadn't killed it I would probably have tried to do this with Sage instead. The Sage achieved a very high WAF (Wife Approval Factor), I think MP will too with a bit more work.
I'm going to split the saga into multiple postings to this thread, so read on for more.
Regards,
Stephen[DOUBLEPOST=1389569544][/DOUBLEPOST]Some might ask why I decided to use an Intel i7 4770k chip, as that seems like a lot of CPU for this sort of application.
Well it came down to two things really:
1. cost, the i7 chip is about the same price as one Colossus card and cable box pair, so it's not really a significant cost increment (as a part of the total system) over something like a high end Athlon chip.
2. performance, while my initial tests convinced me that a much smaller CPU would do just fine for the HD recording task, I wanted to have more CPU available to future proof the system (I don't want to change this for at least 5 years) and I wanted to be able to run COMSKIP for commercial detection and VIDEOREDO for editing and transcoding at the same time that recordings were taking place. This i7 chip is capable of transcoding a 2 hour (10GB .ts file) movie down to a 1GB h264 MKV file in about an hour (while my older desktop Athlon x6 1090T takes twice as long).
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