TV Cards - how many clients? (2 Viewers)

[finrudd341]

I am confused about capacity of TV cards, and the ratio of cards to clients: I have a Floppy DVB-C card, with the cable channels mapped to it. I now have three clients on my network, and don't seem to be able to answer this question to my satisfaction. My question is this:

Should I be able to watch the same channel on multiple clients? For example, if client 1 is watching MTV, can client 2 also watch MTV, where MTV is mapped to the same card?

I assume the answer is no - you can only have one client receiving the TS stream from a particular channel on one card at a time. If I had two cards, then there would be 2 x TS streams from the MTV channel, and both could watch it at once?

Therefore, if the number of TV cards in my TV server is directly related to how many clients can watch the same channel simultaneously.

 

[miroslav22]

If you have one channel tuned, MP will let as many other clients watch the same channel at the same time as is technically possible. You are limited by the speed of your hard drive and network with how many clients can be supported at the same time.

If for example if you had 2 cards:

Client 1 starts watching MTV on card 1
Client 2 then also tries to watch MTV
MP knows MTV is already tuned on card 1 so simply starts streaming this channel to the additional client. So you only have 1 card tuned (the other would be free to watch another channel) but the video is being streamed to both clients. The data is read twice from the hard drive though which is why you are limited by the speed of it. 3 clients should never overload it but if you had 5 or 6 that might be too many

MP can also stream multiple channels that are from the same transponder/mux without having to tie up another tuner card.

 

[finrudd341]

Many thanks Miroslav22 - I am going to do some load testing soon, and see what I can do with my three clients, and two cards, but it sounds like I should manage most combinations!

 

[chillibeans]

Hi

You will be surprised at how many you can run.

4 Clients watching 1080P AC3, with No problems.

The link below solves the HDD speed problem with Live television, and stops the HDD getting thrashed to hell.
TV-Server/UserGuides/Ramdisk - MediaPortal Manual Documentation

 

[pilehave]

Hi

You will be surprised at how many you can run.

4 Clients watching 1080P AC3, with No problems.

The link below solves the HDD speed problem with Live television, and stops the HDD getting thrashed to hell.
TV-Server/UserGuides/Ramdisk - MediaPortal Manual Documentation

Yor network has to be fast though

 

[chillibeans]

Yes I am running 2x PCIe 1gig in a team, with QOS enabled so other network traffic doesn't interfere.

Works fine with just 1 NIC, but was shocked with the lack of performance of PCI NIC's due to the bus speed.

 

[finrudd341]

Thanks for the feedback - I have setup the Ramdrive, and will see how that works out. The network could well be the weak point right now, as it's not gigabit, and it's using the switch on the back of a Draytek router.

 

[vicom]

Does this work the same if you are running "For the Record" ??? ie. more than one stream/client on the same channel from one tuner?
I'm unable to connect more than one client on the tuner when trying to watch the same channel.

 

[mm1352000]

Hi there

Are you using the Argus TV Server, or MediaPortal's TV Server?

 

[vicom]

sorry, forgot that ..

i'm using MP's TV Server