TV server what is the maximum of tuners (1 Viewer)

[janvk]

We got some questions from a clietn.

Likes to setup a brand news home system.
All through satelite.

He needs an amazing 16 connections to his satelite, but we are interested in advising him to use a mediaportal TV server so all things are done centrally.

What are the maximum of tuners that TV server 1.02 or 1.1 supports. We are thinking of using FireDTV DVB-S cards in an external housing. And use small pc's at all the different places in house with mp client on it.


Could some one tell me if there is a limit i looked at the forum and can't find anybody who has more than 4 but is it restricted in TV server or did nobody just tryed it ??

Also question what kind of specs would people use for TV Server Im thinking Xeon and 8GB of memory so that leaves us to go for vista version or X64 versions.

Thanks

Jan

 

[pilehave]

I don't think there is a programmically limit to the number of cards, I believe I once read a post where a user had 8 cards in his setup...but do you really think that he needs 16 cards? If the channels are on the same MUX you can pretty much watch all 8 channels at the same time, on one tuner.

Since the transport stream is "just" saved to the harddrive (and not re-encoded) your biggest limit will be the filesystem access. I'm thinking RAID 1+0 or 6. Probably best on a dedicated RAID-controller (not onboard).

 

[synthdood]

If you mean that your client wants to have satellite tv in 16 different rooms you don't need 16 tuners.

A colleague of mine has just built a tv server with with 3 floppydtv DVB-S cards, 3 diseqs and a single dish with three quad output LNB's pointed at different satellites. With this setup he can watch/record from three different streams from any of the sattelites simultaneously anywhere in the house on an unlimited number of clients as. If you watch channels from the same stream on multiple locations, the same stream/tvcard is used and in practice you wil find that the most popular channels are combined on the same streams which means that often you will be using only one or two cards with several clients watching a different channel.

Worst case, you would only need 16 tuners (and as many dishes/diseqs/LNBs/CAMs/smartcards) if you want to be able to watch 16 different programs all on different streams simultaneously. What kind of household does your client have? Or is he running a hotel maybe?

 

[janvk]

he has multiple rooms lives there with his wife 2 kids and his father and mother in one house you understand we have main livingroom kitchen parents bedroom 2 kids bedroom the living room of the parents, bedroom of the parents and of course the have a basement wich is an american sportsbar where we have 4 big flatscreens so the can watch multiple sports at the same time. So worst case scenario needs to be discussed with the owner of how many tv at ones. But we are going to have 14 clients.

 

[janvk]

Ok. have been thinking about the your replay (thanks for that)

So does the TV server work as follows:
All streams in one mux/stream are stored on the harddrive wether a client watches it or not ??

Meaning that the harddrive space for temporary recordings (live-freeze, live playback) has to be big also ?
Thinking you'll need a terrabyte just for temp recordings while multiple tuners need to temp record for multiple streams at once then ???

 

[pilehave]

Ok. have been thinking about the your replay (thanks for that)

So does the TV server work as follows:
All streams in one mux/stream are stored on the harddrive wether a client watches it or not ??

Meaning that the harddrive space for temporary recordings (live-freeze, live playback) has to be big also ?
Thinking you'll need a terrabyte just for temp recordings while multiple tuners need to temp record for multiple streams at once then ???

No, only streams being watched or recorded is saved. Watching one channel only saves a timeshift-buffer for this particular channel, not the entire MUX. Zapping between more channels saves a timeshift-buffer for these channels in the time you were watching them.

But yes, having 14 clients (maybe not at one time, but still) would require a good deal of drivespace for the buffer, I would suggest 2-4 GB pr. client...