TVServer Basics (1 Viewer)

[Paul_B]

I have recently come across Media Portal after looking at Myth TV and Videolan. My idea is to run a central server which is powerful and then have up to four clients which receive ripped DVDs and Satellite television. The clients would either be centrally located in a rack or in the same room as the TV.

From my intial investigation it looks as multiple FireDTV / FloppyDTV TV "cards" can be fitted to the central server and controlled by the client machines?

Does TV Server stream to the clients? Can the server be more powerful (Core2 Quad) and allow the clienst to be relatively less powerful (Nano-ITX has built in MPEG 2 / 4 graphics card)?

What is the best OS for running Media Portal Windows XP or Windows Vista, 32bit or 64bit?

Many thanks for now ;o)

Paul

 

[bjarkimg]

Hi, since you have 0 replies i will tell you what i know.
Yes, multiple FireDTV / FloppyDTV cards to a central server and can be controlled by the client machines if the card is idle. otherwise you can catch the stream that the card is running. (pretty cool ).

Yes, stream to clients, (on my newly vista machine i stream the tv only takes 5-8% cpu power form the server and its not Core2, 3200 AMD)

I have been running MP on windows XP for about 3-4 years, worked grate, some skipping in the Digital TV card video, now i'm trying MP on Vista Ultimate and it look promising, no skipping of the video in TV, but i will upgrade the memory

using 32bit vista(no reason but had the license, perhaps some driver issues with 64bit on the TV card, but untested).


but use 64bit on my own computer.

Correct me if i'm wrong about the FireDTV...

 

[Paul_B]

bjarkimg,

Thank you for the post really useful information and the product just sounds better and better.

My MSI motherboard has turned up today so I will be playing over the weekend. The central server will be as follows:
- MSI x48 Platinum Motherboard
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 LGA775 'Yorkfield' 2.50GHz 6MB-cache (1333FSB)
- 2 GB DDR3 Memory

I'll have to start with DVD as I don't currently have a FireDTV TV card

Paul

 

[petsa]

Hi Paul,

Yes you can fit the server with multiple cards and then stream to the different clients. Wrt your question on what to use as clients I would not go for too slow machines. If you run HDTV it will require a lot of CPU power to decode, and that is done on the clients. The alternative is to have a powerful gfx card and use HW acceleration to decide h264 streams (HDTV).

I use WinXP and my impression is that it works a little better than Vista atm. Perhaps it is just my impression, since I use XP myself so I can not give an absolute answer on that.

The central server does not have to be very powerful, at least not for TV, as the TV-stream will just be forwarded or recorded as-is and the power is needed on the client-side as I mentioned above.

/Peter

 

[Paul_B]

Petsa,

Thank you for your comments.

My intention is to use the central server as a TV Server and also to store our DVD collection which will be ripped, suggest on doing this in MP would be appreciated.

I am thinking of using Nano-ITX boards for each room. The benefit is they consume very little power and the size means I don't have to much space taken up in my rack. Looking at the VIA website this is the blurb for the Nano-ITX NX board:

"Packed full of advanced multimedia features through the VIA CX700M2 system media processor, the all-in-one digital media IGP chipset integrating the VIA UniChrome™ Pro II 2D/3D graphics core and an extensive array of high end audio and video technologies, including Vinyl Multi-channel HD audio, hardware MPEG-2/-4 and WMV9 video decoding acceleration, and a built-in HDTV encoder up to 1080i for HD DVD playback for the richest entertainment experience"

So I am guessing that although the CPU is only rated at 1.2GHz for the fanless version some of the grunt video work will be offloaded to the GPU?

So when using the MP TV Server what is the client actually sent a raw MPEG4 stream?

Paul

 

[petsa]

Hi Paul.

I guess the GPU could do the decoding IF the codec supports that and there is support in the drivers for that IGP. My mobo has ATI X1250 IGP but I've not got the HW acc to work for this. I bought an Nvidia 8600GT 512MB Silent gfx card which can do HW acc.

As for the decoding of h264, yes as far as I know the stream is sent "raw" to the client, which will decode and display. All recordings are stored in the original format. TV-server has no options to select codecs, that is in MP only.

/Peter

 

[Marcusb]

I'm not sure if VIA inbuilt graphics is ever up to the task of high power gfx, such as HDTV, depsite what the advertising says.
It would definitely be wise to wait for others to tell their eexperiences or even just buy one ITX board and test before committing yourself to more than one.

I went for the option of cheap HTPC style all in one motherboards using the nvidia 7050 chipset. Now you can even get these boards with the 8050 chipset. Couple that with a cheapish AMD CPU and low power using RMClock you'll probably have a much cheaper solution that still doesn't use much power and has better upgrade options.

 

[Kingsize]

Hi there, i have an ITX bord and admitadly its only a 800Mhz one but at the end of the day it was advertised as being able to play DVD vedio fine on its own GFX chip! But in reality i would have had more luck trying to play a DVD on a record player. Only after fitting a PCI ATi card to it did it play ok ish. It is now used as a linux firewall as this is about all its good for. Hope that helps