relocating the pvr server

[haverer2]

Hello! Suggestions please!

I current have my TV devices coming into a desktop in my office. It works no problem. I also use the machine for doing work besides nPVR recording.

To remove unsightly wires from the side of my house though, I'm thinking of relocating the tuners to the garage which is far nearer the satellite / aerial... and here no wires will be seen. Obviously I won't then be working in the garage, so I'd need to keep the desktop in the office to do work and purchase something new to run the npvr box / tuners. There's my question... what should I buy to run 4-6 tuners and npvr so that it works properly???

Currently the office machine is a quad core i7 960 with 4MB RAM. I've obviously never had a problem using nPVR with that... but I don't want to buy something for the garage that's well over speced.... need it to do an excellent job, but not have redundant hardware bought!

Thanks for any ideas.

John

[stustunz]

Will it be playing the video?
Do you use comskip ?
Do Any transcoding?

[martint123]

I used an old P4 3GHz + 1GB for many years with 1 x PVR150 analogue tuner, a nova-t-500 dual dvb-t tuners and a nova (something) dvb-s tuner.
Not used for viewing recordings (except for testing) but it was up to the task for PC clients and NMT's

Currently using an I4 as it was available when upgrading my main system.

[haverer2]

Thanks for the comments... forgot to say that I won't be doing any postprocessing stuff - either transcoding or comskip.

[Graham]

NextPVR recordings are more or less exact copies of the broadcast stream so there is very little processing required to transfer the broadcast stream to disk. The most likely bottleneck is disk I/O when recording multiple HD streams while playing one or more HD recordings on client devices.

I would expect that you will be reassured if you use Task Manager (or better yet, Resource Monitor) on your existing server. You will should see that the NextPVR load is trivial even when multiple recordings are active.

[haverer2]

great idea Graham.
Thanks

[jcjefferies]

Quite a few of us use an HP Microservers. They often have a cash-back offer but sometimes are for sale for even less without the cash- back offer. There is space for four hard disks and two PCIe cards.

[martint123]

I'm using one of the microservers (when they dropped to £75 with cashback) with a microstick dvb-t2 tuner and a tbs dvbs2 tuner as a testbed (I suspect the current cheap offers have no drives in them??).
It runs npvr faultlessly and a number of other servers at the same time (logitech media server, solar pv, linux VM for card serving and camera movement recording).
Great little boxes.

[gEd]

Do you have a budget? The i7 960 is getting on a bit iirc so might you not be better off buying a new office PC instead?

[steeb]

Do you have a budget? The i7 960 is getting on a bit iirc so might you not be better off buying a new office PC instead?

I'd go with gEd! If you already have a working NextPVR system don't muck about with it and treat yourself to a new PC instead?