Six Tuners at Once?

[Anthony]

I currently have two HVR-1600 tuner cards, which gives me two digital and two analog tuners (a total of four).

Over the past few months I have become addicted to the quality of digital recordings, so I try to avoid the analog tuners whenever possible. I have a few cable channels that are only available via analog, but it's frustrating to have to record a show in analog because I'm already using the two digital tuners for other shows.

So, I'm considering adding an HVR-2250 to my system to have access to two more digital tuners. But, I'm concerned about how many HD shows I can record at once without running into problems with the drive access or whatnot?

Does anyone here have four or more HD digital tuners recording at once? If so, have you noticed any system performance issues? We often surf the net or do other work on the computer while GBPVR is recording shows, so I don't want to affect the performance too much.

Thanks,

Anthony

[pcostanza]

I have a system that has 3 ATI OCUR tuners and 1 HVR1600 but I've never had a reason to record 4 shows at a time. Plus, with this setup I have to use Vista Media Center as the ATI Tuners only work with it. However, I have recorded 2 HD and 1 analog at the same time with no problems. I have a relatively fast system with 3 gigs of ram and a dedicated hard drive to save the video to. I'm also not doing any post processing so the video files are just recorded to be watched later.

[pBS]

watch out for comskip tho, it'll bog things down considerably...
[basically doubling the drive accesses]
i made an app to keep comskip to 1 show at a time, but it still bogs me down if i try to watch something while recording more than 2 at once with comskip running...
without comskip, i think 4 is reasonably easy if you do other things on it..

writing seems to be done in chunks every few seconds, while reading seems to be much smaller chunks..seemingly constant...

i wrote an app to offload certain directories to another drive which eliminates this problem entirely [if you have enough drives]
you can link a dir to another drive so recordings for that show go only to that drive...
makes simultaneous records a breeze,like a single..
[actually it's a feature of ntfs,i just wrote a helper app]
all recordings appear as if on main recording drive, so only you will know..
i just link shows that record same time as another, so always have single recording loads..also helps expand space..
i think it's under 'ntfslink' i seem to have lost my thread...lol

[sub]

The defaut behaviour of the app is to serialise comskip. ie, if you do two recordings at the same time, the app will run comskip for one, wait until it completes, then run comskip on the other. You can have multiple running at the same time if you select to run comskip 'while recording', or if you're manually running it yourself from batch files.

[Anthony]

I've never had a reason to record 4 shows at a time.

This season seems to be worse than past seasons for simultaneous schedules. I find I'm often recording 3-4 shows each evening, while the tuners sit there unused most of the day.

168 hours in a week, and the various networks all seem to place the interesting shows on the same day and time. The other 167 hours there's nothing but soap operas and talk shows.

watch out for comskip tho, it'll bog things down considerably

I save shows to a log file after recording, then run comskip and VideoRedo overnight while I'm sleeping. Since it only processes one show at a time, and I very rarely record anything at those hours, performance isn't really an issue.

I have recorded 2 HD and 1 analog at the same time with no problems.

Yeah, I record 2 HD and 2 analog all the time with no problems, and that's while I'm streaming a show to my TVix media player, and my wife is surfing the net.

But, HD pushes a lot more data, so I'm curious just how many HD tuners I can record from before it becomes a performance issue. My computer is relatively fast (2.67 ghz, E6750 duo core, w/4gig of ram, a 250gb SATA main drive, and a second 640gig SATA drive dedicated to video). Even when all four tuners are running, there is very little processor load and the hard drives seem to be gliding along gently. So, I don't think adding a couple of HD tuners would make a huge difference, but I was hoping someone had tried it already...

Anthony

[whurlston]

As long as your recording drive can handle about 20MB/s sustained write speed, you should be fine. 40MB/s for 6 full QAM channels (12 HD channels). That's a conservative estimate and doesn't account for reads of course.