How are you all having multiple tuners??

[alexd1983]

I am just curious about this, because unless you have special MBs with 500 pci slots lol, there wouldn't be the room for them!

You hear people talk about having 3, 4, + tuners and it just made me think "how??" Are these people using USB based tuner systems?

I'm using (granted) an older PC. AMD 1.8 Ghz 3000+ chip on an ASUS P8V E-SE (I think it is) board. I've got an AGP video card, my Hauppauge card, a promise SATA card, (because the MB only has 2 sata ports), and an sound blaster card in there. I am out of slots... haha.

So how do you "recording/watching enthusiasts" do it"?

[sub]

Most people have more than one PCI slot they can use for tuners, which makes 4+ tuners pretty easy. For example, two HVR-2250' would give you 4 tuner.

I've got an AGP video card, my Hauppauge card, a promise SATA card, (because the MB only has 2 sata ports), and an sound blaster card in there. I am out of slots... haha.

Most users use their motherboard's onboard sounds and SATA controllers, so that'd easy account for others having at least two more slots available, even on three PCI slot MBs. My motherboard has 2 PCI slots, 3 PCIe 1x slots and 1 PCIe 16x slot.

[psycik]

I bought a motherboard specifically because it had one pcie-16 (graphics card) and 4 pci slots - all filled with tuners. Sound and raid are onboard the motherboard.

And one of these tuners is a dual, giving me a total of 5 tuners. Pretty soon I'm looking at replacing another single tuner with another dual tuner..Maybe the new back gold with 6 tuners on board (2 satellite, 2 terrestrial and 2 analog).

[pcostanza]

How do you get time to watch all the stuff you record?

You might need a larger HD. Dell as the Seagate 1TB for $103 after rebate.
http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/produ...lid=912336
Use coupon code ?2WJ$?FX3J9?WM. While supplies last.

[psycik]

How do you get time to watch all the stuff you record?

You might need a larger HD. Dell as the Seagate 1TB for $103 after rebate.
http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/produ...lid=912336
Use coupon code ?2WJ$?FX3J9?WM. While supplies last.

yeah i'm looking at hard drives next, the 1.5 Tb ones are out, I'll wait for them to hit the $320NZD mark then I'll replace a 250gb drive with that, leaving 1.5tb and 500gb. Then the 250gb will go into my popcorn hour..

[martint123]

I got an Asrock m/b with 4 pci slots. I have a PVR150 for satellite STB, Nova-t-500 dual dvb-t, Compro S350 Satellite dvb-s tuner. I have a Pinnacle dual DVB-S tuner, but sadly I have to use other software with that. On-board sound and SATA. PCI-e video. Most viewing is done via PCH and/or MVP media extenders. 500gb+750gb drives internally, with the same as external USB for backups. There's an HP NAS box somewhere in the shack as well with a pair of 500gb drives.

We record a lot more than we watch, but it gives a much better choice of viewing than the broadcasters do.

[bgowland]

I also sourced my mobo specifically for having everything onboard and with 6 PCI slots. At one point I think I held the record for most tuners in one PC (seven in total - one analogue, one dual analogue and four DVB-T cards).

The single analogue card developed a fault and GB-PVR doesn't know about one of the DVB-T cards (it's now reserved for tinkering with my own DVB-T software) so that leaves five which rarely get used all at once - three or four simultaneous recordings isn't uncommon though.

There's only my wife and I but we both work odd hours so often what we want to watch is on when we're at work - multiple tuners are a must. If I was going to start again from scratch, I'd go straight in with a four tuner system and probably leave it at that.....we still have a VCR in case of emergencies. :eek:

Cheers,
Brian

[alexd1983]

Great answers here. Thank you. Another question: I may have missed it in the documentation, but is it possible on multiple PCs to run GBPVRs and have them somehow linked together? Recording shows, sharing files etc? Multiple servers..?

[psycik]

You could have multiple servers and set them up to see either others recording files. But there is no inbuilt functionality for the two servers to access each others database, or to have both servers recording to the same database.

It would require manual navigation of the recordings directory of one of the servers.

[ilovejedd]

HDHomeRun. 'Nuff said.

As for recordings, I just bought a bunch of 1.5TB HDD's + mobile racks since I already filled up a couple of 750GB drives installed on the GB-PVR server with just recordings. I've probably only watched around 25% of what I've recorded.

I keep meaning to cut commercials from recordings, but I can't seem to find the time to do so. While comskip works pretty nicely, it isn't perfect so I need to do some manual fine-tuning with VirtualDub+DGIndex.