Building a Tuner Farm/Server

Whiffle

Whiffle

Whiffle

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27 Jul 2009
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386
Hi there,

I am currently running Mediaportal on a an HTPC that is acting as bother Server and Client.
I would now like to build a dedicated Server that that hosts Mediaportal as a Server only and shall hold all my TV tuners and do my recordings and stream all my media to other computers on my network.

I will also have iTunes on the server, downloading new podcasts whenever available.

In essence, I need a quiet and efficient Server that is going to do all the above. Some ideas for what I might need:

RAM: 4GB
CPU: Core I3-200T
Motherboard: Not Sure on m-ATX or ATX - needs to have lots of PCI-E slots for various video cards and must have USB 3.0 for backing up. As I don't need powerful graphics (the server is going to be run headless, I don't need a P67 motherboard).
PSU: Needs to be quite and efficient
Case: Depends on which size of motherboard, but is it better to go for a tower or an HTPC-style horizontal case?
Hard Drives (I think I shall need three):
* 1.5TB AV-GP WD (for making all recordings) - already have
* 2TB Samsung F4 (for storing all media other than recordings) - already have
* A Small Laptop Hard drive for the operating system (for those that don't know, Mediaportal uses a dedicated hard drive for time-shifting to avoid thrashing the hard drives where all your media files are kept) I would partition the first part of the hard drive for the OS and leave the rest for the time-shifting.

The reason that I am using a laptop hard drive is to try and save some unnecessary noise/power, though I realise that depending on the case I get, I might have to get a 5.25" or 3.5" to 2.5" adapter.

Your views on some suggested specs for this server would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks very much.

A
 
if ur running it as a headless server, u could just put itaway somewhere, so the case/looks wont really matter

also the noise is less of an issue too.

i would suggest a quad core thou, if u plan to have a lot of tuners running, a quad core would mean u could encode 4 at a time.

i have my media server up in the loft, which runs with 4 dual wintv tuners, and 2 dual usb ones giving me 12 tuners available.

althou im just running it on a Q6600 which does the job.
im running mine on mythbuntu as a mythtv backend.

it even allows me to remotly setup programs to record from anywhere on my mobile.

dual tuners would be the way to go if u want lots available, depending on what type of tuners your after.

speed of harddrive doesn't really matter that much, so just get the large ecogreen drives, there fast enough for the media and save power.

depending on your budget, an SSD or hybrid drive might beuseful for the main os, and these use even less power
 
Sorry to hijack the thread but I'm really interested in the idea of a tuner farm. I have a home file server running fedora that I use for torrenting and media serving, but hadn't really realise that I could potentially use it to stream TV from internal tuner cards.

My server is a pair of dual core xeons with 4Gb RAM, dual Gigabit LAN (Bonded) and the whole house is wired with CAT6. The drive system should be fine, its 4 x 1Tb drives on a 3ware raid card running raid5.

How exactly would I go about setting this up as a tuner farm? Can I continue to use Fedora? How easy is Myth TV to setup and how do the client PCs connect to it?

Many thanks,

E-I
 
Thanks for that, very good suggestions about the hybrid hard drives - i shall have a look at that.

When you say you reckon you would need a quad core, do you mean a proper quad core would the CPU I suggested do: It has two cores but has hyper threading.

Also, would I definitely need a quadcore processor if I am only using the server to record and serve media? Any editing, encoding would be done on a separate, more powerful computer.

Evil-I, I note that you have some pretty powerful hardware for your server, is there anything in particular that you are doing that needs something that powerful (maybe I have underestimated what I will need for my build) and I also note that you have dual Gigabit Lan (Bonded) - never come accross this before, what is it and what are its benefits?

Unfortunately, I cannot really help with any advice on tuner farms and Linux programs as I have only used windows based software (as far as I know, it doesn't look likely that Mediaportal will be supported by Linux), but let me know if there are any generic questions I might be able to help with.
 
Whiffle,

Definately ignore my hardware spec, its the least sensible home server you've ever seen and completely OTT, it all started because of a raid card and drives I got given, unfortunately the raid card was PCI-X rather than pci-e so I ended up having to get a server motherboard to accept it, then it was the pair of CPUs etc etc.

God knows what it costs me in electricity a year, but its certainly quite a lot!

E-I
 
Bonding allows you to have two (or more) lan connections appeariing as one IP address. Doesn't exactly give you 2Gbps but it does mean that if you have multiple machines accessing the server the load is balanced over both (or more) lan cards.

E-I
 
Evil-I said:
Sorry to hijack the thread but I'm really interested in the idea of a tuner farm. I have a home file server running fedora that I use for torrenting and media serving, but hadn't really realise that I could potentially use it to stream TV from internal tuner cards.

My server is a pair of dual core xeons with 4Gb RAM, dual Gigabit LAN (Bonded) and the whole house is wired with CAT6. The drive system should be fine, its 4 x 1Tb drives on a 3ware raid card running raid5.

How exactly would I go about setting this up as a tuner farm? Can I continue to use Fedora? How easy is Myth TV to setup and how do the client PCs connect to it?

Many thanks,

E-I
Click to expand...

well the first thing u'll need is the tuners, like i suggested above, get the dual tuner cards.

u could get the external usb ones as well.
i would go for hauppuage ones as thier linux support is generally very good.


next u'll need to software to do the recordings, theres a few i believe, but i've only really used mythtv.

mythtv used to be a pain to setup, but now, its pretty straight forward, on ubuntu its as simply as installing the mythtv packages and its ready to go.
i assume theres something simlar for fedora.

also, if ur plannign to reinstall at all, theres a distro called mythdora, this is basically fedora with mythtv preinstalled.

The mythweb plugin is great to use, this gives u the channel listings via a webpage, and allows you to setup recording sceduals and such like, as well as stream any of the media you have, either the tv recordings or anything from ur media library

for the clients, there are several ways you can do this, the mythtv supports various modes, u can setup the server as a backend then have clients running it as a front end, which i run for my media players, i have several in the house all streaming from the backend.
but you can also use any other front end media software to stream it, windows 7 detects it as a media server and can stream stuff directly to media player without having to do anything, doesn't even need SMB installed to work, althou thats also an option
 
Whiffle said:
Thanks for that, very good suggestions about the hybrid hard drives - i shall have a look at that.

When you say you reckon you would need a quad core, do you mean a proper quad core would the CPU I suggested do: It has two cores but has hyper threading.

Also, would I definitely need a quadcore processor if I am only using the server to record and serve media? Any editing, encoding would be done on a separate, more powerful computer.
Click to expand...

it depends what u want to do it, my server records the stuff from the tuners and encodes it on the fly.

however, if u plan on doing the encoding on a seperate pc, then u dont need to worry a bout a quad core, just recording would be fine on any old cpu really. The quad core helps with the encoding mainly, for that, having 4 physical cores would be better, especially when using a lot of tuners, coz its likly u'll have multiple programs to encode at the same time.
 
Cycrow said:
also, if ur plannign to reinstall at all, theres a distro called mythdora, this is basically fedora with mythtv preinstalled.

The mythweb plugin is great to use, this gives u the channel listings via a webpage, and allows you to setup recording sceduals and such like, as well as stream any of the media you have, either the tv recordings or anything from ur media library

for the clients, there are several ways you can do this, the mythtv supports various modes, u can setup the server as a backend then have clients running it as a front end, which i run for my media players, i have several in the house all streaming from the backend.
but you can also use any other front end media software to stream it, windows 7 detects it as a media server and can stream stuff directly to media player without having to do anything, doesn't even need SMB installed to work, althou thats also an option
Click to expand...


Thanks for the advice, I'm going to have a play with the mythdora live cd on on of our machines with a tuner card (satelite) in it (Compro S350 I believe). Do you have any reccomendations on which of the hauppuage cards would be best? I'd say USB is possibly the safest and I'd probably be after a dual DVB-T and a dual DVB-S2. My server is based on a tyan s2735 motherboard so I basically have 2 x free pci slots and 4 USB ports and thats about it.

Thamks,

E-I
 
for DVB-T, the WinTv novas are pretty good

the pci one is in the Nova 500-TD
theres 3 versions of the 500 so need to check u get the right one
one of them is just a single tuner card.
the other 2 are duals, but one of them is Diversity.
either of the duals would do, but i prefer the non diversity card.
the differences is that the diversity has 2 inputs, one for each tuner, whereas the other just has a single input driving both tuners
so u need less cables with just the single

the only real difference is that with the diversity, u can use 2 aerials to power a single tuner to help improve its signal.

u can get those in low profile as well if u need to put them in a slim desktop case

the external is just called Nova-TD, again theres a single and dual, Nova-T being the single, Nova-TD being the dual

i've not used a DVB-S2 card, so dont know about those ones.

theres little difference between the usb and pci versions thou so either will be fine, or even both depending on how many u want
 
Great, thanks for that.

Time to get the wallet out I think and have a play with the server. If I can get this up and running it makes a hell of a lot more sense than trying to wire satelite and coax cable around the house as I've already wired it all for CAT6.

I may be picking you brains a little later on in this process if thats okay mate ;-)

Thanks again,

E-I
 
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