[LastCoder]

Hi all,

'cause of the great client-server model our tv backends could run on special servers. Atm I'm using a single seat setup (means, XBMC + TVServer = one machine) but for further multimedia development @Home I'm quite interested in real standalone tv servers.

Adam@TVHeadend told, that he uses a NAS for that.

How could a hardware setup for a standalone tv server look like ? which components and which OS could be used, if this machine should run about 24/7, should support more than one tuner - and of course should be "green" with low power consumption ?

Greetz

LastCoder

[Ned Scott]

Something like an Intel ATOM or AMD's APUs draw very little power and make for great "green" HTPCs that can be left on 24/7. Depending on the source of your TV, you could even go as far as a Raspberry Pi for both PVR backend and XBMC frontend at the same time.

[FeloniusMonkey]

Something like an Intel ATOM or AMD's APUs draw very little power and make for great "green" HTPCs that can be left on 24/7. Depending on the source of your TV, you could even go as far as a Raspberry Pi for both PVR backend and XBMC frontend at the same time.

But at some point, you'll want to encode/compress your recordings, and you'll need the CPU power to do it. It would be nice to do this on the fly because those recordings take up a ridiculous amount of space! I personally haven't figured this all out yet, but I'm hell-bent on doing so. What I plan on doing is building my TV server with a solid dual or quad core CPU that will be able to handle all of the encoding while simultaneously delivering the content to the client machines. I'll be making sure my tuner card is built into the PC to eliminate any network traffic between the tuner and the server. The trafic between the server and clients will be quite high, and I don't need any additional "noise" clogging the bus.

[Ned Scott]

Hardware encoding does exist out there. Not sure what hardware supports it. One interesting option would be the Raspberry Pi, which has a hardware h.264 encoder, but I don't know if anyone has done anything with it yet. A Pi could even transcode, in theory.

[twojciac]

I'm running Mythbuntu as a VM on an ESXi 5 server paired up with a HD Homerun + HD Homerun Prime so I have 5 tuners. I already had my ESXi server running which runs a VM for my Asterisk instance, Linux box for HTTP/DNS/CIFS/NFS, OpenVPN appliance VM for remote access. I've allocated 2 GB of memory and 1 GHz of CPU minimum and haven't run into any issues.

So far I have two frontend boxes, both Windows based. Have two additional Raspberry Pis with the MPEG2 license, still doing beta testing on those before I go live with them. All in all, a pretty slick setup.