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+---- Thread: Looking for advice... (/showthread.php?tid=197892)
Looking for advice... - wagman67 - 2014-06-15
Total noob to the board and serverWMC...
The main part of my setup consists of a couple of Windows 7 PCs and two RPis running Raspbmc, and a single HDhomerun Prime.
It appears (from reading posts) that running SWMC on two computers on the same network is a no go...is that correct? I originally thought I could run it on two and point the two RPis to one and anything else to the other...didn't work out so hot
. This all runs on a gigabit wired network...of course, the RPis are only 100 Mb.
So, I now only have it running on the better of the two PCs...which has a Core i5 Dual CPU (Hyperthreaded), 8 GB of RAM, and a Nvidia Quadro NVS 295.
Is that a suitable system to handle three tuners, to three clients, and recording distribution? If so, if I got a second HDhomerun Prime, could it handle 6 channels?
If two (or three) clients wish to watch the same show live, will that take up two or more tuners, at that time, or just one?
Finally, can more than one client watch the same recording, at the same time?
Thanks
RE: Looking for advice... - scarecrow420 - 2014-06-15
(2014-06-15, 01:52)wagman67 Wrote: Total noob to the board and serverWMC...ServerWMC (and the WMC running on the same box) must have exclusive use of a tuning device. In effect that means you can't run multiple ServerWMC in your environment however technically you could as long as each had it's own tuner hardware. Eg I have a "production" setup for my family (a backend system with USB twin tuner, running WMC and ServerWMC then 3 windows HTPC accessing this using XBMC) and then my "development" system which consists of my dev PC running WMC/ServerWMC with a separate USB tuner. For most normal users you wouldn't typically want/need to run multiple ServerWMC instance anyway.
The main part of my setup consists of a couple of Windows 7 PCs and two RPis running Raspbmc, and a single HDhomerun Prime.
It appears (from reading posts) that running SWMC on two computers on the same network is a no go...is that correct? I originally thought I could run it on two and point the two RPis to one and anything else to the other...didn't work out so hot
(2014-06-15, 01:52)wagman67 Wrote: So, I now only have it running on the better of the two PCs...which has a Core i5 Dual CPU (Hyperthreaded), 8 GB of RAM, and a Nvidia Quadro NVS 295.Your suggested hardware is more than adequate in my opinion! Overkill even... I havent heard of anyone in here with issues running 2 or 3 clients on even less capable hardware. You didnt mention what storage setup you have, and that is one of the most critical hardware elements for ServerWMC given that there is alot of working with large MPEG2 WTV files and remuxing to TS files, then clients reading/streaming these files etc.
Is that a suitable system to handle three tuners, to three clients, and recording distribution? If so, if I got a second HDhomerun Prime, could it handle 6 channels?
(2014-06-15, 01:52)wagman67 Wrote: If two (or three) clients wish to watch the same show live, will that take up two or more tuners, at that time, or just one?One tuner is taken up per channel watched, not per client. So in your example only 1 tuner would be in use, however each client does have their own remux job producing a TS file for that client to access, so there is some additional storage overhead with each additional client. People dont seem to have troubles running 2 or 3 clients though, from what I've seen.
(2014-06-15, 01:52)wagman67 Wrote: Finally, can more than one client watch the same recording, at the same time?Yes they certainly can. If the recording is complete, the clients XBMC are simply playing the WTV file over the SMB network, just like watching any other video file in your library. If the recording is in progress, ServerWMC is remuxing the WTV file to a TS file for each client watching the recording. So as per above there must be some limit to the number of concurrent TS remuxes that can occur on your given storage platform however im sure a few would be OK
So if anything id be thinking the amount of disk activity would be the limiting factor rather than CPU/RAM etc. Also if you were running other workloads on the ServerWMC box such as sickbeard or anything that was heavy on IO that is obviously going to have an effect on hard drive performance.
If we ever have a user who seems to be running out of storage performance due to large amounts of active recordings and clients online, and had already upgraded their storage and reduced other workloads, my plan would be to make some tweaks to ServerWMC to allow separate storage locations say per client, or for recordings vs live streams etc, so the load could be split across multiple hard drives. You could do things like have hard drives dedicated to specific client/s and/or scheduled recordings, move completed recordings off to new storage etc. Use SSD drives where required for live remux jobs and so on. But so far we havent had any users in this situation, most likely because there arent many people who would need/want large numbers of clients/tuners and recordings or perhaps because for modern PCs and hard drives this work isnt too taxing.
I would certainly love to hear from anyone who believe they have a large setup in terms of concurrent clients/recordings! If you do go down the path of setting stuff up please let us know how you go. Your raspberry Pi's should do OK (note that you need to buy MPEG2 licenses for them to display the video) however they are a bit slow in loading the EPG data etc. For the price they are pretty acceptable though! My 3 HTPC are Intel i3 and celeron NUCs which are great but obviously a hell of a lot more expensive than an rpi
RE: Looking for advice... - wagman67 - 2014-06-15
scarecrow420,
Thanks for the detailed responses, that clears up my questions nicely and makes me feels easier about my setup.
I do have the MPG2 (and VC1) licenses for the RPis...and they seem to be working well.
I noticed last night that two of us were watching the same thing (College World Series...go Vandy!) and it was only using one tuner, so got that answered real world style.
As for storage, I just have a single, standard, 500GB internal SATA 6 7200rpm drive. If I got a SSD, in addition to the 500 gigger, how would you recommend I set that up? There really is only three of us that utilize the system, although I plan to install XBMC on several more devices, throughout the house...have four more PCs (2 are Win 7 and two are Win 8.1)...and a bunch of android tablets and phones...just to know I can. But only a couple/three would be in use at any given time.
BTW, this stuff is great...really loving XBMC...been using it, without the live TV portion, for about a year.
RE: Looking for advice... - krustyreturns - 2014-06-15
Just a couple of points:
Wmc has a 4 tuner limit. There are ways around this, but they require software tricks (see tunersalad).
When multiple clients are watching the same channel, there is only one remux job running but multiple output filters to product a separate ts file per client.
RE: Looking for advice... - scarecrow420 - 2014-06-16
Thanks for the correction on the remux job krusty... I guess what I meant was that we write 1 file per client so there will be some additional hard drive overhead. But yes at least the actual reading of WTV file and remux processing is only happening once.
wagman67: Until you (if you ever do) run into issues, I wouldn't bother changing anything hardware wise. Theoretically if you did want to incorporate an SSD into the mix and without us making any changes to ServerWMC like I suggested above (multiple file storage locations etc etc) then what you could do is set the SSD as the WMC default recorded TV location, meaning all live streams, remux jobs and in progress recordings will be written there. Then you could setup ServerWMC "ExternalActions" to run a script whenever a recording completes, that would move that recording to a second "archive" storage drive. This drive would be added in WMC as an additional watched folder, and WMC/ServerWMC would handle playing completed recordings from either the primary location or this additional location. In this way you would have the SSD for all live streams and in progress recordings, but a regular/larger SATA drive for the storage of completed recordings. This wouldn't really help if you had problems due to high number of concurrent client streams and recordings, but of course an SSD would be more capable of such simultaneous drive access... so it really only provides the benefit of being able to use an SSD with it's higher IOPs for those activities, and would shift the "load" of playing completed recordings off to another storage, and of course mean that your SSD drive doesn't have to be huge since completed recordings would be stored elsewhere. As i said, IF somebody ran into such problems, we could make a change in ServerWMC to support segregating live streams from recordings and/or segregate clients to their own storage. As yet nobody has presented a case where anything like this has been required
RE: Looking for advice... - wagman67 - 2014-06-18
(2014-06-16, 00:18)scarecrow420 Wrote: wagman67:Theoretically if you did want to incorporate an SSD into the mix and without us making any changes to ServerWMC like I suggested above (multiple file storage locations etc etc) then what you could do is set the SSD as the WMC default recorded TV location, meaning all live streams, remux jobs and in progress recordings will be written there. Then you could setup ServerWMC "ExternalActions" to run a script whenever a recording completes, that would move that recording to a second "archive" storage drive.
So far, everything seems to be working fine and smooth, so I don't guess I will be changing anything...however, I do like to tinker, so I may look into a small SSD. I am not familiar with ServerWMC's ExternalActions, so I may be back to ask for some help. I can't imagine doing this for, at least, a couple of weeks.
Instead, of taking the ExternalActions route, what is your impression of MCEBuddy, and using it to essentially perform that same function (while also re-encoding and cutting commercials)?
Thanks again for your and krusty's advice.
RE: Looking for advice... - scarecrow420 - 2014-06-18
haven't used MCEBuddy or comskip personally but there has been discussion about it. Our external actions can run anything so you could make them run MCEBuddy as soon as a recording completes if you wanted to. But I understand MCEBuddy probably does it's own monitoring/scanning and such anyway so perhaps unnecessary. One thing I have seen someone say is that they ended up having to run these things overnight, as having them kick in as soon as a recording finished (and they were likely also trying to watch live TV at the same time) their live viewing was impacted when their backend machine started hammering away at re-encoding the completed recording file.
RE: Looking for advice... - wagman67 - 2014-06-22
Not that I am having issues with the setup, but I just ordered a 128GB SSD...should be here Tuesday. As I said, I like to tinker and if this can potentially make our experience even better, I'll give it a go.
RE: Looking for advice... - krustyreturns - 2014-06-22
I am the same way, always looking for excuses to buy new toys
.
RE: Looking for advice... - scarecrow420 - 2014-06-22
To make use of an SSD currently I think you would need to make that SSD be the default recorded TV drive in WMC, then if you didn't have enough space you could run an "ExternalAction" in ServerWMC on recording completion, to move completed recordings to your SATA hard drive (and that location would be added as a watched folder in WMC)
RE: Looking for advice... - wagman67 - 2014-06-23
(2014-06-22, 23:57)scarecrow420 Wrote: To make use of an SSD currently I think you would need to make that SSD be the default recorded TV drive in WMC, then if you didn't have enough space you could run an "ExternalAction" in ServerWMC on recording completion, to move completed recordings to your SATA hard drive (and that location would be added as a watched folder in WMC)
Yeah, when I get the SSD, I will clone my current system drive to it. After I test and make sure the new SSD runs as the system drive, I will format the 500GB SATA drive and create a single folder (probably D:\Recorded). I will then add that to WMC as a watched folder. At that time, I will probably need help setting up an 'ExternalAction' to move recorded shows to that folder. When you say 'ExternalAction', is that part of SWMC, or do you just mean an external action, to SWMC, like using robocopy?
I will probably toy with MCEBuddy, to see how well it does at removing commercials and moving content.
My sons are out of town for a couple of summer weeks with the grandparents, so I have to occupy myself with something.
RE: Looking for advice... - scarecrow420 - 2014-06-24
(2014-06-23, 15:21)wagman67 Wrote:From what I've read it's preferable to install the OS fresh on your SSD rather than clone a conventional HDD install onto an SSD. I believe that windows 7/8 will enable/disable/optimise certain things when it knows it is being installed on an SSD and potentially you might not have these optimisations present if you clone your existing install onto the drive. It may not be such a big deal though, just something I had heard.(2014-06-22, 23:57)scarecrow420 Wrote: To make use of an SSD currently I think you would need to make that SSD be the default recorded TV drive in WMC, then if you didn't have enough space you could run an "ExternalAction" in ServerWMC on recording completion, to move completed recordings to your SATA hard drive (and that location would be added as a watched folder in WMC)
Yeah, when I get the SSD, I will clone my current system drive to it. After I test and make sure the new SSD runs as the system drive, I will format the 500GB SATA drive and create a single folder (probably D:\Recorded). I will then add that to WMC as a watched folder. At that time, I will probably need help setting up an 'ExternalAction' to move recorded shows to that folder. When you say 'ExternalAction', is that part of SWMC, or do you just mean an external action, to SWMC, like using robocopy?
I will probably toy with MCEBuddy, to see how well it does at removing commercials and moving content.
My sons are out of town for a couple of summer weeks with the grandparents, so I have to occupy myself with something.
And yes, "ExternalActions" refers to functionality I added to ServerWMC that allows recording state changes to trigger external programs, and the ability to pass through parameters (like filename, channel, program name etc) to that external program as well. This could be used for things like MCEBuddy, renamers/scrapers, etc. There is a post in this thread about how to configure them, if you search for "ExternalActions" in the WMC subforum here, you should find all previous mentions of them. I haven't really heard from anyone that is using them so I hope no news is good news... It was added in response to user feature requests so im hoping SOMEBODY out there does actually use it
RE: Looking for advice... - wagman67 - 2014-06-24
(2014-06-24, 02:54)scarecrow420 Wrote: From what I've read it's preferable to install the OS fresh on your SSD rather than clone a conventional HDD install onto an SSD. I believe that windows 7/8 will enable/disable/optimise certain things when it knows it is being installed on an SSD and potentially you might not have these optimisations present if you clone your existing install onto the drive. It may not be such a big deal though, just something I had heard.
I guess that makes sense. I can easily do a fresh install (Windows 7 Enterprise)...will kind of have that new car smell.
(2014-06-24, 02:54)scarecrow420 Wrote: And yes, "ExternalActions" refers to functionality I added to ServerWMC that allows recording state changes to trigger external programs, and the ability to pass through parameters (like filename, channel, program name etc) to that external program as well. This could be used for things like MCEBuddy, renamers/scrapers, etc. There is a post in this thread about how to configure them, if you search for "ExternalActions" in the WMC subforum here, you should find all previous mentions of them. I haven't really heard from anyone that is using them so I hope no news is good news... It was added in response to user feature requests so im hoping SOMEBODY out there does actually use it
I will look up the discussion and see what I come up with.
Again, thanks.
RE: Looking for advice... - scarecrow420 - 2014-06-24
Here's the main "doco" on ExternalActions
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=178996&pid=1605365#pid1605365
RE: Looking for advice... - pagali - 2014-06-25
I don't have an SSD (yet), but I had no problem directing WMC to record to the 2nd HDD in the HTPC system, creating it's own 'Recorded TV' folder there. ServerWMC picked up that G:\ drive for recordings. Couldn't you do the same from an SSD installation? I'm a little confused why extra steps would be necessary... ?