Sreaming TV server for student home

[LittleWan]

Hi there,

Configuration:
Pentium D 3Ghz.
4x Pinacle 50i
Win XP Pro

Situation:
We beyed a pc that we wanted to use as an TV server for a student home (200+ students).
Is it possible for us to make it a TV server with 4 channels for about 200+ clients?
There is a 100mb network to all the clients.

Now we are broadcasting in multicast with videolan. We have problems that for now, we cannot manage to use multiple tvcards. Also the audio doesnt work when using multiple tvcards.

What are our options? we spend very much money on the server, and it would be a pitie if we can not manage to get it working.

Thanks

[btvfreak]

Theoretically BTV can support this configuration, but in reality there might be some limitations.

That Pinnacle tuner card is supported by BTV, but it looks like it's a software encoding card. That's not a good thing if you want to use 4 of them since software encoding cards eat a lot of system resources and produce sub-par picture quality compared to good hardware encoding cards (ex. Hauppauge PVR-150, ATI Theater Pro 550).

The other issue I would see is that streaming to 200 clients simultaneously might be a problem. Not sure if your harddrive could handle all that activily at the sametime.

What are you using as "clients"? Do you actually have 200 PC's? That's incredible!

[LittleWan]

Hi there,

I know the tuners need software encoding. The guys who tested with an onther configuration tested on a 2GHz PC and it had about 40%load. So they think that they could do on a dualcore 3Ghz 4x 40%. But they cannot run more than one tuner. (now i have to solve there problems grrrr, they didnt listen to me when i said that we have to use hardware encoded tuners).
I hope the PC is strong enough to manage all te work.

Yes we realy have more than 200 PC's here. We are a large student home in belgium, just next to the school. Everybody has his own room and his own PC.
All connected on 1 network.

I dont think everybody will look TV at the same time, but the system must work right in extreme circumstances.

Does BTV needs much interaction with the HD?

[btvfreak]

You are right in saying that CPU should have enough horsepower for 4 software encoding tuners, but I still think the picture quality won't be as good as hardware encoding cards. Although since you already have them you should give it a try and see. Do you know if the Pinnacle driver supports multiple cards? That could be a limitation and why they are running into problems. BTV can theoretically support unlimited number of tuners.

There is interation with your recording hard drive when your record (write to the drive) and stream from it (read from the drive). It can only take so much. I'm not sure what that limit would be though, but 200 seems like a lot of activity. Even half that seems like a lot. Maybe someone can help out here. Also buying 200 BTV Link licenses is a lot of $$. Maybe you can get a bulk purchase deal.

Before you even deploy this solution out to everyone have you tried running BTV on your server? Download a trial and give it a try to see how it works on just your server to ensure at least that part works since that is the most critical part. Then maybe download and try BTV Link on a couple of client PC's that interact with your server to see how it performs.

[Bigbird999]

As well as hard drive IO, won't bandwidth on the LAN be a major hurdle? 200 clients means only 500 Kbps each on a 100 MB (100,000 Kbps) network. Even low Quality SD (1.2 GB/hr) would require about 350 Kbps. So you would need a gigabyte LAN for starters.

With what you have, I think the best you can do is have each user copy the files they want to watch to their individual computers and watch them locally. I don't think streaming is practical in this situation.

Then there is the whole issue of getting 4 software cards working on 1 machine. Does the Pinnacle tuner even support more than 1??

BB