Max. HDTV Tuners Supported?

[Savage1701]

Just curious if anyone has tried to see how many tuners can be simulataneously supported by a CPU. I'd like to have 4, but am worried the hard drives won't be able to keep up recording 4 streams at once.

Thanks for any info.

[rugby]

I've got 6 OTA HD tuners and have had no problems at all. The only time I get stutter is if I'm recording 4+ shows while BTV and BTV Link are working at the same time.

[gambitpvr]

As long as your hard drives are SATA, you should be fine. I've recorded 2 HD via HDHomerun, 4 OTA HD and 3 SD channels at the same time without any problems.

[greynolds]

I've run tests with 7 HDTV tuners recording at the same time without any problems.

[Nick Burns]

I have 7 tuners, and only once had all 7 going at one time for some tests. In normal production, I believe I've had 6 going at once without an issue.

[Savage1701]

Hey that's great to know !

Thanks to everyone who could help me. I have an odd situation where I live on the border of WI and IL. I have an cpu/antenna w/ 2 tuners aimed north to get WI stations and another cpu/tuner south to get 2 IL stations at once. Helps minimize blackouts of sports events. I have wanted to consolidate all 4 but was concerned I would overload the capacity of a single CPU/HD to get 3 or 4 channels at once recorded. Guess that's not going to be a huge issue.

[Jakesty]

Without knowing what kind of a CPU you have, what could be an issue is whether you plan to use showsqueeze on any of these as that would be pretty intensive. Even just the post processing of smart skip is a big workload.
I would think that if you have the likelyhood of 4 tuners recording simultaneously that you'd want a fairly beefy CPU, A Wolfdale e8400 or better or Q6600 quad core. Can't tell you comparable speeds in the AMD world.
Search the boards also for info on how to set up your system, RAID, etc. There are many viewpoints that differ, but there is some general consensus on what to do which works best.

[Joey Z]

Originally Posted by Savage1701

Just curious if anyone has tried to see how many tuners can be simulataneously supported by a CPU. I'd like to have 4, but am worried the hard drives won't be able to keep up recording 4 streams at once.

Thanks for any info.

Not doing HD but I usually have about 10+ shows recording at one.