Copyright 2003 SageTV, LLC All Rights Reserved

This document describes how to setup network encoding feature of SageTV, this is available as of V1.3.3. This can be used as part of a single or multiple tuners setup. The first thing required for this setup is a SageTV server instance.  This is a computer running SageTV, with or without any capture hardware.  The second thing required is an instance of SageRecorder running on a machine with the capture hardware.  The one main constraint is that all of the drives that are used by the SageTV server for storing video must be network shares.  They can be referred to in the SageTV setup using their UNC pathnames (i.e. \\computer\share) or using mapped drives. If you're using mapped drives, the same drive letter must appear on the SageTV PC as well as the SageRecorder network encoding PC.

Using SageTV with a network tuner vs. a local tuner is seamless from a user perspective. The only difference that is seen is on the Setup Wizard screen for selecting a video capture device, there will be ones listed that look like:
Hauppauge WinTV PVR PCI Capture on HTPC:6969
indicating that its using the Hauppauge card on the machine HTPC over port 6969.

SageTV is also aware of the availability of the network encoders. If one of them is down, SageTV will recognize this and re-adjust its recording schedule to compensate for loss of the tuner.  It will also add it back to its list of available tuners once the tuner comes back online. All of this is done without user intervention.

There are a few steps to the setup procedure to get a network encoder running, here they are:

1. The machine with the capture card that will be used as the network encoder will be running SageRecorder. Install SageRecorder on that machine. This is the only instance of SageRecorder used in this setup, further references to SageRecorder will refer to this one just mentioned.
2. Launch SageRecorder. Go into Setup. On the Multimedia page, select the option for "Enable Encoding Server".
3. If the capture device uses an infrared transmitter, serial control, Girder, etc., to change the channel then configure that now as outlined in the SageRecorder manual.
4. Quit SageRecorder
5. Save the SageRecorder.properties file somewhere so it is accessible from the machine that will be running SageTV.
6. On the machine that will be running SageTV, open the SageRecorder.properties file you copied in step #5 using Notepad.
7. Find the mmc/encoders/#### set of properties that correspond to the capture device you want to use across the network (if you only have one capture device, there'll only be one set of mmc/encoders/#### properties, #### is a number)
8. If there's any capture devices in the SageTV machine that are the same as those in the SageRecorder machine (i.e. each have a PVR 250), then replace all of the #### with 12345 If you're doing this for more than one card, then don't use 12345, just pick a different number, any number will do as long as its unique.
9. Highlight and copy all of the lines referred to in step #7.
10. Save the file and Quit notepad
11. Open the Sage.properties file on the SageTV computer (this assumes you've already run SageTV before on the SageTV machine)
11. Go to end of the mmc/encoders section, and paste what you copied from the SageRecorder.properties file
12. For the text you just pasted, find the line that says:
mmc/encoders/####/encoding_host=
and change it to be:
mmc/encoders/####/encoding_host=HTPC:6969
where HTPC:6969 is the machine name running SageRecorder and 6969 is the port the EncodingServer is on (6969 is the default, and configurable in the SageRecorder.properties file, if you want to run more than one instance of SageRecorder on a single machine then each of them needs to use a different port)
13. Save the Sage.properties file
14. Launch SageRecorder on the SageRecorder machine (you can close it, it'll go to the system tray)
15. Launch SageTV on the SageTV machine. Go through the SetupWizard. You should see the network tuner, configure it like you would any normal tuner.
16. Enjoy!

Any questions, please contact support@sagetv.com