I find myself needing a system for CQC to run on. I downloaded the trial, and bought before the price increase, but have not been able to do anything yet. I had hoped to do some dev work on my PC, but it is flakey. I have had several failures in the last month, and as such have not gotten to play with CQC much. In fact, my temp key has expired and I have not even bothered to renew. So, to make a short story long... :-)
I need to put together a dedicated server. The first phase of the implementation will be HT and a few music zones (office, back room, patio). I will get into HA later, if I ever tackle it in the current house.
What do you think I need? I was not planning on it just yet, so the budget isn't as unlimited by any means. Initially it will be my file server as well for ripped DVDs.
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will it actually be rendering video, or just storing it?
If just storing it, you don't really need anything with big chops. For example, I currently run all my CQC and SageTV Server stuff on a 2.5yr old AMD2500 w/512MB RAM.
If you're buying new, I'd advise getting something with some chops on it, but if you've got a machine lying around start learning with that.
It might render video. Certainly I hope plan on it doing the audio stuff.
I cleaned out the closet last summer, so I don't have anything laying around anymore.
Sounds like a decent proc and 1GB RAM should work? If I want to do video rendering, as well, how much video card do I need?
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I used to have that machine not only do all my CQC server & Sage recording, but also mzone audio and nearly every driver in my system. No video rendering, but it was fine.
But, I can't answer that one with any personal experience - I can say that my AMD3200 didn't do so well with video rendering and CQC master server duties. Had nothing to do with CQC - that barely takes any CPU, but my dScaler/etc on the video rendering side was a resource hog.
Any chance of using a 2nd machine for video rendering so any dScaler/etc doesn't impact anything else?
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I would not mix video rendering with the automation machine. I think that that's pushing it a too far, particularly if you want it to be an audio server and a CQC level server for other CQC clients. Rendering audio is no big deal and pretty light weight, but video is a whole different thing. It can serve up video data for others to render.
Dean Roddey
Explorans limites defectum
The final plan is to do a different system for video, so I will not bother with it on the server.
For the server, it sounds like a mobo with onboard video, a decient CPU and 1GB RAM will do it.
For mzone audio, do I need multiple sound cards? I can't think of any way to get multiple audio streams out of the system than that.
Thanks
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An M-audio Delta 410 multichannel card will work and is what I use. It's a single PCI card that has an external port with a cable for 8 channels, 4 concurrent analog pairs. It's discontinued, but I *think* the 1010 has been proven to work. I'm not positive though - you need a multichannel soundcard that will expose each pair of outputs to windows as a difference audio device.
