Sage TV Is Awesome!!!

[rnadeau]

I just wanted to make a statement to the fact that sagetv is one of the greatest pieces of software I have ever used and still will have the pleasure of using for a long time still!!! THANK YOU!

[davephan]

I agree with you. I've been using SageTV for 8 years now. It is by far the most useful software I use. Whenever I visit my relatives, I am continuously reminded how bad TV was before SageTV. They put up with watching commercials or flip between different channels to avoid commercials and watch fragments of several programs. SageTV automatically records for you, learns what you like and don't like, and drastically improves the quality of the TV programming when I have time to watch TV. My relatives simply "put up" with whatever happens to be on the air when they watch TV.

The SageTV development has been frozen in time for about a year now, and still nothing comes remotely close to it.

I can easily imagine still using SageTV 10 or 20 years from now. At the rate Google, Apple, and others are going, it might take them one or two decades to come out with an equivalent or better program.

Dave

[wbarber69]

Let me put it like this. I have screwed something up with my install that requires reinstallation, but still we opt to just deal with the lag and put off fixing the system because it would mean taking the system offline for a few hours. Still havent found just the right time to do it. And its still better than actually breaking down and switching over to input 4 for the directv dvr. Which I use to backup record all my important shows. Thats how much we love it here.

My Baby:

[davephan]

Originally Posted by wbarber69

Let me put it like this. I have screwed something up with my install that requires reinstallation, but still we opt to just deal with the lag and put off fixing the system because it would mean taking the system offline for a few hours. Still havent found just the right time to do it. And its still better than actually breaking down and switching over to input 4 for the directv dvr. Which I use to backup record all my important shows. Thats how much we love it here.

If you had an image, you could get the system working in about 30 minutes by recovering back to a point in time when the system was working perfectly. So, you must not have an image.

To fix the problem, I recommend you buy Ghost 15. I just checked Amazon, I found one selling for $20, another for $25. This is a cheap price for Ghost 15, which you can also buy from Symantec for $70.

Since you don't have an image of a working system, it won't help you quickly fix your system now, but it will help you get it working. Take an image of the system at this point in time. Then uninstall SageTV and start over. If that doesn't work, then wipe out everything on the drive and install the OS, then re-install Ghost 15. Then take an image.

Then start re-installing SageTV and it's accessory programs. As you move along with the installation process, take "checkpoint" images of the system. If something does not work right during any point of the re-installation process, then recover back to the previous "checkpoint" image.

If you find the whole re-installation is taking too long, then you can always recover back to your original image and do the re-installation later.

If you find you need files and folders from the old installation, you can recover specific files and folders from the initial image.

Imaging is very important to use to build up a system. You may start from scratch, but you never have to start completely over if something goes bad during the installation process.

After everything is built up and working perfectly. Then take another image. At this point in time, you can recover to a completely working state in about 30 minutes. You need to protect the images by storing them on a secondary drive and copying them to another drive or computer system. You can do that automatically with SyncBack freeware. You could also store a copy of the image files off-site for more protection.

After that point in time, schedule images periodically, like every month or two. Or maybe every week. You could even schedule a full image once a month and daily incremental images. Then you can recover to any specific day in the past. You can even take incremental images several times a day and recover to a time within a day. The incremental images are normally very small. When using this method, you don't have to manually recover to the full, then from one incremental to another. You just select the day or day and time to recover to, and Ghost 15 figures out the rest.

For this whole process to work correctly, the C/Programs drive needs to be a separate drive, not a partitioned drive with recording stored on the secondary partition. You should be able to use about a 120 gig drive for your C/Programs drive, not a large drive partitioned in two.

An alternative way you could do the whole rebuild process would be to buy a new drive. Then physically disconnect the old C/Programs drive and rebuild everything, including the OS from scratch. At any point in the process, when you needed SageTV working again, you could switch back to the old drive with SageTV not working perfectly. It would still be a wise idea using this process to take "checkpoint" images along the path to getting the system fully functioning.

I've been using this method to build up computers and servers at work for more than a decade. I still remember the "old days" before imaging where long build processes had to be repeated from the start because of problems. It took hours days to fix computer problems back then, sometimes ending with scratch re-builds.

The imaging tools are out there now. You're time is just too valuable to not be using imaging and SageTV, for most people, is a critical system where downtime needs to be minimized as much as possible. Otherwise, you have to watch TV the old way, and put up with the commercials!


Dave

[OneOfMany]

Kudos to Sage.. I moved from the old XP MCE on one PC client with two PVR-150s which got the family used to a computer running the TV, incuding the occasional restart of the PC . With the vaporwareness of softsled, I started looking for a client/server package, and Sage was it. Started with v6, and am now using Phoenix and v7 on three always on PC Clients, three portable clients - one an Acer Iconia W500 running Win8. Our three Win7 Phones let me pin the jetty Web Interface site to a tile for them, so they have one-click access to our recording scheduler.

And yet, the one feature my wife loves the best, is when the scrolling slideshow comes on and displays our digital photo collection.

Grant

[panteragstk]

More excited to use sage than ever. Just got a projector, and sage looks awesome at 120".

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by OneOfMany

And yet, the one feature my wife loves the best, is when the scrolling slideshow comes on and displays our digital photo collection.

This is a popular feature in my house as well. I actually started looking at enhancing the slideshow to add several effects similar to what's available in the Windows7 screen saver. Would anybody else be interested in seeing this? If I get enough interest I may resurect the project. (I'm headed out on vacation in a few hours and won't have access to the internet for a week, so don't expect any replies soon.)

Tom

[wayner]

@Tom - I am definitely interested in that as well. My wife and I sometimes just sit and watch the photos come by. Our 3.5 year old daughter likes it as well - she keeps asking who all of the people are or says "Is that you Daddy, you look different", not recognizing a younger and slimmer version of her father.

[tvmaster2]

+1 - most usefull and well thought-out piece of software in my house.

[nkd]

I agree with all of you but after almost a year and no announcements on where this fantastic solution is going I am ready to try something new. I have been holding off on investing in a cable card ready tuner card as there is no supported solution that I can deploy with Sage (my opinion). Yes there are user developed solutions but nothing from Sage. More over without new hardware availability I have no way of upgrading my solution for my growing family. Yes I can certainly buy used models but that is not a sustainable path. I have used Sage for about 6 years now and there is really no replacement that is even close but I am afraid it is time for me to move on.
I am getting the very inferior AnyRoom Comcast DVR installed tomorrow and will transition to Plex or XBMC for streaming my movie collection from my server.

[OneOfMany]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

This is a popular feature in my house as well. I actually started looking at enhancing the slideshow to add several effects similar to what's available in the Windows7 screen saver. Would anybody else be interested in seeing this? If I get enough interest I may resurect the project. (I'm headed out on vacation in a few hours and won't have access to the internet for a week, so don't expect any replies soon.)

Tom

If I had one request, it would be to allow the surfacing and displaying of a couple of the tags, instead of the filename. In the default, if you check a photos properties, it correctly displays a couple of them. I would love to have the option to enable them, and have them appear on the screen similar to the Phoenix music mod (which does it with artist and songname).

I use PhotoGallery to tag my titles, subject etc., and don't ever change the camera source name of the .jpg.

I do use the Phoenix UI, but open to ideas

Grant

[Mike]

It is a great piece of software. going back to regular TV would be rough. Unfortunately, I am now at a point where I'd like to expand my system with no really feasible way to do so.

[Skirge01]

Originally Posted by Mike

It is a great piece of software. going back to regular TV would be rough. Unfortunately, I am now at a point where I'd like to expand my system with no really feasible way to do so.

You can still buy extenders (albeit at a premium) and client licenses, so I'm not sure I agree with your sentiment. Additionally--while not ideal--there are ways to access your media via a non-SageTV client/front-end.

[Mike]

Originally Posted by Skirge01

You can still buy extenders (albeit at a premium) and client licenses, so I'm not sure I agree with your sentiment. Additionally--while not ideal--there are ways to access your media via a non-SageTV client/front-end.

Where pray tell are extender licenses for sale and are they legal licenses?

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by Mike

Where pray tell are extender licenses for sale and are they legal licenses?

Here are some and here is a whole forum devoted to buying and selling SageTV equipment and licenses.

[Mike]

I appreciate those links. I knew Extenders were being sold on ebay, and the price does seem high for a used unit, but I wasn't aware that Licenses were being sold here. I don't think that's in line with the license agreement (I could be wrong), but if it's being done here it has at least the tacit approval of Sage.

[davephan]

The price for used HD extenders is very high compared to the old price for new HD extenders. But still, the price is less than a SageTV client computer system. It is still a good idea to buy SageTV client licenses as a long term insurance policy when the HD extenders quit working.

Years from now, it may not be possible to find used HD extenders for sale. Then, your only alternative will be to build up a SageTV client computer. You will be prepared for that situation if you buy SageTV client licenses now. Otherwise, you would have to use SageTV client trial, image back the computer and re-install the SageTV client trial, every 21 days, for years.

Dave

[jarredduq]

+1

Originally Posted by tmiranda

This is a popular feature in my house as well. I actually started looking at enhancing the slideshow to add several effects similar to what's available in the Windows7 screen saver. Would anybody else be interested in seeing this? If I get enough interest I may resurect the project. (I'm headed out on vacation in a few hours and won't have access to the internet for a week, so don't expect any replies soon.)

Tom

[KarylFStein]

Originally Posted by davephan

If you had an image, you could get the system working in about 30 minutes by recovering back to a point in time when the system was working perfectly. So, you must not have an image.

To fix the problem, I recommend you buy Ghost 15. I just checked Amazon, I found one selling for $20, another for $25. This is a cheap price for Ghost 15, which you can also buy from Symantec for $70.

Ghost?! I'm telling Acronis!

NewEgg was selling True Image Home 2012 for $14.99 a week ago. I picked up a copy as it turns out the WHS2011 server backup feature still has some limitations when trying to move server backups off-site. I'm keeping WHS for the client images, but at least can use Acronis to safely image the server now, (including the client images), in simple encrypted files that can handle being stored on multiple removable drives, (manual swapping off-site), or be sent over the Internet, (more automatic and where I'm heading). I've found that WHS2011 has problems with both of those options...

[rnadeau]

Can the Ghost 15 program you buy at Amazon be used on more than one system?