Hats off to SageTv (and a couple of issues)

[mikbro]

I just finished getting SageTV up and running on my PC (see specs below). I am so pleased I just ordered another 2 PV-250's to up my total to 3 tuners!

Hats off to everyone involved in the development as this is a Class-A product. I have a few minor issues but by and large this is my dream PVR setup.

My system:

Soyo P4X400 Dragon Lite Motherboard A9 Bios
Intel P4 2.4 533k CPU
512meg OCZ RAM
1 80 gig WD HD
1 Soundblaster Live 5.1 sound card
SIIG Comm single comm port card
Hauppauge pvr-250
Asus/Nvidia FX5200/TD video card
Sony 61" HDTV circa April 2000
Clean install of Windows 2000 SP4 and all updates
Latest Nvidia 45.23 drivers
Latest VIA 4n1 4.49 drivers
Latest Hauppauge 21226 drivers
Latest Soundblaster drivers
Using the Intervideo noncss decoders

As a warning to anyone else attempting this with a Soyo motherboard or any motherboard with a C-Media chipset. I tried for a day to get WinTV/Sage to play nice with the motherboard based C-Media chipset - no dice. Video and audio would start when switched to LiveTV, but shortly thereafter (within 5-30 seconds) the machine would hard lock and I had to power off.

Finally I gave up and installed an old SB Live 5.1 card and disabled the motherboard sound and voila - perfection.

I have 2 Tivos and have A/B'd Sage and the Tivos. Both the Tivos and Sage are connected via s-video.

The Sage (on its 5.5gig/hour setting) has much fewer MPEG artifacts than the Tivo (which is to be expected). However when watching a show the Tivo image shows a bit more detail (and along with it, graininess). I still have more to tweak I imagine with Sage, but the image is good enough for me to consider giving Tivo the boot.

The few issues I have had:
1. Pressing FF many times in succession lead to a blank screen with audio or blank screen and looping audio. Rewinding and slowly fast forwarding got me back up an running. I have seen a similar issue elsewhere in the forum.

2. Please, please, please support Canadian TV lineups! I would fillout the survery several times if it would help

3. Priority list for upcoming recordings. Once I have 3-4 tuners though I imagine this won't be that big of a deal, though it would still be nice. Especially for the control freak that likes to know exactly what is going to happen, and if it didn't, why.

4. Similiar to above, allow user to specify a priority to the tuners and even better, a priority to each input on each tuner. I have some sources that are better quality than others, and I would like to control what source gets used first.

5. Suggestion: create an online knowledgebase vs. the forum. The forum is VERY nice, but I found that I followed many threads 1-2 months old, only to find out the issue had been resolved. This is of course a GOOD thing, but I would be easier to have access to an equally up to date searchable kb. KB articles would also be usefull for those trying to decide on codecs, video cards and such.

6. Price: this product, for what it offers, is too cheap. Not that I am complaining, as long as your business can thrive at that price point and you can afford to offer stable updates and features. I am looking at exchanging $300/yr in Tivo fees for more product for $0/yr in Sage which is super!

Thanks again for a great product, and keep up the good work!

[mlbdude]

For video quality try this....

Make sure overscan is enabled on your TV out (you may have to adjust your SageUI in the sage.properties file after this).

Get the Elecard MPEG2 decoder (their is a trial too).

Use this to decode and use DSCaler to deinterlace using the Adaptive deinterlacing plugin. Most or all blurriness will be gone as well as the image "smearing" you can see (like when text is scrolling).

I am using an ATI 9000 for TV out but you should be able to get similar results.

You may also find this helps the FF problem. I have never had this problem on SageTV (have hat it on SageClient).

Good luck!