How well does sage work for you?

[PhillJones]

For myself, I'm deeply dissapointed in how poorly sage seems to work for me, I've got a bunch of unresolved issues like

1) Video file menu is full of spurious entries. They are the names of the albums with ~ in front of them. It's one entry per track, makeing the video library unsusable

2) Sage crashes regulalry under a number of conditions

3) playback of video recorded over s-video looks bad and has terrible ghosting artifacts which doesn't happen if I play the video back in another player

4) When playing back music files it freezes up fairly regulalry

5) A bunch of my album folders are empty.

Is it just me or is sage supposed to still be experimental and not really a finished product?

[dblaine2]

Its definitely you. I don't experience any of those things. What are the specs on the machine and capture card? What java/directx/codec version are you running? Also is this machine used for any other purpose?

[Necro]

Originally Posted by PhillJones

1) Video file menu is full of spurious entries. They are the names of the albums with ~ in front of them. It's one entry per track, makeing the video library unsusable

You either have your things named wrong or something setup in correctly. Make sure you read the manual and understand HOW imported videos are handled and this problem should go away.

2) Sage crashes regulalry under a number of conditions

So does Windows. Specifics are your friend

3) playback of video recorded over s-video looks bad and has terrible ghosting artifacts which doesn't happen if I play the video back in another player

Chances are you have some something setup in Sage that is setup differently in the other programs. Go through your setups and make sure everything is exactly the same (Decoder, etc) and see if that doesnt fix it.

4) When playing back music files it freezes up fairly regulalry
5) A bunch of my album folders are empty.

Music support is kind of crappy right now if things aren't setup exactly right. And again, this seems like it could be something on your side. Did you read how music files are read in, whats supported, etc? Seems like not.

Is it just me or is sage supposed to still be experimental and not really a finished product?

No, but you seem to do a good job trying to flame/troll...

[PhillJones]

Well, if it's just me, maybe I should try another clean install of windows and start again. I tried to follow all the instructions to the letter but maybe I made a mistake somewhere along the line.

I've tried to debug a few of these problems in the past with no luck so maybe a clean slate would fix things. I'm conflicted about doing that since the whole setup thing takes a while.

[Hades]

Originally Posted by Necro

No, but you seem to do a good job trying to flame/troll...

That`s his perogitave,and its hardly flaming/trolling.

Personally i have given up using the media(Video/Audio) aspects of sage. SageTV (PVR) & Meedio Essentials (Media)are a match made in heaven IMHO

[PhillJones]

You either have your things named wrong or something setup in correctly. Make sure you read the manual and understand HOW imported videos are handled and this problem should go away.

I did and I think I do uderstand how they're supposed to work. Sage seems to think that .ape files are video files even though they aren't listed as such in the config files.

So does Windows. Specifics are your friend

When I exit fullscreen after wathcing something through to the end. When going into fullscreen. When tyring to play a music track and less commonly when navigating menus. Hangs are more common than crashes.

Chances are you have some something setup in Sage that is setup differently in the other programs. Go through your setups and make sure everything is exactly the same (Decoder, etc) and see if that doesnt fix it.

The other player is MPC, which has it's own codec. The point is that the recording is fine, it's the playback that's the issue. The same codec nVIDIA works fine to play back videos that were recorded over firewire. I have to use nVIDIa because it's the only way to play back HD content without stuttering with my modest processer.

Music support is kind of crappy right now if things aren't setup exactly right. And again, this seems like it could be something on your side. Did you read how music files are read in, whats supported, etc? Seems like not.

Certainly tried to. I have winamp plugin with ape support. All tracks were ripped using EAC and tagged with ID3v1 tags. I've manually checked the tags of the effected files but they appear fine. The tags and such like are the same between tracks that work and those that don't. The hangs on playback are random and only happen when it's trying to play a new track.

No, but you seem to do a good job trying to flame/troll...

I'm sorry if it seems that way. The intent was to try and assess if my problems are unusual.

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by PhillJones

Is it just me or is sage supposed to still be experimental and not really a finished product?

Originally Posted by PhillJones

I have winamp plugin with ape support.

If you're using third-party plugins and customizations, then you've put yourself into the experimental category regardless of how stable Sage itself may be. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying plugins are the cause of your troubles or that you shouldn't use them, just that they complicate the troubleshooting picture and put an extra burden on you to make sure you really understand where things are going wrong.

When in doubt, fall back to a stock installation of 5.0.4 and see if you can get that running stably before you try adding in any third-party stuff.

[PhillJones]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

If you're using third-party plugins and customizations, then you've put yourself into the experimental category regardless of how stable Sage itself may be. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying plugins are the cause of your troubles or that you shouldn't use them, just that they complicate the troubleshooting picture and put an extra burden on you to make sure you really understand where things are going wrong.

When in doubt, fall back to a stock installation of 5.0.4 and see if you can get that running stably before you try adding in any third-party stuff.

So I should strip out the winamp plugin and firewire recording. Then reconfigure sage to record everything over s-video, and transcode my music collection to MP3 and see if the s-video artifacts and crashing on entering and leaving FSE and random lockups go away?

Or should I just uninstall sage and reinstall it?

[mlbdude]

I know issues coming in and out of FSE happen to others as well. Sage is aware of that one. I would try and not do that if you can.

[Enormous]

Originally Posted by PhillJones

When I exit fullscreen after wathcing something through to the end. When going into fullscreen. When tyring to play a music track and less commonly when navigating menus. Hangs are more common than crashes.

In my own experiences, my SageTV UI would crash when entering or exiting fullscreen with FSE enabled only when I had the latest Java installed. Once I rolled back to a 1.4x version (the one that Sage ships now), things work much better. Even the menus seem more responsive.

[jominor]

Originally Posted by PhillJones

For myself, I'm deeply dissapointed in how poorly sage seems to work for me, I've got a bunch of unresolved issues like

1) Video file menu is full of spurious entries. They are the names of the albums with ~ in front of them. It's one entry per track, makeing the video library unsusable

2) Sage crashes regulalry under a number of conditions

3) playback of video recorded over s-video looks bad and has terrible ghosting artifacts which doesn't happen if I play the video back in another player

4) When playing back music files it freezes up fairly regulalry

5) A bunch of my album folders are empty.

Is it just me or is sage supposed to still be experimental and not really a finished product?

It's you. I've been running Sage since 1.4 and it has always been solid. I run my Sage server 24/7 and restart quarterly to install Windows fixes.

I have 3 tuners and 5(4x200gb,1x160gb) drives dedicated to this server running on Windows XP Professional.

The image quality matches my standard television. I've got IMDB searches, it automatically skips commericials, I use it for my Divx'ed movies, and even use the weather module.

All software doesn't work for all people, but I don't hesitate to recommend it.

Even the WAF is great! My wife tells her friends about. My 2.5 year old daughter now thinks that commericals mean that the TV is broken.

It has been a very postive experience.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by PhillJones

I did and I think I do uderstand how they're supposed to work. Sage seems to think that .ape files are video files even though they aren't listed as such in the config files.

Can't help you much there, as I've never played with the music plugins. On option is to convert your APEs to WMA Lossless, which Sage supports natively.

When I exit fullscreen after wathcing something through to the end. When going into fullscreen. When tyring to play a music track and less commonly when navigating menus. Hangs are more common than crashes.

As mlbdude noted, this is a known issue with FSE. For the time being, just don't do it. Try exiting Sage instead of switching in/out of Fullscreen.

The other player is MPC, which has it's own codec. The point is that the recording is fine, it's the playback that's the issue. The same codec nVIDIA works fine to play back videos that were recorded over firewire. I have to use nVIDIa because it's the only way to play back HD content without stuttering with my modest processer.

Not sure what to tell you, sounds like a deinterlacing problem. What video card do you have? And, if you don't mind my asking, what's your setup that you're worried about HD and S/Video output?

FWIW, Sage has been great for me for over 1100 days (not strait though, have to upgrade and screw around from time to time though ), YMMV

[talonmike]

SageTV is far the best tv software I ever tried. I have no bug at all with it except for french translation that is half way done. I love sagetv.

[mayamaniac]

PhillJones, most of your problems can probably be fixed or at least have an alternative solution where you can be happy with. Just post your specifc problems and people can halp you out, if not email technical support. SageTV is very stable and works really well, but you do need a lot of knowledge and time to figure things out. And that requires patience, which depending on your expectations, it will determines whether its worth the effort or not. And if you willing to spend the time, the forum experts here can help.

[PhillJones]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Not sure what to tell you, sounds like a deinterlacing problem. What video card do you have? And, if you don't mind my asking, what's your setup that you're worried about HD and S/Video output?

I have a nVIDIA 6600GT passively cooled and an AMD 2400M.

I think there's a missunderstanding. I have a cable box connected both with firewire and s-video. The channels that record over firewire are recorded that way and it works well. The ones that are encrypted and won't record over firewire, I try and use S-video.

I don't use s-vid out from the graphics card. I have a plasma connected over DVI.

BTW, I've got a dedicated thread for this problem here
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18742

[PhillJones]

You'l have to excuse me, I feel the need to vent.

I just suffered a classic example of the sort of problems I have. We invited some freinds round to watch the England-Portugal game and was streaming the game via sage in order to be able to pause and skip back and such like.

Half an hour in, the sound goes choppy and the picture slows down and I get the now familiar spinning sage icon of dissapointment. We have to abandon using sage and miss a chunk of the game as a result.

This is typical. I set it up and test it and everything works. Then all of a sudden it goes wrong for no readily apparent reason. I can't troubleshoot it because right now it works fine. I can't replicate the issue because nobody did anything to cause it. It just happenned. This was actually an unusual one, normally the motion just gets jerky or it refuses to play anything back and I have to reboot to get it to work again.

Maybe I have a dodgy codec that interferes or a piece of harware that's not behaving exactly as it should but quite frankly, it seems unfixable and i've been trying for over a year now.

[Narflex]

As I recall, you're also trying to use two separate encoders through a single cable box. That simply won't work correctly, and if you want to use 2 separate inputs like that you should get 2 cable boxes.

Issues with FSE and the music/video/photo libs have already been resolved for the next release.

And thanks to everyone for their support.