USB and Laptop use questions.

[TryingToBeSage]

I am interested in purchasing and setting up SageTV on a Laptop with the tuner connected through a USB port and using an external USB drive to store my television programs.

I have read that at least one user has done this successfully. I do not intend to watch tv on my laptop, I just want to store the shows on the external USB drive so that I can burn them onto DVD-R at SP quality setting using my USB connected DVD-R/W drive. Then I will take the dvd's over to my DVD player which is connected to my TV.

Can anyone recommend or disrecommend a USB connected Standard Definition Tuner for USB connection to a laptop?

Is there any benefit to buying the tuner directly from SageTV, i.e. does SageTV provide support for the Tuner devices it sells?

My setup is a digital cable system and so I just need the Tuner device to give me a very clean input for Channel 3.

Thank you in advance for any helpful suggestions and comments.

P.S. I had a really difficult time registering for forum use. Even sent emails to webmaster, support and info at sagetv.com No reply was received from any of them. Is this the norm, that they never answer requests for help?

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by TryingToBeSage

P.S. I had a really difficult time registering for forum use. Even sent emails to webmaster, support and info at sagetv.com No reply was received from any of them. Is this the norm, that they never answer requests for help?

You probably just haven't received a reply yet; I just heard about the issue from support last night. You were trying to register using an email domain that was used by many spammers in the past. Now that most spam bots are stopped in a different way, that email domain has been cleared for use for now & we'll see what happens with it.

As for an analog USB tuner, the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-USB2 works pretty well. (Note the "PVR" part of that model name."

- Andy

[TryingToBeSage]

You probably just haven't received a reply yet; I just heard about the issue from support last night. You were trying to register using an email domain that was used by many spammers in the past. Now that most spam bots are stopped in a different way, that email domain has been cleared for use for now & we'll see what happens with it.

As for an analog USB tuner, the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-USB2 works pretty well. (Note the "PVR" part of that model name."

- Andy

Thank you for the reply. I appreciate you getting back to me. I originally emailed for help on the 24th. I thought that I would get one of those "auto-reply" confirmations that the email was received, within a few hours of sending it. It is a pretty common business setup for support nowadays. When nothing came by the next day, I sent two more emails, and then nothing came in response after another day. It seemed like things were being sent to "/dev/null". :-) You might want to consider an auto-reply setup for the support email address to let people know the emails are getting there and to tell them that they will be responded to within a few days or so. But I am very glad that the emails did in fact get there and that your company was in fact looking into the problem.

I just checked and found a reply dated today the 27th at 8:12PM.

I should also let you know that you may get an inquiry from the email domain owner also, because I made them aware a few days ago that there was some kind of problem going on and I asked them to look into the problem also from their end. Hopefully the domain will no longer be a problem domain for you guys, since the domain is now legitimately owned.

Thank you also for the recommend on the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-USB2. I've read on amazon.com 's website that some Hauppage device owners have had difficulty with Hauppauge's support, particularly with driver setup issues.

Do you know if Sage provides direct support on the hardware tuners it sells?