Question Regarding Live TV/Recording - Comparison to MythTV Feature Set

[Bill_Mackintosh]

I've been evaluating SageTV and the linux distribution MythTV, and really like one feature that MythTV has that doesn't appear to be in the current version (1.4.1) of SageTV regarding how they each handle the "Live TV" aspect of the PVR software.

MythTV sets up a separate cache folder for the "Live TV" features such as pausing, rewinding etc. You can specify where you want this to be and how big (how many GB) it should be. For shows that you schedule it to record, it saves them into a separate folder. This allows you to not fill up your hard drive with useless shows (i.e. ones you never wanted to record in the first place, but merely wanted to watch) while preserving the ones you schedule the software to record in a separate folder or drive.

In the trial version of SageTV I downloaded, it appears to record each and every show you watch, and save it until you manually delete it. Is that correct? Will the oldest show automatically "expire" or be deleted once the allocated space is used?

Of the two programs, SageTV is definitely the easier to get working I've almost get MythTV working, but it's definitely flaky (not a linux guru, but I'm trying to learn). However for space allocation and hard drive fragmentation issues (I have two drives, a 20GB master that the live tv cache uses and the OS and programs sit on, and an 80GB slave that will be used to store shows I actually want to record) I would think that the utilization of a cache and a separate repository for recorded shows would be best.

Does anyone know if version 2.0 will have this type of functionality, or if it will continue to record each and every show I watch regardless of whether I want it too or not?

[mikbro]

Sage will automatically delete any of these "temporary" recordings to make room for things you told it to record (or things it records on it's own if you have Intelligent Recording turned on). So you don't have to worry about space.

I found once I have my system up and running and basically at or near capacity, I never see any of these recordings because Sage is doing it's job and deleting them almost as soon as they are there to make room for new stuff I want.