New User Questions...

[Alex0230]

I bought the Happauge 350 card/SageTV bundle and am very excited about being able to finally do this. I loved the idea of tivo but it was too expensive....and if I ever dropped the Tivo service, the box would be useless.

I have few questions...

How much hard drive space is typically required per hour of recording?
I couldn't really find the specs, I'm sure they are out there....I was probably looking in the wrong place.

I've been reading about people having problems with Sage recording all night...is there a way to only record say one or two shows without shutting off Sage during the other times?
I'm sure there is, this seems like a major problem if it didn't. Say I just want Sage to record South Park for me on Wednesday nights and only 'South Park'....can I leave Sage on without worrying about it recording other stuff? Would this require disabling the intelligent recording feature?

Can I tell Sage to only record new episodes?
In other words, avoid the reruns....what about 'new' episodes to me, ones I don't already have recorded? Just curious.. : )

I appreciate the feedback and want to thank you ahead of time for your responses.

Alex

[fidget]

Alex,

These statements are being made within the scope of SageTV 2.0 Beta, so be aware that some may not apply to the production (and evaluation) version 1.4.

There are quite a few different recording qualities, because I dump some recordings to DVD, I use the DVD compatible ones. These are 3.25, 2.5, and 1.8 GB/hr variable bit rate (programs I record at 3.25 tend to be less than 3.0, but the exact size is not predictable).

In order to keep SageTV from recording all night long, you can turn off intelligent recording (which is something that I do). The only requirement that you will then have is to not be watching Live TV when you are done for the night. I keep some programs in my archive so that I can start playing one of them when I am done for the night.

Under SageTV 2.0, you can select a favorite to be first runs only, reruns only, or both.

[stanger89]

Originally posted by Alex0230
I bought the Happauge 350 card/SageTV bundle and am very excited about being able to finally do this. I loved the idea of tivo but it was too expensive....and if I ever dropped the Tivo service, the box would be useless.

Glad to have ya!

I have few questions...

How much hard drive space is typically required per hour of recording?
I couldn't really find the specs, I'm sure they are out there....I was probably looking in the wrong place.[/B]

This will all depend on what you think is acceptable PQ, if I remember correctly recording qualities from .75Gb/hr to 5.6Gb/hr are available, with 2-3 Gb/hr being the ones I use since anything less does not give adequate PQ and anything more doesn't really improve it any.

I've been reading about people having problems with Sage recording all night...is there a way to only record say one or two shows without shutting off Sage during the other times?
I'm sure there is, this seems like a major problem if it didn't. Say I just want Sage to record South Park for me on Wednesday nights and only 'South Park'....can I leave Sage on without worrying about it recording other stuff? Would this require disabling the intelligent recording feature?[/B]

You've probably been seeing the sleep issue, the simple way to stop Sage from recording everything is to "Sleep" it when you're done watching, that way Sage stops recording LiveTV. IR doesn't really cause anybody problems from what I've experienced and seen here, it's really a nice feature and works quite well.

Can I tell Sage to only record new episodes?
In other words, avoid the reruns....what about 'new' episodes to me, ones I don't already have recorded? Just curious.. : )[/B]

When setting up favorites, Sage provides options to record First Runs (new), Reruns, or both. Also Sage does a pretty good job not recording only re-runs you haven't seen, ie if you create a favorite to record Reruns it will record the ones you haven't seen (with Sage, it's not psychic). Couple things to note related to this, the logic I've described is only as good as the guide data, some shows have no info so Sage can't tell which ones are Firstruns/Reruns etc.

I appreciate the feedback and want to thank you ahead of time for your responses.

Alex [/B]

Not a problem, good luck.

[Alex0230]

Thanks for youre response, I'm going to have to get a feel for how this all works when I get my card....and a bigger hard drive.. : O

When you say that you keep programs in your archive to start playing when you're done for the night, to me that doesn't make much sense you know....it's nothing against you, it's just my inexperience with the software and how it works. It makes me think that I have to have the tv on to record at night....

I'm more than confident that I will have a blast with this though....I appreciate your help!!

[fidget]

Originally posted by Alex0230
When you say that you keep programs in your archive to start playing when you're done for the night, to me that doesn't make much sense you know....it's nothing against you, it's just my inexperience with the software and how it works. It makes me think that I have to have the tv on to record at night....

I have a dedicated PC (a small form factor) that I use for driving the TV and a server that I keep in another room that does all of my recording. The only reason that I play a program is to make sure that I am not watching LiveTV. I don't put my SageTV client to sleep and this is my way of preventing SageTV from filling my HDD with programs that I don't want.

I would also recommend having no less than 120 MB of HDD space (formatted for 64 KB blocks). This will give you about 40 hours of storage. I currently have 140 GB of storage with another 120 GB due to arrive this week. This way I can be on vacation for a couple of weeks and not miss anything .

[ezeitler]

Originally posted by fidget

I would also recommend having no less than 120 MB of HDD space (formatted for 64 KB blocks). This will give you about 40 hours of storage. I currently have 140 GB of storage with another 120 GB due to arrive this week. This way I can be on vacation for a couple of weeks and not miss anything .

How does one reformat a HD using 64K blocks?

[nielm]

How does one reformat a HD using 64K blocks?

If you just right-click a disk in Explorer, the Format command does not give the larger block sizes as options, so

Either using command-line format and the /A:64K flag (do Format /? on command line for more options), or in Win2000/WinXP, right-click 'My Computer', click Manage, click Disk Management, right-click the drive, click Format and select Allocation Unit Size...

It goes without saying that all data will be lost during the reformat

[Opus4]

... or use something like PartitionMaginc, where you can resize the partition, change to NTFS, change the cluster size, etc., all w/o losing your data.

- Andy

[Alex0230]

So you can't use a your system hard drive and just have the files write to a folder? Looks like I'll be getting that new hard drive sooner than I thought...

Have any of you used hard drives connected up through usb with your sage system? Did they work, were there any PQ problems?

[Cayars]

USB or Firewire hard drives work fine with SageTV. Sage doesn't really care of the drive is internal, networked or attached via Firewire or USB. This is all handled by the operating system and to SageTV it's basically "just a drive letter".

The one thing I would make sure of however is that the drive you plan on using is USB2 and also make sure your computer is USB2 equiped. If not pick up a cheap USB2 PCI card.

Carlo

[nielm]

So you can't use a your system hard drive and just have the files write to a folder

You can, and I was running a 100Gb disk with default block sizes for a while without problems...

Smaller block sizes will lead to more fragmentation when the disk fills up, and more fragmentation leads to slower read/write speeds, which will then lead to frame skipping on playback...

[stanger89]

Originally posted by Alex0230
So you can't use a your system hard drive and just have the files write to a folder? Looks like I'll be getting that new hard drive sooner than I thought...

While this would work, I would advise against it. The problem lies in the way Sage manages space: You obviously don't want to let Sage use all the space on the drive so that leaves you with either Leave X Gb free or Use X Gb. The problem with these is that the size/amount of data on your system drive is constantly changing so if you choose Use X Gb then you can create a situation where there is less than X Gb for Sage to use which causes problems , if you choose Leave X Gb Free it's easly to encounter a situation where you add something to the drive and that causes Sage to delete things to free space. Leave X Gb free would probably be the safest choice.

It's really best to give Sage it's own partition to play with (can be on the same physical drive), especially in the long run.

Have any of you used hard drives connected up through usb with your sage system? Did they work, were there any PQ problems?

I'd recommend a FW drive if you go that way, from what I've heard they perform better than the USB2 drives.

[Alex0230]

Just to be totally clear... I meant my OS disk....like 'C:\SageRecordings' for my tv shows where I also have 'C:\Windows' and 'C:\Program Files'...etc. I'm not a computer newbie, don't mean to come off as one....but just want to double check before something bad happens....like all my por...system files dissapear..

I know this seems kind of silly right now, it is just an interim solution until I build my sage tv box. If it doesn't work too well this way, I'll just have to speed up the build process. It might be better to frick around with a seperate box than with my main system anyway....hmmmmmmmm now debates buying rest of PC this weekend!! Is sage tv worth it?

[stanger89]

That's what I thought you meant, I just wanted you to be aware that by putting your recordings in "C:\SageRecordings" it will either eat up all the space on your C drive, or possibly cause problems for Sage since other things use space on that drive.

It should work fine short term, but long term you really should give sage it's own partition. For now I'd just pick "Leave X Gb Free" and set it to something like 1-2Gb.

Hell yeah! It's worth it