Thoughts and observations from a seasoned Tivo convert...

[newmedia42]

While I like the Tivo, I don't want Sage to be a Tivo - but there are a couple of very basic functions that the Tivo does, that Sage does not (or at least, I have been unable to discover), which make it a less than intuitive experience. Here's a couple of them, as well as my comments:

--- Things that are missing:

1. Grouping - I've seen it mentioned in the groups, and was under the impression that it was in the beta, but I haven't seen it. My understanding/hope was that this would work much like the 'Folders' do in the Tivo; ie all of the same shows appear within a folder, so you scroll through a list of folders (with the number of shows currently in them).

2. Only record this show/favorite, from a particular channel - This is basic, but I never realized how important it was until it was broken. I watch Stargate SG1, I only normally care about new episodes on Sci-Fi channel, but with the Sage favorite I'm getting recordings of older shows off some network channel that has invalid guide data. Not a problem for the Tivo, constant hassle for Sage.

3. Ability to say only record this favorite on a particular day and/or time - although I haven't encountered this problem yet with Sage, I know it's just a matter of time. Some networks haven't mastered the fine are of submitting proper guide data, and I would like to be able to use logic on the computer to get around this. For instance, I may like to watch South Park, and I know that the new episode comes out every Wens, so I would like to tell it only record South Park when it occurs on Wens.


--- Things that are not intuitive:

1. Having circular navigation is bad in my opinion, and makes it VERY difficult to browse through a list - oh wait a minute, I'm back at the top again, which number am I on? The latest recording should be at one end, and the oldest at the other, and when you hit one of those ends, that should be it, it shouldn't wrap around to the top again.

2. Transparency; This probably has more to do with the fact that it doesn't appear to work on my system, or if it does it just plain works badly - the results for me a ghosting of the time, etc. I would love to be able to turn this off, but it is unclear how to do it.

3a. The upcoming recordings (Tivo's ToDo list). I'm still a bit unclear on what the upcoming showing really show - I know that the Sage contains about 10 days of guide data, but it only appears to plan the next recordings that are going to occur in the next 2 or 3 days - beyond that it doesn't show any recordings. This was initially REALLY confusing, since I thought "Wait a minute, doesn't CBS Evening News occur every weekday? Why isn't it in the upcoming recording list? (the day was Friday)". I can fully understand how the schedule may change, but I like to have the ability to give it a look over to make sure everything is correct - does it think the SG-1 on Friday is new, or do I need to manually help it along? Is it recording repeats of South Park all weekend, that I can just delete from the ToDo list?

3b. The upcoming recordings show every time, including times nothing is happening. Ok, if the Sage isn't doing anything, why should I care? Just give me a list of the upcoming recordings and the appropriate times, tuners. The row/column format that is currently used is very good and very intuitive, but having to scroll through page after page of empty recording slots is pointless and time consuming.

4. What does Additional Showings actually show?!?!?!?! This has to be the single most confusing functions on Sage - I assume it's like the Tivo function that lets you see how many more occurrences there are of a particular show in the guide, describing the episodes, etc. The problem is that I think this only shows things that appear in the Upcoming Recordings section, in other words, that happen within the next 2 or 3 days. It should show me ALL the showings of a particular show, and then indicate which showings are going to be recorded, and which ones aren't.

5. Favorites should indicate how many occurrences of the show occur in the guide, as well as how many are being recorded. I would often go into the Tivo ToDo list at the very bottom to check over the list of Season Passes (Favorites) that Tivo had, that weren't being recorded. This was especially useful in helping to track down shows that had changed their names (such as Star Trek: Enterprise), or shows that weren't identifying their FirstRun status correctly.


--- Things that would be nice:

1. The ability to stop the Now Watching or whatever show it happens to be from being put in the SageRecordings window - this really threw me off when I first saw it; "What are these, I didn't tell it to record 'A Baby Story' on TLC!"

2. Conflict resolution - I don't know if this was still being worked on in the beta or not, but one of the things that I originally REALLY liked about Sage 1.4 was it's conflict resolution system, where you could address the situation individually, and apply some rule if you so desired. I only ran into one conflict on the system when I installed it, and that was with 2.0.13, but it did nothing more than just say there was a conflict between show X and show Y - no option as to how to solve it, or even a way to get much more detail about what was happening.

3. Better IR integration - One of my objectives in the conversion was to use the Tivo remote; and I saw some other people mentioning this was possible, so I was very excited. I bought both the USBUIRT device as well as the Actisys 200, but encountered some problems. It appears everyone using Tivo remotes were using the Philips peanut remote, not the Sony Tivo remote. The Philips works fine, the Sony has all sorts of issues (it thinks all the numbers keys are the same, many of the buttons map weird, etc). In the end it's no big deal since I mod'ed my original Sony Tivo remote to be a universal remote and reprogrammed it to act like a Philips peanut, but it's still a hassle. Not sure why the problem exists, but I know none of the universal remotes I played with had any problems emulating the original Sony.

4. Multiple IR integration - I originally had thought to use one IR device to get input from the remote, and another to control the cable box. Since the Sage can currently only support one device, this isn't an option - but I caught a previous post which states something along the lines of multiple USBIRT devices being able to be plugged in and effectively they would bother broadcast their signals, so it will solve my immediate problems. Ultimately I would like to be able to assign one (or more) particular IR device as a receiver, and one (or more) as transmitters.

--- Final thoughts:

At the end of the day after building a Sage box that cost 4x what my Tivo did, I feel very confident that the Sage was the right way to go. I think I will get much more use out of it, as well as being surprised by cool new features in updates in the future, which is awesome!

--- A little bit about me:

I've been using the Tivo since a couple months from it's initial release, and have upgraded to each new hardware instance from the original Series 1 to the Series 2, and done all the mods from ethernet to drives. Due to the utter stagnation of Tivo development though, I decided to make a foray back into PC solutions (I ran Snapstream for about 6 months about year or so ago), and was pleasantly surprised to discover Sage (specifically v2, since v1 has the look and feel only a mother could love, or developer in this case). Sage looked hot enough that I decided to bite the bullet and build my 'Tivo-Killer' machine, which finally came to life earlier this week (P4 2.8G, 1Gig RAM, 1TB Raid-5 (750G usable), 2 350's, ATI IGP9100 chipset, DVD burner, HTPC case).

I'm also a professional software developer, having done work with video programs in the past, and directly for Microsoft in the Windows Media Group, so I understand what is possible as well as what should be more easily accomplished. One of the aspects of what drew me to Sage is not only the fact that it is obviously actively developed, but the developers actually care about what people think about the product and how it might be potentially improved. On the flip side, I've been in the Tivo newsgroups for the past couple years, seen many many MANY very basic suggestions which Tivo just ignores, and basically one major product upgrade which boasts *gasp* folders as one of it's major features.

[mikejaner]

--- Things that are missing:

1. Grouping - Press ESC when viewing the Sage Recordings, to switch between grouping and non grouping. I think there are about 6 different ways to display it. This is assuming you have the background set right in to Video Menu Setup in (Settings--Detailed Settings--Multimedia--Video Menu Setup--Video Backgroundb)


--- Things that are not intuitive:

2: Transparency can be properly turned on by enabling 3d Accelleration (Settings--Detailed Settings--Advanced), and then turning on DXVA instead of Overlay in the Video Decoder Section(Settings--Detailed Settings--Video) Then in click on reload media player in the same section.

3a: Yes, Sage only plans recordings 3 days in advance

3b: You can change the view, by hitting ESC.

[Brett]

The transparent stuff was just introduced in beta 14, it still is a little rough, but thats the point of beta.

For recording shows on particular channels or at certain times/days I would suggest a manual recording. I was able to set it so that it would record firstruns at a higher priority then reruns this way.

-Brett

[Opus4]

Have you read the forums much, or the release notes? Much of what you just said is covered.

(Not) missing:

1) Use the Option command to change the categorization style of the recordings list.

2) Limiting a favorite to specific channel(s) is
yet to come.

3) V2 lets you set time based recordings.

Intuitive:

1) OK, this is a matter of opinion, but when I have a LONG list of items, it sure is nice to rap back to the beginning.

2) Transpaency: read some of the posts on this from today/yesterday.

3a) SageTV has guide data for 14 days; it schedules recordings for 3 days in advance. You can set a manual recording any time during teh 2 weeks. Requests have been made to make an option for the number of days to schedule in advance .

3b) use the option comamdn in b2v14 to change the scheduled recording list to the old v1.4 style. (See release notes.)

4) Additional airings show the additional airings of a show during the next 14 days of the guide data. Yes, it might be nice to have an indicator for which ones will be recorded. (Unles I've missed taht!!) And, it is supposed to also show currently recorded episodes again at some point -- see release notes.

Nice:

2) Conflict resolution: beta 14 seems to have that again, asking you what to do about the conflict.

- Andy

[turak]

Originally posted by newmedia42

--- Things that are missing:

1. Grouping - I've seen it mentioned in the groups, and was under the impression that it was in the beta, but I haven't seen it. My understanding/hope was that this would work much like the 'Folders' do in the Tivo; ie all of the same shows appear within a folder, so you scroll through a list of folders (with the number of shows currently in them).

There is grouping:


-Scott

[falchulk]

Tansparacy is not new. Its been around since the first beta. You have to use VMR instead of overlay (NOT DXVA as stated above). The new overlay "transparancy" is not really transparent. Its just white letters and box outlines over top the video overlay You cannot see through any of it so its NOT transparent. Its a good effect and an excellent alternative to using VMR.

[newmedia42]

Thanks for all the feedback - being able to use folders (the hidden (at least to me) ESC functionality) has pushed the Sage to the forefront for me, so now I'm just using the Tivo as TV insurance until I am fully confident of the Sage's performance/stability.

falchulk; thanks to your and mikejaner's help, I now have the transparency working, and I think it's much better now. Before I was using overlay mode, and so it was doing something like a 50% fade feedback effect that updated every second or so - very annoying, and also made the sage look like it was unresponsive.

Brett; I agree about beta's being about refining something - I've done more than my fair share of betas as well, and I would much rather be judged on the finished product that the process that it took to get there. That being said, the most valuable thing we can do as testers (short of the obvious, finding bugs), is to make suggestions about how to improve the product or refine existing features. At the end of the day, we all want Sage to be the best it can be!

Opus4; I would love it if they would make the change you mentioned that was asked for before - the ability to change how far into the future the scheduling is done; that would be outstanding.

--- Some things I've noticed since using it more extensively (bugs):

I think some of these are bugs, but I thought I would mention them here first, so as to verify from more experienced users first before submitting them through the proper channels.

1. In the Commands section, if you unlink a IR command it prompts you with a yes/no question if you want to unlink. If you select yes, it appears to unlink it, but the dialog remains until you select no.

2. I was adding some programs into the favorites, and when I performed a search for the title, selected it, and then selected Add Favorite, the text changes to Favorite Options - I went into the favorite options, made my changes, and then went back, but now the text went back to Add Favorite. If I performed this again, it would create duplicate entries into the Favorites list (at one point I made about 5 because it looked as if the changes weren't taking effect). I think this may be related to picking an episode that is not going to be recorded by the favorite rule (such as it being a rerun where you only have firstrun chosen). If that is the case, it's very unintuitive - I think it would be better to always map it back to the favorite that deals with it, and if it were not recording, print a message that says something to the extent of "This episode will not be recorded because it is a rerun" or "This episode is already scheduled to be recorded at a different time", etc.

3. I was updating the channels I receive with .14 (I used .13 a little bit), and the configuration dialog has changed for this radically (and the old way can not be change back to via ESC) introducing a bug I believe. If I tried to remove a channel that was duplicated in both my analog and digital channels (ie; HBO is channel 4 and 200) - in the previous version it showed both channels next to eachother, and you could disable them individually. In this version, it doesn't seem to be able to disable them - ultimately I had to disable all the channels, then add them each manually to get around the problem.


--- More things that would be nice:

1. When viewing additional airings, it would be great to be able to use the Page Up/Down (Channel Up/Down) to move to the next occurrence when viewing the details of a particular program. The Tivo does this and it makes it much easier when you're trying to track down a program.

2. I have to reiterate making the circular listing an option (which can be turned off). I was attempting to look through the additional airings for a particular episode of a show, and it had 10 upcoming events. The main list didn't give any details about what was different about each episode, so I needed to go into the details, look at the info, and the move back to the airing list and move to the next one (time consuming and clunky). The problem is that I probably went through 15-20 episodes before I realized I was just looping through the list (since many of the episodes were repeats anyway, it wasn't obvious).

[gplasky]

On the circular list thing-I think it's great for menu's. But for file lists-maybe there is a way when it gets to the last file of the list the first press of the down arrow does nothing-letting you know you are at the bottom of the list. If you press down again on the same file then it does it circular behavior and arrows down to file #1. Just a thought.

Gerry

[Opus4]

Just put a special entry in the list to signify that the list has wrapped. So, instead of a recording listing, that space would have some message. "Danger! Danger, Will Robinson! You will wrap if you don't turn back!"

- Andy

[stanger89]

I think the wrap around would be much improved it a simple black space were added at teh beginning/end of the list, that way it would be obvious that you reached the end, but still allow you to go to the start without going all the way to the top.

[Brett]

Could it not be a simple toggle, some people perfer this and others not. I mean its not much code to say if(bWRAPAROUND=false) then stop at the end of the list?

-Brett

[Opus4]

Originally posted by Brett
Could it not be a simple toggle

Sure, but even if it becomes a toggle, there is nothing wrong with wanting to improve the wrap around for the people who use it.

- Andy