Questions from a newbie

[invisible_ink]

I'm ready to make the leap and buy a tuner and Sage, but I'm rather lazy and I was hoping someone could answer some or all of the following questions:

1. I keep reading about tuner/motherboard issues. I have a Abit IS7 running a Intel 2.6Ghz processor. Anyone have recommendations as to the tuner card that will give the least amount of problems? Are people in love with the PVR-250 (my experiences with Hauppauge (which apparently is German for: "What drivers?") in the past haven't been stellar).

2. I appreciate the nature of the open beta. My questions: When will 2.0 go final? For someone like me who may not have all the time in the world to tinker with every new beta, is it worth downloading the 2.0 beta or should I just bide my time until it goes final? Are the immediate returns worth more than the current issues?

3. Is there any other software that is required to burn DVDs of live TV to be watched on other DVD players?

Thanks to anyone who responds.

ink.

[tangfj]

I will anwser your questions based on my experiences and I hope this helps:

1. I use an AMD system so I can't help you out there, but having the upmixing capability of the nforce chipset is great (I have everything upmixed to dolby digital 5.1 with my motherboard, an asus a7n8x).

Hauppauge tuners are awesome. I've compared them to some other ones and they are by far the best I've used. Driver support isn't a problem at all, especially with the help of SHS's website. The only issue I've heard of is mixing 350's with 250's. I don't have a 350, though, so I can't speak from experience.

2. Upgrading the beta's isn't all that hard. So far I've been through 3 releases of the beta version and all you have to do is download and install. Of course, you can tinker, if you want. In any case, to answer your question about a final release, I would say who cares??? I love that a new release is out almost weekly and I love to see the development of the software as it is done. I would rather have it this way than wait for months and not have any input. And by the way, the immediate returns on the beta is definitely worth the install. I would say that most people wouldn't even know it's a beta release.

3. Yes, you will need a dvd authoring program like tmpgenc. I haven't gotten a successful burn yet, but I think that's because I recorded the shows with the wrong decoders or something.

I hope this helps.

[Ralphjb]

I second the comments made above.

Regarding Beta's, I do share some of your reticence. I resisted uprading to V2 beta's until .15. It seemed that this version had the least amount of "problem" chatter. I've not downloaded RC1 because of the higher volume of such chatter.

In otherwords, I lurk on this board, reading the posts of the braver amongst us and determine my next step .

[stanger89]

Originally posted by invisible_ink
I'm ready to make the leap and buy a tuner and Sage, but I'm rather lazy and I was hoping someone could answer some or all of the following questions:

1. I keep reading about tuner/motherboard issues. I have a Abit IS7 running a Intel 2.6Ghz processor. Anyone have recommendations as to the tuner card that will give the least amount of problems? Are people in love with the PVR-250 (my experiences with Hauppauge (which apparently is German for: "What drivers?") in the past haven't been stellar).

These problems are probably in regard to problems with the 350's TV out, generally the bugs you seed discussed here are discovered because Sage is doing things nobody else has done before (multiple tuners/350 OSD). I'll say that with my P4 2.4B in my Abit BE7 I've had no compatiblity problems whatsoever with my 250 (it's an old v15). The Hauppauges are by far the best cards available, but with support for the MCE cards there are a number of cards like the Avermedia M150 that could easily come to challenge that, but they haven't been proven yet.

2. I appreciate the nature of the open beta. My questions: When will 2.0 go final? For someone like me who may not have all the time in the world to tinker with every new beta, is it worth downloading the 2.0 beta or should I just bide my time until it goes final? Are the immediate returns worth more than the current issues?

It's currently in RC, and will probably go gold whenever we stop breaking it My guess would be a matter of weeks.

3. Is there any other software that is required to burn DVDs of live TV to be watched on other DVD players?

Thanks to anyone who responds.

ink.

You'll need something to author the DVD (create the ifos/vobs), but Sage/250 can record DVD compliant MPEGs that don't need to be transcoded which makes burning pretty painless, and most burners come with Authoring SW anyway. If you're going to be burning DVDs, you'd serve yourself well to look at Womble MPEG-VCR or Video ReDo to cut commercials/trim files/etc.

[Crowdx42]

TO tangfj or any newbie trying to author a dvd from your recorded mpegs, you need to use an authoring program which will transform the files from mpeg to vob files, what basically happens is that the mpeg is split into video and audio seperate streams and then remuxed back into vob files to make them work on a DVD, also these files must be written on the dvd with VIDEO_TS as their root folder, some dvd players (older ones) also require a folder called AUDIO_TS to make it work, this folder can be empty.
There is no re-encoding in this process and so loss in quality, it also is not that cpu intensive, more hard disk intense, but should take no more than an hour to make a compient dvd.
I agree with strange89, gold release seems only weeks away now, hopefully the remaining bugs can be sorted. Also PVR 250 cards seem to be the most trouble free cards out there for Sage. If you want to just record one show at a time and watch with a hardware decoder, the PVR 350 is the only current card which supports Sage menu display, though there are still bugs to iron out with this also.
Patrick