Building a SageTV box for the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor)

[rkelleyrtp]

Greetings all,

I am tired of spending $50/mo for Dish TV, so I am looking to build a TiVo-like box for our family room. We currently have TimeWarner Cable with ATSC/NTSC/QCAM channels (verified via EyeTV 250 tuner on my Mac) coming into the house. I have plugged the cable into the back of our TV, and voila` - we have tons of channels available (even better than the $50/mo Dish box). However, the lack of an electronic program guide (EPG) and DVR capability is a show-stopper for us.

I purchased the Elgato EyeTV 250 unit for my Mac Mini and played with it for a few days. The hardware part worked fantastic, however the software (program guide, tuning between stations) was very flawed. I could tell within 2 days this box would not work for us. After that, I purchased the Magnavox 2160A 160GB HDD & DVD Recorder with Digital Tuner box but did not realize the Electronic Program Guide (EPG) was not included. Crud! Another return...

Doing some research, I ran into the SageTV software and decided to look into it a bit deeper. Essentially, I need some advice in building the perfect SageTV box that MUST pass the Wife Acceptance Factor (WAF). In other words, it must just work. My wife must be able to push the "on" button on the remote and instantly watch TV (just like normal cable set-top boxes). It must have DVR capability (pause, rewind, etc) as well as a very good program guide. I have lots of spare parts lying around from various PC projects in the past, so hardware should not be an issue.

Any ideas or suggestions for the perfect SageTV combination? Ideally, the box will support HD-TV via DVI/HDMI, have a very good remote control, and be reasonably quiet. It can be PC or Mac based - makes no difference. And, it must just work.

Thanks in advance for any help/tips.

[Lucas]

Originally Posted by rkelleyrtp

Greetings all,

I am tired of spending $50/mo for Dish TV, so I am looking to build a TiVo-like box for our family room. We currently have TimeWarner Cable with ATSC/NTSC/QCAM channels (verified via EyeTV 250 tuner on my Mac) coming into the house. I have plugged the cable into the back of our TV, and voila` - we have tons of channels available (even better than the $50/mo Dish box). However, the lack of an electronic program guide (EPG) and DVR capability is a show-stopper for us.

I purchased the Elgato EyeTV 250 unit for my Mac Mini and played with it for a few days. The hardware part worked fantastic, however the software (program guide, tuning between stations) was very flawed. I could tell within 2 days this box would not work for us. After that, I purchased the Magnavox 2160A 160GB HDD & DVD Recorder with Digital Tuner box but did not realize the Electronic Program Guide (EPG) was not included. Crud! Another return...

Doing some research, I ran into the SageTV software and decided to look into it a bit deeper. Essentially, I need some advice in building the perfect SageTV box that MUST pass the Wife Acceptance Factor (WAF). In other words, it must just work. My wife must be able to push the "on" button on the remote and instantly watch TV (just like normal cable set-top boxes). It must have DVR capability (pause, rewind, etc) as well as a very good program guide. I have lots of spare parts lying around from various PC projects in the past, so hardware should not be an issue.

Any ideas or suggestions for the perfect SageTV combination? Ideally, the box will support HD-TV via DVI/HDMI, have a very good remote control, and be reasonably quiet. It can be PC or Mac based - makes no difference. And, it must just work.

Thanks in advance for any help/tips.

Since WAF is key, my recommendation is to have a pc or mac to run the sagetv software and host the TV cards. This should be fairly straight forward and you could hide this box anywhere in the house as long as it is still connected to you network.

Then get a SageTV HD200 or whatever the next model will be called and you have what you want + more.

I am hesitating to recommend to use the pc/mac direcly on your TV since the video playback issues you would faced initially until all sorted out could lower WAF

[wrems]

HD200's will be your friend Use your PC or mac as a dedicated server, put it in the basement or closet and forget about it. Then run HD200's where ever you want SageTV access. Done. Multi-room fully functional DVR with a common interface and same remotes for every room. The remotes are OK... Nothing to be too impressed with. I would see if it works with your family and then consider upgrading it/them. You can get Hulu/Netflix through these extenders too, not officially supported but it works. Can help to add to your Sage experience.

[rkelleyrtp]

Thanks Lucas/wrems.

I have been reading more about the HD200 box and it seems like a fantastic unit. It appears I just need a PC running the SageTV software with a TV Tuner card in my basement (as the SageTV server) and use the HD200 box to connect to the TV. The HD200 box them simply talks to the SageTV server via ethernet so we can view our TV shows on separate TVs. We can add additional HD200 boxes to the network to expand our SageTV "distribution". Is this correct?

If so, can we still watch live TV on all the HD200 boxes in the house? Assuming the TV Tuner card in the SageTV Server has enough built-in tuners, each TV should be able to watch its own live shows. Is this correct?

Also, what about the Electronic Programming Guide? Is it free? If so, what is the EPG source (TitanTV, TV Guide, etc)?

[wrems]

Yes, you are correct. supposing you have enough tuners. The advantage is that if each are watching the same "live" station only 1 tuner is used and Sage will dish out the programming to each HD200 requesting it. The only time you need more tuners is when each terminal is watching different programming. Take that into consideration as part of your build. How many programs run simultaneously that you would need to be recording?

EPG is free through Zap2it.

The other added benefit is streaming a collection of movies to each HD200 too. It can do a multitude of formats and you can house your entire collection of DVD's etc and each terminal would have ubiquitous access.

[rrhorer]

You will want to buy one HD200 (or its replacement) together with the SageTV server software to get the combination price break. However, as you may already know, the HD200 is currently out of stock and has been for a while.

[Fuzzy]

Yeah, really the out of stock issue will be your biggest hinderance at this point. You could certainly purchase sage adn give it a whirl on your desktop, just to get the feel for it, but the fact that the combo discount is out is a shame. You might contact sagetv sales adn see if they can offer you the software with the extender discount, if you pre-order the extender when they are back in. I don't know that they will, but it's worth a shot.

Also, for you needs (ATSC/NTSC/CQAM), I'd recommend an Hauppague HVR-2250. It's a 2 tuner unit, and each tuner can record ATSC, NTSC, or ClearQAM. Another word of caution though. ClearQAM is rapidly disappearing throughout the country (for everything but SD locals), so this may cease to be a viable options for you if you do a lot of non-broadcast watching. If that happens, your best bet would be to go with at least one Hauppague HD-PVR, which is a Component Video capture device. It would be connected to an HD cable Set-Top Box. It has an IR blaster for controlling the box, but only one hauppague blaster can be used on the server. Adding more would require a different blaster device (USB-UIRT).

[rkelleyrtp]

Thank you all for the great information and advice (especially the Hauppage HVR-2250).

From your replies, it appears the HD200 has been out of stock for a while. Any ideas when it will be available again? Will there be a better/enhanced box? Just wondering if I should wait for a month or so before building my SageTV box.

[Fuzzy]

noone knows the status of the HD200. most likely, sage is the victim of the recent problems everyone in the industry has been having with electronics parts availability, and it will be sorted eventually... less likely, but still rumored is that they will come out with an improved version, and that's why they've led the 200 run out of stock. Only time will tell. In the meantime, you can certainly look into putting it on your desktop to play with the trial for a bit.

[VCRUser]

Originally Posted by wrems

You can get Hulu/Netflix through these extenders too, not officially supported but it works. Can help to add to your Sage experience.

Is that via PlayOn or is there another way? I've hesitated about PlayOn out of concern for overtaxing the resources on my server.

[wrems]

Originally Posted by VCRUser

Is that via PlayOn or is there another way? I've hesitated about PlayOn out of concern for overtaxing the resources on my server.

Yes, it's the only way I know for extenders. Run Playon's trial and see if it taxes your server.

[rrhorer]

Originally Posted by VCRUser

Is that via PlayOn or is there another way? I've hesitated about PlayOn out of concern for overtaxing the resources on my server.

My advice is that you try the trial first. I bought PlayOn and set it up with Sage. My experience is that it requires frequent updates, can be somewhat quirky and, because it must transcode and stream the video, it does not have near the same picture quality as consumer video hardware with internet apps. My Vizio 55" TV and a Samsung BlueRay player (both with internet apps) produce a much better picture with NetFlix watch-now movies. Of course, YMMV.

[davephan]

You did not mention anything about disaster recover in your plans. If your wife is dependent on the system working, then if it fails you will need to be able to recover it very quickly if the system fails. If you take periodic images of your boot/programs drive, then you can recover the system in less than 30 minutes back to a point in time when the system was working.

If you use WHS, then you cannot use disk imaging. If you search around the forum, you can find stories of very long recovery times with WHS, where the system has to be rebuilt from scratch. You can find other posts where disk imaging could have fixed problems that were reported by simply recovering back to a point in time when the system was working.

RAID is one of the methods where you can protect the video files against loss of hard drives failing. I've had hard drive fail in the past. RAID protected me from file loss.

If you and your wife become dependent on the computer system working without problems, and you are not prepared to recover your system quickly, then your WAF will drastically lower. Since you never know when your system problems could develop in the future, you have to be prepared.

Dave

[sic0048]

I think we also need to provide a big time warning..... the unencrypted QAM cable stations that you can currently receive (you plugged you coaxial cable cord into your TV and got lots of channels...) can and probably will disappear without warning. This is at the discression of the cable company (SageTV has no control over this).

This is because most cable companies have moved to encrypting their digital cable stations. They don't want anyone with a QAM capable TV from simply plugging in their cable line and watching shows they are not paying for. To prevent this, they encrypt most shows and that requires their STB to decrypt the channels.

So what does this mean? It means you could spend money on a QAM tuner and loose the ability to use it in the future because the QAM tuner cannot decrypt the cable signal.

There is a Component Tuner that most of us use. It is called the Hauppauge HD-PVR and it allows you to take the component video output from the cable company supplied STB and hook it up to the HD-PVR. The HD-PVR then records the signal from the STB in HD quality up to 1080i resolution. Of course the draw back to this is you need 1 STB and 1 HD-PVR for each concurrent stream you want to view/record at the same time. It is more expensive than the QAM tuners you can buy which do not require a STB.

Anyway, I just wanted to give you fair warning. Again, this really isn't a SageTV issue, and there are solutions to continue using SageTV even if the worse case does happen. But I want you to be prepared in case the cable company does change to encrypted broadcasts.

[davephan]

If you still have clearQAM, you could still setup your system to record clearQAM cable, with the understanding that you'll re-configure your clearQAM tuners for OTA digital channels when clearQAM cable goes away. At that time, you'll probably have to go with the HD-PVR solution for the cable channels, using a cable box for each tuner.

Dave

[rrhorer]

Originally Posted by davephan

...you'll re-configure your clearQAM tuners for OTA digital channels when clearQAM cable goes away.
Dave

That's my plan if it happens with Cox here in Fountain Hills, Arizona. So far, Cox has continued SD analog along with approximately 40 channels of clear QAM, including a number (maybe one-third) in high def. My recollection is that they intended to continue analog for three years following the transition to digital. Since that transition occurred after a delay (I believe 6 months), I don't know when the three years is up or if Cox will change their plans. It would really be good if the cable companies were more open about their intentions; but, of course, that's wishful thinking.