Why I went back to Mythtv

[gregmac]

I'm writing this post so hopefully SageTV can be improved, and maybe someone will get some ideas out of this or help decide between myth and sage. I'm sure there will be people who feel compelled to flame me (this is the internet, afterall) and that's fine, but I'm trying to be constructive here.

I've been using Mythtv for the last 4 or 5 years now. A couple years ago I switched to Mythbuntu, and things have been fairly smooth. I have a few frustrations with mythtv, and I wanted to get some quieter hardware for a frontend, so I figured I'd give Sage a try. In particular, the $150 HD300 is a very attractive frontend.

To give you an idea of my tech level: I've been programming professionally for about 12 years (and non-paid much longer), doing stuff ranging from embedded linux development, to web applications, to my current job leading a team of 8 developers in a .NET ISV. I've also been active in the OSS community on and off for a long time. I'll also say I have pretty high standards when it comes to software - so although I'm capable of debugging many complex problems, I really don't want to have to, especially when I pay for software and especially when it is supposed to run on a TV and not feel like using a computer.

So I started my adventure by installing Sage tv in Windows. Worked well enough, and looked nice, so I bought the Linux OEM edition. The install was actually pretty simple, and I had it up and running with my PVR-150 and analog half of PVR-1600 very easily.

Then the trouble started. I could not get Sage to reliably work with the digital part of the PVR-1600. It first took a long time trying to find a signal before giving no options (where it would normally let me choose Cable or OTA). The only hint at the problem was in the sagetv_0.txt log, where it shows a Null reference exception. I should mention, this is harder to debug than mythtv errors.

After upgrading to the latest Ubuntu (from 10.04.1 to 10.10) it could finally see the tuner, and even found some channels.. or so I thought. I'm tuning ClearQAM over my cable, which worked fine in Mythtv (and I later found out, still works fine in Mythtv even after the upgrades). It didn't differentiate between encrypted and non-encrypted, and it didn't give me any nice channel numbers (they are all eg, 85-13, 86-152, etc, corresponding to the raw ClearQAM channel). Using the lineup results from SiliconDust, I was actually able to start mapping these. I got through about 3 channels, before the preview stopped working. At first it would just say "Null error during playback", and then after restarting a couple times, it would just lock the Sagetv server up completely. This is also when I found out the sagetv init script SAYS it restarts Sagetv, but actually doesn't.

I can't remember when, but at some point I also tried tuning OTA channels with an HD antenna attached (after verifying directly through my TV's ATSC tuner that they come in), and couldn't get it to find anything at all.

So all the above spanned several days. At this point, I gave up, and ordered an HD Homerun (don't have it yet), and figured I'd just not bother with digital on the 1600.

I also attempted to get Sagetv Linux client (placeshifter) running on the server (which has been running a myth frontend for a couple years, connected to my TV/receiver via HDMI). This was an abysmal failure. Once again, I gave up hopes of getting this to work, and decided I'd just get an additional HD300 and use that.

For my testing phase, I set up two systems running Windows 7 and SageTV Client, using MCE remotes (again, same hardware I've been running Myth frontends on, just a different OS). Minor annoyance at the work it takes to get Windows as a decent frontend - turning off all the security/etc notifications and enabling auto-login. Would be nice if the SageTV Client installer had options to do all that. I was pleasantly surprised that the remotes "just worked" (though Mythbuntu has also made the remotes "just work" so it's not a big deal).

For some unexplained reason, one of the frontends (I did an identical install on both) was unable to play any recorded TV shows, until several incidental reboots later when it just started working. I didn't investigate further.

Now, once sage is working, it's actually a very nice UI for the most part. High points compared to Mythtv:

• Video window and/or music keeps playing when you go to the menu
• Music player is great. I absolutely love the "queue this item" option that queues a song to play after the one now - many media players are missing that.
• Having the time/weather everywhere is a nice touch

Downsides compared to myth:

• The back button (and left button) seem very inconsistent. I eventually figured out "back" is like a browser back button, as opposed to going backwards through the hierarchy (as I expected it would, based on Mythtv and every other piece of consumer electronics I've ever used). I never did get used to this, and I constantly found myself getting lost in the menus.
• The recordings menu should have another default: newest recordings, by date, ungrouped. This is the default view from Mythtv (you can easily "group by show" from the same UI though), and we find ourselves using it when you don't know what to watch .. it's the closest thing to "live" TV I ever do. Great that I can set this up on my own, annoying I have to do it individually on every front end. Even worse that there's no easy way to re-order them, so this shows up as option #5.
• Left/right buttons do nothing during playback. Myth used these as skip ahead/back buttons, skipping forward 30 seconds, and back 5. A nice feature (I think called stickykeys) was if you hit forward again after pressing back, it would only go forward 5, allowing for "fine tuning". The Skip forward/back buttons went by 10 minutes by default, and the FFW/RWD buttons would play at 2x,4x etc speed. I guess I could have remapped these, but again would need to be done on every frontend, and I couldn't do the stickykeys thing.
• Myth could move by arbitrary amounts if you typed in number of minutes. Eg, pressing "2 5 Right" would skip forward by 25 minutes. We were half-way through a movie, and skipping 60 minutes using the biggest 150 second default skip value took a while.
• The notification icons are nice, but stop giving me warnings about crap I don't care about. I can't remember what it was, but there was an error icon in the top, and when I clicked it (couldn't figure it out with the remote) it showed me some useless messages that clearly were not actually errors. After that, I mostly ignored the error icon aside from while I was trying to debug issues. I realize this probably comes from plugins and not Sage itself, but it still reflects badly on the whole user experience.

The plugin system I understand in V7 is incredibly improved compared to what it was, but as someone new to Sagetv I found the whole thing very sloppy. The categories of plugins didn't really make too much sense to me - eg, "library" seems like it should be something to do with my video library, not dependencies for other plugins. It also seems like have the plugins are just dependencies for other plugins that say "do not install this". They just shouldn't be listed. These are problems any 3rd party plugin repository will have (just look at Firefox addons or Apple's App store), but if it's out of hand right at the start, think of how it will be in a year or two. It would be nice to have an easy way to search, and have some more categories. Next steps would be Ratings and "most popular" lists, etc.

I had a lot of confusion trying to install the metadata grabber ("bmt" I guess? Or is it Pheonix?). At first I thought they were competiting plugins, but then eventually realized one uses the other one (still not sure which). Once I got the metadata grabber installed, and told it to rescan everything, it still failed to find metadata for at least half of my library, if not more. I have very consistent and clean naming for all files, and mythtv's built-in metadata grabber was able to find descriptions and fanart for pretty much everything.

I had a similar experience with the Web UI. I installed 'jetty', and then nothing happened. I had to also install some other plugins to make it useful. After I got them installed, I had to go back and search through to find out the port and default user/password - would have been nice if it told me about that during the install.

Two of the biggest things I missed that I have to say ended up being fairly big contributors to leaving Sage were commercial skipping, and automatic aspect ratio. I was surprised I cared as much as I did, but both are things that "just work" in mythtv (zero configuration) and I didn't know but I had really gotten used to them. I didn't attempt to install the comskip plugin because I was very confused about what needed to be done, what plugin to use, and it looked like a pretty big hack to get it going in linux.

There is no automatic aspect ratio switching in Sage, which means whenever I watch something that is broadcast in letterbox on a 4:3 channel (which is a LOT of shows now), on my widescreen TVs it looks rediculus with 1/3 the screen taken up by a useless black border. One of my friends has an HD200 and apparently the remote has an "aspect" button, unfortauntely my MCE remotes don't, and there is no aspect option on the menu during playback (I was surprised by this) so I was unable to do anything about it. To compare, mythtv automatically detects the letterbox (black bars on top/bottom) and zooms it to fullscreen. During commercials (if they're not skipped, and/or the show you're watching changes aspect ratios which does happen from time to time), it goes back. This also works while watching Live TV. Basically, you just forget about "aspect" issues, it "just works".

Couple other points:

• I think one of the biggest annoyances with the Windows client is that it's easy to have Sage lose focus: eg, click 'View webpage' in a plugin, and then it opens a Web browser that can't be controlled by a remote. This is double-annoying if you don't have a mouse/keyboard hooked up.
• One of my Windows Sage Clients (on my personal desktop PC) was acting very inconsitently, and kept locking up randomly (especially if it lost connection to the server at any point), requiring killing it with task manager.
• Why is there no internet radio support? Mythtv doesn't have this either, but come on.. it's not that hard and it's a really nice feature. I was really hoping there would have at least been a plugin, but no. (unless you count the one that only works with one client at a time, and requires a separate PC.. I lost interest as soon as the instructions started talking about using a cable to loop the audio out back to a line-in..). Kudos to whoever figured out the kludgy way to implement it .. but it just shouldn't require a hack like that to work.
• This is really nit-picky, but the default picture for "watch TV" in the default theme is horrible. A photoshopped TV sitting in the sand of the most boring ocean picture ever? The picture on the TV itself looks nicer. It's nit-picky, but this is also the FIRST thing someone sees when using the system, and it's just.. lack-luster.
• Online stuff is nice (myth only recently added this, I haven't even tried it yet), but the UI is annoying. It feels very different from the watch TV/videos UI, like I'm using a totally different system. Even during video playback everything is different.
• I had a lot of crashes/lockups while trying to debug problems, especially with the 1600. For example, after enabling debug mode, the server locked up, preventing me from connecting any clients to it.

So all in all, there are some nice things, but a lot of work to be done. The bad error messages, lockups and crashes were the biggest things that turned me off, and if those were the only problems, I probably could have lived with it. Nothing else in this post was enough on its own to make me change my mind about using Sage, but taken together, in the end I'm happier with Myth. Perhaps most telling, my girlfriend considered Sage to be a 'downgrade' from Mythtv .. and we were running Myth 0.21, which is three versions out of date (released March 2008). I had everything switched back over to Myth (now 0.23.1) in just a couple of hours, and she's happy again.

Maybe I'll try Sage again in a year or two.

[blade]

Originally Posted by gregmac

Worked well enough, and looked nice, so I bought the Linux OEM edition.

I won't address your problems with the Linux version because I haven't used it before and it's for OEMs. So I wouldn't really expect it to "just work" and be easily configurable.

For my testing phase, I set up two systems running Windows 7 and SageTV Client, using MCE remotes (again, same hardware I've been running Myth frontends on, just a different OS). Minor annoyance at the work it takes to get Windows as a decent frontend - turning off all the security/etc notifications and enabling auto-login. Would be nice if the SageTV Client installer had options to do all that.

Sounds more like a complaint about Windows than Sage. In all fairness I've only run the PC client on XP and don't recall having any issues with security notifications or auto-login, but maybe it's different with Windows 7.

Now, once sage is working, it's actually a very nice UI for the most part. High points compared to Mythtv:

• Video window and/or music keeps playing when you go to the menu
• Music player is great. I absolutely love the "queue this item" option that queues a song to play after the one now - many media players are missing that.
• Having the time/weather everywhere is a nice touch

It's a bit funny that those are the Pros. I dislike playing the video in a window so I have it play in the background instead. Also the Music player is one of the worst parts of Sage that tends to get a lot of complaints. I'm not too fond of it myself.

Downsides compared to myth:

• The recordings menu should have another default: newest recordings, by date, ungrouped. This is the default view from Mythtv (you can easily "group by show" from the same UI though), and we find ourselves using it when you don't know what to watch .. it's the closest thing to "live" TV I ever do. Great that I can set this up on my own, annoying I have to do it individually on every front end. Even worse that there's no easy way to re-order them, so this shows up as option #5.

• I disagree that Sage should sort recordings the same way Myth does by default because you find it preferable. For me the way you suggest wouldn't be any better than what Sage uses now by default because I always group by show, groups sorted alphabetically, episodes sorted by original air date starting with the earliest date. To me this is more logical because many shows have an ongoing storyline where the characters are developed over time. So watching them in order of the original airing would be the most logical choice for a default sorting method IMO. My point is while you prefer one default method someone else probably prefers the way Sage currently does it. So they can't please everyone.
  
  

  Left/right buttons do nothing during playback. Myth used these as skip ahead/back buttons, skipping forward 30 seconds, and back 5. A nice feature (I think called stickykeys) was if you hit forward again after pressing back, it would only go forward 5, allowing for "fine tuning". The Skip forward/back buttons went by 10 minutes by default, and the FFW/RWD buttons would play at 2x,4x etc speed. I guess I could have remapped these, but again would need to be done on every frontend, and I couldn't do the stickykeys thing.

  Actually when using the comskip plug-in the left and right arrows skip forward and back to the next commercial marker. So if you don't have auto skipping enabled you can jump to the end of the commercial block with the right arrow. If the commercial marker has the commercial beginning sooner than it actually does and you can press the left arrow to jump back to the beginning of the block and watch the part of the show that was incorrectly marked as a commercial. This only really applies if you have auto-skip enabled. It's also handy if you need to skip a long ways into a show you can jump forward to the end of the next commercial block with 1 button press. So getting to the 45 minute mark in an hour show takes about 3 button presses.
  
  

  Myth could move by arbitrary amounts if you typed in number of minutes. Eg, pressing "2 5 Right" would skip forward by 25 minutes. We were half-way through a movie, and skipping 60 minutes using the biggest 150 second default skip value took a while.

  I thought someone created a plug-in for v6 that did this, but I may be mistaken and even if they did I don't think there is one for v7. I know it's a feature some people have requested in the past.
  
  

  The notification icons are nice, but stop giving me warnings about crap I don't care about. I can't remember what it was, but there was an error icon in the top, and when I clicked it (couldn't figure it out with the remote) it showed me some useless messages that clearly were not actually errors. After that, I mostly ignored the error icon aside from while I was trying to debug issues. I realize this probably comes from plugins and not Sage itself, but it still reflects badly on the whole user experience.

Actually I've never received a message that I didn't need to know about. It's usually a new channel being added, a software update, capture device error, or recording conflict that needs resolving. As for how to access them you simply go to the main menu and select "Setup" then "System Messages".

The plugin system I understand in V7 is incredibly improved compared to what it was, but as someone new to Sagetv I found the whole thing very sloppy. The categories of plugins didn't really make too much sense to me - eg, "library" seems like it should be something to do with my video library, not dependencies for other plugins. It also seems like have the plugins are just dependencies for other plugins that say "do not install this". They just shouldn't be listed. These are problems any 3rd party plugin repository will have (just look at Firefox addons or Apple's App store), but if it's out of hand right at the start, think of how it will be in a year or two. It would be nice to have an easy way to search, and have some more categories. Next steps would be Ratings and "most popular" lists, etc.

I agree that there should be at least a basic and advanced view. I don't need to see all the dependencies, but some users prefer it so I understand having it as an option.

Two of the biggest things I missed that I have to say ended up being fairly big contributors to leaving Sage were commercial skipping, and automatic aspect ratio. I was surprised I cared as much as I did, but both are things that "just work" in mythtv (zero configuration) and I didn't know but I had really gotten used to them. I didn't attempt to install the comskip plugin because I was very confused about what needed to be done, what plugin to use, and it looked like a pretty big hack to get it going in linux.

I installed comskip years ago back when it was a little more difficult to setup. It looks pretty simple now IMO. Did you bother to check this thread out? ReplayTV was sued out of existence for including commercial skipping with their product so I don't blame Sage for not wanting to jeopardize their company over something like commercial skipping.

There is no automatic aspect ratio switching in Sage, which means whenever I watch something that is broadcast in letterbox on a 4:3 channel (which is a LOT of shows now), on my widescreen TVs it looks rediculus with 1/3 the screen taken up by a useless black border. One of my friends has an HD200 and apparently the remote has an "aspect" button, unfortauntely my MCE remotes don't, and there is no aspect option on the menu during playback (I was surprised by this) so I was unable to do anything about it. To compare, mythtv automatically detects the letterbox (black bars on top/bottom) and zooms it to fullscreen. During commercials (if they're not skipped, and/or the show you're watching changes aspect ratios which does happen from time to time), it goes back. This also works while watching Live TV. Basically, you just forget about "aspect" issues, it "just works".

Actually Sage does have multiple aspect ratios you can select while watching shows on both the PC clients and extenders. As you already stated if your remote has a button you can toggle that way. If not you can select options while watching a show and you can change it from there. I agree it would be great if Sage automatically detected and selected the proper aspect ratio for you, but there is an automatic aspect ratio plug-in that allows you to set the aspect ratio per channel, tuner, show, etc... For example source works for probably +90% of what I watch. For shows that are letterboxed 4:3 I have an aspect ratio that zooms in and makes them full screen. When I run across one of those shows I hit options, select aspect ratio, select the proper aspect ratio and then select it as default for that show on that channel using that tuner. So if I capture the show on another channel or capture device that isn't letterboxed it doesn't incorrectly zoom in. Once I've done that for the show I never have to do it again. Not as good as what Myth apparently does, but it's better than nothing.

[Brent]

Never used the linux version of SageTV, and I understand how the tuner issues you were having would give you a bad taste. But all of the downsides" you listed are easily dealt with by changing a setting or just understanding how it works. If you ever come back to SageTV I definitely would recommend you ask on the forums if there is a way to do what you wish instead of assuming it just won't work the way you want it to.

[Taddeusz]

I don't know because I've never used the Linux version of SageTV but It sounds like all your technical problems were probably due to that. I've used the Windows version for quite a few years and never had any of the kinds of technical problems you're describing. It has always just worked for me.

As far as setting up Windows, disabling UAC, auto-login and stuff. Really not needed. It sounds like you're a big Linux guy so you're sticking passwords on everything. If all you're going to do is use a machine for a single task having no password isn't going to end the world. The Administrator account in Windows 7 is disabled by default. So unless you're just completely paranoid or need to be able to use Remote Desktop a blank password is ok. As far as SageTV and UAC are concerned the virtual store gets used and works seamlessly. The only reason UAC would get in the way with SageTV is if you have multiple users on the same computer that want to use it. If only SageTV used best practices and put all configuration files in "All Users". Maybe one day.

[pzasso]

I do run the Linux version of Sage, and have been since the version 6 days. I have also run Mythtv in the past as well. As much as I wanted to make Mythtv work, the fact that I had to build a PC to act as a media extender just didn't go over well with the wife. Mythtv was also not fully cooked when I last tried it. I'm not knocking Mythtv, but with a wife and 3 kids that use the TVs in the house more than I do, I need something that is going to keep my phone from ringing at the office.

I have been very happy with Sage on Linux, and my only gripe is that I don't have access to some of the plugins that you get on the Windows version. This is not Sage's fault, this is more an issue with apps like Playon not developing a version that works under Linux.

I have 4 Hauppauge USB tuners, and one HDHomerun box, along with two HD100 and one HD200 media extenders. Everything works well, and I have run the Linux version of Sage both under Gentoo Linux and currently under Fedora 12. I can't speak to the specific tuner issues you are having, but I can say that the Linux setup was not that difficult, at least under Fedora. Ubuntu is pretty straight forward as well.

I think if you just keep using Mythtv for now and play with Sage in the back room until you get it figured out, you will eventually be pretty happy with it. If you don't like the look of version 7, then just use version 6 for now.

Good luck

--Paul

[derelicte1]

I agree with some of your points.

I also get a lot of pointless notifications, like new channels added to my lineup. I use qam, and all of these new channels are encrypted. I also dislike the fact that it automatically adds these channels to my channel lineup. I'd like to disable the notifications for everything other than fatal errors.

I'm sure I'm in the minority, but I also agree that the plugin system is a mess. It takes me a while to find anything in there, there are lots of plugins that are shown that shouldn't be (i.e. the "don't install this" ones), and I despise the navigation.

As a new sage user I also had a hard time figuring out the default web page and login for the web server. is it too much to ask to put is on the plugin info screen!?!

I agree with you about the aspect ratio and comskip plugins. there are a few competing auto aspect ratio plugins, but which one should use? the comskip thing is equally confusing to me. there appear to be multiple comskip related plugins. what is actually needed to get comskip running. I will say that running comskip in wine on a linux server is a bit of a hack, but it was your choice to run the linux version. windows servers should be easier.

Also, by using the regular mce remote, you are missing a lot of buttons that I think you need to make sage usable by remote. you really need a options button, and the multiple skips (1/2) for instance.

The biggest thing I love about sage (and the reason I switched from 7mc) is the hd300 extender. imo, this thing makes it all worth while.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by derelicte1

II also get a lot of pointless notifications, like new channels added to my lineup. I use qam, and all of these new channels are encrypted. I also dislike the fact that it automatically adds these channels to my channel lineup. I'd like to disable the notifications for everything other than fatal errors.

You can turn those off in the Detailed Setup-Customize (I believe) in Sage.

Gerry

[derelicte1]

Originally Posted by gplasky

You can turn those off in the Detailed Setup-Customize (I believe) in Sage.

Gerry

I now see that. cross that complaint off my list.

Thanks!

[bialio]

Originally Posted by derelicte1

I now see that. cross that complaint off my list.

Thanks!

You can also tell it not to add new channels that it finds to your lineup (if that's not what you are referring to) - it's in Detailed Setup - Customize as well, up at the top.

[derelicte1]

Originally Posted by bialio

You can also tell it not to add new channels that it finds to your lineup (if that's not what you are referring to) - it's in Detailed Setup - Customize as well, up at the top.

that is actually the setting I found and was referring to. I didn't see one to disable the notifications other than for updates.

[paulbeers]

You also have to understand that as far as Notifications are concerned, Sage did not have these for many many years. You didn't know if a tuner failed, you didn't know when new channels were added, etc. We all wanted this, and Sage put it in. I would rather see the little blue ! at the top corner even if it is to tell me that Univision 8 was just added to my lineup, then not having it. This was really important just a few months ago when Dish Network dropped FX for about a month. I didn't even realize we had gotten it back until the little ! popped up and I read the message. You also begin to train yourself not to care much about the blue ones and only check them every week or so....

[barney B.A.]

Yes. It's better to have the notifications than not.

[panteragstk]

I agree that the plugin system could be better organized, but those of us that have used sage for a while and are used to the old way of doing things realize that this is WAYYYY better than it used to be. Baby steps....

[derelicte1]

I'm going to have to cross anything complaint off my list: I got commercial skipping working!

It was actually pretty simple once I found a guide. This is what I used:

http://www.geektonic.com/2010/09/com...ay-sagetv.html

thanks for the writeup, Brent!

For the most part the defaults work pretty well, but I need to tune it a little bit.

[billism]

Originally Posted by gregmac

The plugin system I understand in V7 is incredibly improved compared to what it was, but as someone new to Sagetv I found the whole thing very sloppy. The categories of plugins didn't really make too much sense to me - eg, "library" seems like it should be something to do with my video library, not dependencies for other plugins. It also seems like have the plugins are just dependencies for other plugins that say "do not install this". They just shouldn't be listed. These are problems any 3rd party plugin repository will have (just look at Firefox addons or Apple's App store), but if it's out of hand right at the start, think of how it will be in a year or two. It would be nice to have an easy way to search, and have some more categories. Next steps would be Ratings and "most popular" lists, etc.

Three days into using SageTV, I think this is my largest gripe. I am loving the SageTV experience otherwise.

Thanks for the in-depth review/constructive criticism. Very useful to SageTV noobs like myself.

[nick_l]

A completely understandable gripe, but here are two things that may make you feel a little better about it:
1. It's 1000 times better than it was in version 6.
2. Once you get your Sage set up to your satisfaction, you really won't be accessing it much. There is a pretty finite number of plugins that you and your family will find useful. Once they are installed and configured you really wont need to access the plugins area much (yes, you will probably look for new plugins from time to time, but Sage is even smart enough now to tell you when one of your current plugins has an updated version available).

Enjoy SageTV.

[paulbeers]

Yes I agree with those who say the new Plugin system isn't organized the best, but, as stated from all of us "senior" members, it is a huge improvement (seeing as how previously it all had to be done on the server itself with a lot of manual tweaking). Considering this is the 1.0 version of plugin Manager, I can only imagine that Sage will update it as time progresses as they get feed back on it.

[gregmac]

It has now been 4 months later, so I figured I would post a follow up.

After my initial frustrations, I went back and priced out a "silent" small mythtv frontend PC, which was over $400 at the cheapest. I decided to give it one last shot, installing Sagetv on a Windows system, and using an HD300.

I bought the HD300, and installed Windows 7 64-bit on my mythtv server, in another partition, dual-booting so I could try it out but still maintain mythtv. I had FAR fewer problems getting this up, so initially things were looking good.

The mythtv client is absolutely no comparision to an HD300, at least when you're trying to use it as a set-top box. The client is so-so when used on a PC, with a mouse and keyboard, but it just fails at being a 10-foot interface - mostly due to the way it works inside the OS, and not the software itself, but still.

For kicks, I also tried the sage placeshifter client on a Linux system (an Intel Atom ION 330, which runs mythtv including 1080p video playback like a dream) and it's an absolute disgrace. It runs so poorly, looks bad, and is just a miserable experience in general, that sage should just discontinue it entirely. Granted it's not the most powerful box, but the placeshifter client really didn't run much better on my server (a dual-core multi-ghz with lots of RAM).

The HD300 is a very nice experience by comparison. It pretty much "just works", which is what is needed in a set-top box. (I did have troubles though; a broken HDMI cable that didn't pass audio, and couldn't run in 1080p without sparkles on the screen until upgrading to a beta firmware).

My biggest and probably almost only complaint with the HD300 is the volume buttons: it's a low WAF when the big buttons in the middle that say "vol" don't control the volume, and instead, the tiny ones in the top left that say "TV Vol" do (2 of my 3 HD300's use external sound systems).

Windows as a server has been generally pretty positive, to speak nothing of Sage but of improvements Microsoft has done over the years. The only issue I have now is my PVR-150 stopped working after a month on sage (and a couple years on myth before that), but I'm not entirely convinced it's not some driver issue with Windows 7 64-bit.

Setting up the HDHomerun was easy, once I figured out that the Silicon Dust setup software actually sneakily puts a .frq file into the Sagetv directory (but ONLY if you run it locally, which I didn't). Once you get the channels set in the Silicon Dust software Sagetv scanning takes a few seconds (as opposed to minutes) and it's obviously just reading the .frq files. This process works, but could be a lot smoother if it was more transparent. Silicon Dust should be up-front about this, and Sagetv should have a warning like "You're trying to configure an HDHomeRun, but the files generated by the HDHomeRun setup are missing. Running the HDHomeRun setup will provide a mapping file for SageTV to use, simplifying the setup. Would you like to proceed anyways without the files, or go back so you can run the HDHomerun setup?"

Many of my other complaints still stand.

• I still find the back button and left button annoying. The worst is when you're in a show, and accidentally hit "back". To get back to fullscreen, you have to use the "Home" button or "Left" button to go back to home, then press "Left". This is not intuitive, and very annoying.
• The "intelligent" sort is anything but. The forum has many complaints about this, it is just not a great algorithm. I changed "current recordings" to be grouped by show, ordered by newest first, and "all recordings" to be grouped by show, ordered A-Z.
• I still miss the ability to press a number and then left/right to jump by that amount of minutes. Having comskip installed helps for most TV shows, but doesn't help for videos.
• Similar topic, the HD300 button has 3 fast forward and 3 rewind buttons, not including left/right. This is excessive, and has a low WAF. I also miss myttv's sticky keys feature (pressing Skip Fwd goes 30 seconds, but then if you press Skip Back, it only goes 5 seconds and Fwd also only goes 5 seconds. This is great for fine-tuning). I have skip set to 10 seconds, which is acceptable, but just not as nice.
• Aspect ratio. The lack of auto aspect is annoying (the plugins for it just don't work very well, and there is no auto-detection of letterbox that switches the mode, mythtv has had this for years). The aspect button works, but sage, please get rid of everything but "zoom c". The forums are full of complains about this. I have two widescreen TVs, and a 4:3 set. I watch a mix of downloaded shows, and broadcast cable and OTA digital, which means I have source 4:3, widescreen, and widescreen broadcast in 4:3 format (letterbox): the only time I EVER need to use "aspect" is to switch to zoom C for the letterbox 4:3 stuff on a widescreen TV. I can't imagine why anyone would ever need the stretched zooms. At the least, there should be an option to customize what zooms are available. Again, very low WAF here. She doesn't use the aspect button at all, and just watches those shows with a giant black border around the whole screen.
• No internet radio! The webfeedencoder plugin is a decent work-around (though the EPG plugin bit is annoying) but a true internet radio option would be much nicer.

All in all, Sagetv is actually something I'd recommend to friends, but it's essential to have a stand-alone server, and just use HD300's for the UI. For a bit more than a single silent PC, I bought 3 HD300's. Even adding in the cost of Windows and the Sage software itself, it's still cheaper than two (nice) myth frontends.

[SomeWhatLost]

Originally Posted by gregmac

For kicks, I also tried the sage placeshifter client on a Linux system (an Intel Atom ION 330, which runs mythtv including 1080p video playback like a dream) and it's an absolute disgrace. It runs so poorly, looks bad, and is just a miserable experience in general, that sage should just discontinue it entirely. Granted it's not the most powerful box, but the placeshifter client really didn't run much better on my server (a dual-core multi-ghz with lots of RAM).

I am confused... you ran Placeshifter on what? and more importantly why? any why are you comparing Placeshifter to Myth client?

it has always been my understanding that Placeshifter was actually shifting the Place... ie viewing in a hotel room, or someplace on the road where you have limited bandwidth... ie it compresses or re-encodes or something to get the bit count low enough to stream over the internet...
why would you use that on a local network?

wouldn't SageTV client be a more natural direct comparison to a Myth client?

or maybe setting up a myth client in a hotel room and getting everything streamed over the internet from your server or something and compare that to placeshifter?

or is my understanding of placeshifter completely off base?

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by SomeWhatLost

or is my understanding of placeshifter completely off base?

There is no SageClient for Linux clients, only PlaceShifter. And to make things more confusing they call it "Sage Client for Linux".

You can use SageClient running on a Windows PC to connect to a Linux server, but I think gregmac is using a Linux client.