SageTV Review

[mlbdude]

Don't remember seeing this here anywhere. If it is sorry. Pretty fair article.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...1745131,00.asp

Seems odd that they include Commercial Skip in the feature list.... Especially when that is the only custom addon they mention. Hmmm....

[Opus4]

Yeah, strange -- I don't know why commercial skipping was included as a standard feature.

I'm glad they got the review done, though. I used to play games with one of the editors years ago at the Computer Game Design conferences (not that he would remember me; there are lots of people there) & recently emailed him to ask if they would consider looking at SageTV again, since their past reviews seemed to give it not much more than a glance as they went on to other software. I think it turned out that the reviewer was already checking it out. The coverage in this article seems more complete than how they covered SageTV in the past.

- Andy

[GbrNole]

personally i thought the closing statements were quite biased and a casual observer might come away thinking that sage is an expensive application when in contrast a power user would have to spend significantly more money to get the same functionality from mce 2005 or beyond tv.

mce has it's own merits but extreme's preferred software, beyond tv, lacks by quite a margin when compared to sage specifically as a pvr and of course requires you to spend more money still to make it a full media front end.

other than that the review was reasonably fair.

[mls]

Originally Posted by Opus4

Yeah, strange -- I don't know why commercial skipping was included as a standard feature.

Because it is listed (and always has been) on the SageTV web site under the features section: " Instantly skip through commercials".

Problem is, everyone keeps warping that statement into having some sort of magical built in process instead of understanding they mean being able to use skip and FF to bypass commercials.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by mls

Because it is listed (and always has been) on the SageTV web site under the features section: " Instantly skip through commercials".

Problem is, everyone keeps warping that statement into having some sort of magical built in process instead of understanding they mean being able to use skip and FF to bypass commercials.

Hmmm... now I guess it comes down to how they understood that in the review. Maybe that was all they meant too, since they referred to Tivo displaying ads while f-forwarding through commercials:

Originally Posted by ExtremeTech Review

Gets you past pesky commercials, and won't drop a banner ad on you like TiVo does.

- Andy

[edbmdave]

• It reads as if the reviewer did not understand what he was reviewing. They did not do an apples to apples comparison
• I also read a negative bias. I have used Showshifter, BeyondTV, MCE, and would challenge some of the statements made.
• I don't think they tied to get quality information in doing the review, just tried to plow through it. The same complaints he had for Sage with the DVD decoder and PQ issues exist with Showshifter, but that was left out.
• I don't think they wanted to review the product, but were forced too, or they really failed to understand the quantifications of the HTPC marketplace. Showshifter has long ignored this, and has to be one of the poorest customer service organizations out there. Their arrogance towards their customer base can be seen by the dramatic reduction of quality posters on their own forums, and the number of long time supporters that are changing to Sage, MCE, and Beyond..
• As for the licensing model. again they are not doing an Apple to Apple.

Net: Review not worth considerations.. To many existing biases are exhibited, ExtremeTech's journalist ingrity is lost on this one.

[stanger89]

Not really a surprise, I don't think anybody reviews HTPC products worth a crap, they just don't understand it.

Except of course HTPC News and SHS.

[GbrNole]

well they seem to understand it well enough to consider that beyondTV is the supposed be all and end all application.

i guess waht was annoying was that the shortcomings they specifically list for sage are even more significant for their flagship choice especially where price is concerned.

[zz5]

The thing to understand is that most reviews on these types of sites are just about filling up a page and getting it done and moving on to the next article. You can make it look good to a normal casual reader without a lot of work and research. And so that's what they do. For example, he says that Sage doesn't work well with old decoders just because he couldn't get it to work with the PowerDVD 4 decoders. First of all, there an infinite number of problems that can happen when you have several decoders installed. Second, that's just one decoder so it doesn't make any sense to say that it won't work with old decoders in general. Reading the article, it's obvious that the author is just trying to fill space. I don't mind casual articles like that if they just admit that's what it instead of claiming some kind of authoritative "conclusions".

[mayamaniac]

BeyondTV's strongest point over SageTV and the competition is the remote web access and LiveTV streaming to any web browser including PocketPC, yet that wasn't mention in it's "Pro" section. So yeah, its not a very accurate review. But it is good review letting people know about SageTV.

And yes, the commercial skip thing is misleading, even in SageTV's website as mls pointed out. They should change the wording of that. I remember thinking that SageTV included a commercial skip feature like BeyondTV's Smart Skip when I first saw that, only later to realize that it meant you can manually skip foward.