Upgrading Sage - question re: Cayars/Sage

[cclayton]

Well, the open beta for Sage 2.0 at my house finally finished with 100% user acceptance (both my wife and I love it! ). It was much easier to convince her to upgrade the hardware after hooking her on Sage first. (new processor, more memory, more Hard Drive, extra capture card...) So some questions caused by my new capture card purchase (Hauppauge 500mce).

Reason for Upgrade: Support of the Hauppauge 500mce.
Obviously, I knew I had to upgrade before I bought the card...

End result: Stable system, as easy to use as Sage 2.0, low learning curve.
I don't want to have to teach my wife too much new stuff, but if I get some nice features, change may be good.

I am considering going with the Cayars STV in conjunction with the Sage upgrade. Highlights that caught my eye are Commercial Detection, DVD Burning and Compression, along with a wealth of features to tinker with.

On to the questions:

- In general, upgrading to > Sage 2.0 looks straight forward. Any words of advice apart from "Back it Up!" for doing the upgrade?

- Does anyone know how close the 2.2.4 beta is to a Release Candidate?

- What version of Sage is recommended/stable? (2.1, 2.2.3, 2.2.4)

- What is the recommended version to run the Cayars STV with?

- What is the recommended version of Cayars? (I know you have to pay for the privilege to use 18D - not really an issue if it's good)

- How close is 18 to a Release Candidate?

- Is there a complete feature list somewhere for this STV? So far all I have seen is "Does everything these other STV's did, plus: {read the next 150 pages}"

- one specific feature query - can I see what intelligent recording is doing, and edit it? Alot of "Don't Likes" later and it still records some things I don't like (even after telling it to think harder in the config.)

- I am using an EPG plugin to get a Canadian guide (found here ) should I be concerned about it working with Sage 2.1+, or Cayars?

- Does anyone know of a way to inexpensively convert the DVI out of the MSI5200 to Component?

- Currently not using VRM9, on an S-Video connect. What should compel me to start using VRM9? (had performance issues pre-upgrade - should be fine now)

That's about it for now, may add more questions later. I apologize about spreading my questions all over the place (not all relevant to Customizations) but hoped I could get 1 stop shopping here.

Thanks!
Corey

[Lucas]

Don't know when the next release (sage) would be coming out but I believe that soon we will either have a 2.2.5 beta or a formal 2.2 release.

To give you an indication, I switched from 2.0.20 to 2.2.4 + Cayars17 last week after 6 months with 2.0. Some issues(changing channels, occasional heavy system usage) remain but otherwise pretty useable.

[robertmcox]

I use Cayars 17 ($5 short of beta-tester...) on Sage 2.2.4 - no problems.

Can't answer all your questions, but maybe a few.

No performance issues on p3/800 w/ 512MB, 300GB, DVD Long Play, VMR9, FX5200. What I did to get the most out of this lowly system was to put all video on a separate disk drive from the os. The separate disk drive is ATA133 w/ 8MB cache. I put the separate disk on a separate controller as well (Siig, I believe). And, of course, the 64k block size. I observed before doing this, that disk contention was sometimes an issue - maybe my OS drive is a piece? I also set the comskip to not process while watching TV - only when Sage sleeps. Tell the comskip not to scrub movie channels too.

I don't know if there's a list of *all* the features anywhere as they keep changing, but I think the most significant are:
- you can customize the menus however you want them
- the comskip - If sage changes how you watch tv, comskip changes how you use sage!
- video playlists - you can queue up a few cartoons and let them all playback (comm detected) - great for the kiddos.

If you can stand to read the 100+ pages of stuff on that thread, you will know to use 2.2.4.

There's another thread about xmltv (i think) and sage 2.2.4 re sage changed the way the figure what's a first run, you should search out that thread to figure out if the upgrade will affect your epg. i think the thread is on the 2.2.4 beta announcement thread?

I'm not using the dvd burner stuff (yet) because what I saw on the thread is that it's not quite stable. I'm waiting until v18 is out + a week of no complaints about the feature before putting it on my system.

HTH!

[cclayton]

Just an FYI in case anyone missed it...

AJUhawk is compiling a guide for the Cayars STV. The thread can be found here.

Thanks for the replies so far!

- Corey