Why Did You Switch From TiVo to SageTV?

[joe123]

Hi folks.

For those of you who have or owned a TiVo, why did you select SageTV over TiVo? I am curious to know.

[Fluffdaddy]

In my case it was Replaytv
Sage worked with C-band and Canadian programmers. Plus multi-tuners closed the deal. But it was far far from a cheap move

[dbfresh23]

I absolutely hate the Tivo "jump back" function after fast forwarding. I actually still use my Tivo (DirecTivo) and SageTV both. Commercial skipping and the lack of forced jump back make SageTV an easy choice as the better of the two. The menu system on DirecTivos is incredibly sloooow also.

[GoldenTiger]

I switched from using a TiVo system to a Sage one (I am also planning out systems for my mother and sister) because of the extra options, the freedom, and the fact that you can do what you want, instead of being locked down into propietary systems that you can't even back your videos up off of legitimately. The speed of the menus, as mentioned above, doesn't hurt either (instant vs. 5-15 second waits between commands... wonder which I'll choose!).

[justme]

For me it was the ease of adding additional recording space. I've upped my series 2 Tivo from 40 to 160 GB, but it was not a fun/easy process. I may not even have done it if it wasn't for the fact that my Tivo's harddrive was failing(clicking while reading/writing). I just barely managed to do the swap in time to save my shows along with my OS. It took 2 tries just to get a good copy of the OS and over 10 tries before I got a good gopy of the whole drive with shows. All the other times the drive would go into a clicking fit and the backup was ruined from that point on.

All this points out another advantage of Sage... Much easier to upgrade parts overall. Whether because of failure or to get new features/capacities that you don't currently have. This is especially important considering how fast tech. changes these days. When I first started using Sage my single PVR250 was the only tuner I had and I think even Sage(really more of Hauppauge's drivers) could only use 1 tuner back in those days. Now I have a total of 4 tuners and there's cards like the PVR500 that have 2 tuners on one card. I could get 4 tuners using PVR500s for half the price I paid for my 4 single tuner cards. I'd have less heat, wiring, and more free PCI slots.

I also loved the fact that Sage was much more open especially when I first switched(prior to HMO and T2G options on TIVO). The last major thing is what others mentioned about the speed of menus on the TIVO. It wasn't bad when you didn't know you could do better but now my TIVO's slow menus drive me nuts whenever I use it.

BTW, I'm one of the ones who voted for(against?) the Tivo community website. It was a half joke as the OP likely intended, but also partially true. I found Sage's forums to be among the most open and friendly around, especially back then. I don't like info/topics being locked down, deleted, or forbidden. I actually first came to the Sage site to complain about what a trial(my first use of Sage) of the software did to my computers Elecard decoders settings. It changed them without permission and even an uninstall didn't put them back to there original settings. I have to say my attitude wasn't all that polite(this is part of the reason I registered with the username of "justme"). Still despite all this I not only got a polite answer to my complaint, but an apology, a solution to my problem, and a link to a new version that addressed my complaints. All this and the general feel of the forums made me not only give Sage a second try but publicly(on 2 sites) apologize to Sage for my comments. Hopefully I learned since then, to drop the attitude and just help if you can and shut-up(still working on this) if you can't.

[silkshadow]

For me it was a real easy decision. I moved to the Philippines with 3 SA Tivos, all hacked and decked out, then discovered what a PIA it was to get the XMLTV data into it. Discovered HTPCs in the form of MCE 2004 which wasn't very good and XMLTV was still a PIA albeit not as bad as Tivo. Then discovered FFdshow and then found Sage. Everything ended there.

[ToxMox]

For me the absolute HUGEST advantage was being able to schedule all my "season passes" on one machine and let my many tuners figure out the conflicts instead of having to manually figure out what I was going to schedule on each of my two Tivos and my VCR every night. Man what a pain that was. Then be able to watch those shows on either of my TVs rules!

Speed and responsiveness of the menus was a huge plus for me too as well as multiple tuners and unlimited drive space. Free guide data doesn't hurt either

First I owned Snapstream and had terrible luck with the stability of the app so I pretty much abandoned it right away and continued to use my Tivos for several more years. Then I tried to build my own MythTV box which after days of installing and configuring would just lock up and still not really work the way I wanted it too. Then I googled for a windows multi tuner PVR and came across SageTV. It was like the holy grail when I first read about what it could do. I was up and running with Sage in less than one hour and haven't turned back since. Instead I've flown into the sun pretty much as fast as I can getting more and more tuners and bigger and bigger storage and horsepower. I'm now running my Sage server on an Athlon 64 3500 with a gig of RAM and around a terabyte of storage and 6 live encoders (I have a couple of extra USB2 encoders that are on standby in case one of my others breaks).

God bless SageTV and San Dimas High School Football Rules!

[src666]

I moved to Sage from ReplayTV. I was, and still am, a huge fan of the ReplayTV product, but I knew that DNNA was abandoning the line. This meant no future software upgrades, their bugfix record was poor, and I just felt that there was no future left in the product.

I started out building a Myth system, but that turned out to be a nightmare - when it worked, it was great. If it didn't work, you had to be a linux guru to figure out why. I gave up after realizing I would never get the support I needed from the community (not for a lack of trying).

Looked at several other options, but found Sage to be the best combination of features, expandability, customizability and support (direct and community). Can't say that I've regretted the move at all. I'm just kind of PO'd that it appears the industry is trying to lock us out of the future (i.e. CableCard 2 licensing, etc.).

[Menehune]

Sorry, I mis-read the poll question

[mayamaniac]

I voted :
-SagetTV better than TiVo overall.
-Overall Costs are cheaper with SageTV
-More Functions available with SageTV
-TiVo is too Limiting

I had Tivo at place where I worked and thought it was a great product and was planning to invest in one for home use. I thought Tivo was an innovative product and will change the way people watch TV. Also, a friend has Tivo and loves it. But one day, I bought an nVidia Video card for very good deal, the Visiontek Xtasy Everything. It's a good card at the time and it came with a bonus TV tuner and remote. I didn't really care for the bonus stuffs but decided to try it out any way. It came with a so-called PVR software, WinDVR, made by Intervideo. I quickly found out what a POS software it was. So I went online looking for alternative PVR softwares. Next thing you know, I was sucked into the PVR forums learning all sorts of stuffs about PVR softwares that I never knew existed. At the time, Snapstreams PVS was more appealing to me because of the web features it offers, plus they had support for the software tuner I have. I spent a good year or so messing with BTV until I had enough of it's problems. Plus the Snapstream marketing people went crazy and want to charge high prices on everything. So I made the switch to SageTV and never looked back.

Now with 3 tuners and 600 gigs of space running SageTV server with 2 clients connected, not to mention webserver access with powerful control over my server. Then there's comskip, HDTV option, and soon to be release web streaming client. These things are not possible with Tivo. The problem now is I watch too much TV. Cost wise, this is subjective as SageTV needs a computer to operate while Tivo is the computer itself. But I'm glad I went with SageTV.

[paulbeers]

To begin with I should say, I have never owned Tivo or ReplayTV or any type of stand alone PVR.....

My parents had tivo. They loved it, and my wife, while bored and watching tv at my parents house, fell in love with Tivo. We actaully went to Best Buy to buy one and realised we don't have a landline. We have broadband internet and cell phones, why would we need a landline? Realising this was going to add another 20 bucks a month ontop of the 13 dollars a month and the cost of the unit, it just made it an unwise investment (33 bucks a month x 12 months a year = 396 plus the cost of the unit...). So we decided we could deal without TIVO and just stuck to our vcr.....

Then about a year and a half ago I stumbled upon BTV and SageTV. Unfortunately the only tuner I had then (now I have 6!) was part of an ATI All-in-Wonder and so I tried out BTV. It worked, but I didn't like it. It didn't seem stable enough and the requirements to use a software turner, meant I was going to have to buy a pretty decent second computer just to use the software tuner. Soooo...I took an old box I had and ordered an Avermedia M150. Now I had a hardware turner and could use Sage or BTV and I quickly found that Sage not only was cheaper, but more stable and I liked the GUI much more than BTV.....I was hooked....

Now only a year and a half later, I have tossed out that box, moved up to a dedicated sage server, sage client machine, 2 MVP's (one of which I purchased from Sage), 4 SD Tuners and 1 HDTV tuner. I told my wife though that I am happy now for quite some time (or at least until we buy our next HDTV!),

Sorry for the long post!!

[malore]

I am still a happy owner of a series 1 TiVo with lifetime service since May 2000. But the single tuner is limiting and the price premium for hard disk space is a joke (yes, you can upgrade yourself). The TiVo service price seemed resonable when I bought it because it required free long distance phone calls and software was getting updated. Since then the service price has gone up, free long distance is no longer included, and I haven't gotten a software update since the series 2 were released and when they do update it, it will be to add more advertisements. I would love to know how TiVo blows through all that money.

Originally Posted by dbfresh23

I absolutely hate the Tivo "jump back" function after fast forwarding.

The "jump back" works well for me, but if I remember correctly, if you use the pause button instead of the play button to stop fast forwarding it won't rewind the few seconds.

[DFranch]

It was cheaper to build a Sage box with 3 tuners than to buy 2 more tivo's with lifetime subscription.

[JUC]

I don't see an option for 'thinking of switching to tivo (directv tivo) until Satellite HD support is available in sage. As sad as it sounds I really want to take advantave of HD support for my new HDTV and I can only get it with directv.
JUC

[TakeFlight]

Another ReplayTV to SageTV convert here. I wanted to have a true media server and HTPC instead of just a simple DVR. ReplayTV did what it was supposed to do and did it well. But, SageTV offers me the ability to have multiple tuners as well as archive stuff with greater flexibility (and ease of adding additional space) that ReplayTV doesn't offer.

[joe123]

With me, it all started when we got a TiVo for evaluation. It was great and as many others have said, it really changed the way we watched TV. The ability to watch when we wanted, skip over commercials, etc.

I then started playing with TiVoToGo which enables one to move movies to from TiVo to PC and found it almost necessary to have TiVoToGo due to small amount of disk space available on TiVos.

TiVoToGo was pathetically slow moving movies to/from PC, movies were encrypted, the whole thing was very frustrating. We now needed both TiVo and a PC to have this thing be usuable. Also, we needed 2 TiVo's for our house and at the high costs of TiVo membership, it was adding up.

Since I needed a PC *and* TiVo, I thought, heck, might as well look into PC type of TiVo solutions. I tried many others PVR home base systems and found SageTV to be the best of them all.

So for me, a home PVR setup was ideal. One place to store movies, multiple TV viewing (via MediaMVP's) at a fraction of the cost of TiVo, faster service, cheaper costs, no noise in the bedrooms like TiVo's make, ability to expand cheaply, - the list goes on.

So we now have 2 TV's setup using SageTV which costs me around $450 ( 200 bucks for 2 MVP with lincenses, $150 for tuner & license, & 100 for extra drive. With TiVo, this same setup would have cost me over $1,000.00 bucks and worst yet, spending more and more while getting less and less with TiVo.

Now, if I ever have to add another TV to my home PVR system with SageTV, it will only cost me $100 bucks instead of another $400-$500.

I like TiVo, but there are just so many other chaper, faster, and better choices out there.

[srothwell]

I came from a ReplayTV (which was light years ahead of Tivo anyway).

My reasons were:

1. Ability to have multiple tuners with the recorder figuring out which tuner was for what.
2. The search capabilities
3. The fact that a database exists of all shows and I don't have to merely decided on 1st run or repeat, if I watched a show 3 years ago, the database remembers and won't record it again.
4. The cusomization that you could do.
5. The fact that SageTV never treated me like I was stupid (always let me decide on many, many settings instead of the AOL-like Tivo)
6. Networking where my wife and I could be watching a recorded show downstairs then decide to lay in bed and, with one remote control keypress, continue watching the show upstairs. With Tivo (if you paid the rediculous fee for home networking) you still had to physically copy the show from one box to another --- That's *SO* 1999 :-)

As you can tell, I'm a HUGE fan of Sage and I tell everyone about it that will listen.

Great job guys, keep it up!

Stacy

[dbfresh23]

Originally Posted by srothwell

I came from a ReplayTV (which was light years ahead of Tivo anyway).

Yeah, I don't get this. Why does Tivo get all the hype? RPTV is much better then it. I've used both quite extensively and just don't get why Tivo became King of retail DVRs rather then ReplayTV. I actually blame it mostly on Directv being that about 3/4 of Tivo's customers are DirecTivo owners.

[stevech]

Re non-TiVo

"The Genius is not in the design -
It's in the Marketing"

[src666]

Originally Posted by dbfresh23

Yeah, I don't get this. Why does Tivo get all the hype? RPTV is much better then it. I've used both quite extensively and just don't get why Tivo became King of retail DVRs rather then ReplayTV. I actually blame it mostly on Directv being that about 3/4 of Tivo's customers are DirecTivo owners.

The difference is that TIVO spent real money to run a real marketing campaign, while Replay relied on the geeks to find and recommend their product. So even people who had no idea what a PVR was had at least heard of TIVO, while Replay remained trapped by obscurity.