What did you find confusing about SageTV?

[tsitalon1]

I found Sagetv very easy to setup and get working with an analog tuner and no stb.

However, As a trial user I am very frustrated that even though I purchased a tuner card that was listed as a comptable card (pvr-150mce), You do not in any way support the blaster that comes with it.....That should be expressed in the list of compatible cards!

I wasted 3 days of reading and pulling out my hair trying to get Sagetv/HIP/or Girder to work. As it turns out I need to order the USB-UIRT to control my stb's

Please state, in bold font somwhere on your requirements page, that the only real IR transmitter device that Sagetv is compatible with natively is the USB-UIRT.

James

[jbarr]

My install was pretty simple. I actually did two installs: one on a "test" PC to see if it would even work for me, and second on a PC that will likely be my permanent setup. Both were "trial" installs of SageTV.

The first PC install was a snap, and on my 19" widescreen LCD monitor, it looks crisp and very slick. It really shows off what SageTV can do, and it simply looks impressive. It's clean and quick (3GHz processor, big HDD's, fast graphics, etc.) Very, very impressive indeed.

The second PC took considerably more tweaking. I specifically had two main issues.

The first issue was the graphics. I need to initially connect to my TV via S-video, so I purchased a new nVidia FX 5500 AGP card with TV out. After plowing through the nVidia config screens, I was able to get a pretty decent setup. It now boots to TV the output. That said, trying to get the "best" video configuration for S-Video was very, VERY tedious. I had to tweak lots of the nVidia settings to get the screen size, colors, and brightness looking good. I started with a resolution of 640x480, but it simply wouldn't work properly. The "graphics" looked great (Sage menus, Channel Guide, etc.) but when Live TV played full-screen, it overscanned something feirce making things unusable. I set the resolution to 800x600 and tweaked several of SageTV's video settings, and it now looks solid.

My TV is s plain old 27" tube TV, and the PC is an older 1.6GHz box, so I think a better TV and a newer, faster PC would significantly improve things--especially EPG scrolling (it's dog-slow as opposed to on my higher-end PC.) This just may be the excuse I need to get a better LCD TV....

The second issue revolved around the Haupauge IR Blaster. I got the remote working in a heartbeat, but I could not for the life of me get SageTV to control my DCT-2000 cable box. It worked like a charm on my first PC install, but not on the second. Then I remembered that I had to go into the separate Haupauge IR Blaster Configuration application and set things up there. I rebooted, and voila...it worked. So what was confusing was that one of SageTV's IR Blaster setup screens looked like it should have displayed a list of cable boxes, but the list was empty. I'm wasn't sure that I needed to configure the IR Blaster outside of SageTV.

OK, now I do admit that I read very little of the manual, and much was trial-and-error, but I guess that because I DID get everything working without too much fuss is a really testament to Haupauge's and SageTV's excellent development and design. I consider myself to be a computer expert, so finding solutions was just a typical troubleshooting process. But I believe that most novices would have been sorely lost.

I think the bottom line really comes down to the fact that if you want a simple plug-and-play Media Center, go out and buy a pre-configured Microsoft Media Center PC. But if you want the extendibility of SageTV and are willing to "dig in" a bit, the payoff in the end is worth it.

[blade]

Originally Posted by tsitalon1

However, As a trial user I am very frustrated that even though I purchased a tuner card that was listed as a comptable card (pvr-150mce), You do not in any way support the blaster that comes with it.....That should be expressed in the list of compatible cards!

Unless I'm mistaken the MCE cards do not come with a remote or blaster. Are you sure you didn't purchase a combo package that came with a 3rd party unsupported blaster?

According to jbarr's post (just below your's) the hauppauge cards that come with blasters do work with Sage.

[krasev]

the most confusing thing was epg channels and multituner setup.
I was setting 2 tunners one for cable (from settopbox) and other for the same cable but unscrumbled (without converter). Everything got confusing, till I figure out to edit sage.properties file... merit for tuners. They were equal (0). I set merit 1 for unscrumbled tuner. After that all started making sense... even better than I expected. I mean the channels for unscrambled tuner I have to set are different than channels from the same lineup cable topbox. Say FOX on cable lineup is channel 2 but unscrumbled is 24. On SageTV evntually they came up as regular cable channel lineup. Fox - channel 2, but clicking on it to watch right tuner took care of it and redirected to a proper channel 24 as it was setup for this tuner... well... I guess fox is fox on scrumbled and uncrumbled channels ))

another confusing thing is quality of recording... say, if I set VCD quality I have no video in sagetv... and it gives me the error message... I guess something connected to a decoder (no shifting, just play & record with vcd recording quality). I didn't figure it out yet. How can I record with VCD quality

and more confusing things:

Extender problems:

1. sagetv doesn't start from the bootup... either black screen or flashing... (close what's people complaining in the forums). tried different updated mvp.bin file and it didn't help... just twice it did bootup. Checked all issues with firewall... besides on my internal network where sagetv extender and my comp, firewall is turned off by admin policy. So it's not an issue.

2. if eventually sagetv did booted up, what happened just twice, video and sound is horrible... very much jerky. I don't have though any trouble with Hauppauge MVP software.

in general, so far SageTV Media Center is absolutely incopatible with Hauppauge MVP (btw I have bought this device from your site for use with sagetv )))

[jbarr]

Originally Posted by blade

Unless I'm mistaken the MCE cards do not come with a remote or blaster. Are you sure you didn't purchase a combo package that came with a 3rd party unsupported blaster?

According to jbarr's post (just below your's) the hauppauge cards that come with blasters do work with Sage.

FYI, I purchased WinTV-PVR-150, not the MCE edition. The plain version came with a "Y" cable that plugs into the card and has two leads: IR Blaster and IR Receiver. It appears that the IR Blaster MUST be configured using the Haupauge IR Blaster Configuration utility.

When I was comparing boxes at CircuitCity, the MCE verion box DID show that it comes with an IR Blaster and an MCE-compliant remote. The confusion is: How Do you configure the IR Blaster? Is there an MCE version of the Haupauge IR Blaster utility, or is this handled withing SageTV? If it is consistent with the plain versionm it appears that the MCE IR Blaster is "configured" with a Haupauge utility, and "selected" within SageTV. The problem is that I don't recall seeing a "Media Center Edition Remote" as a choice in SageTV.

[Opus4]

So that this thread doesn't wander around too much, please leave questions of how to do something & replies to such questions for other threads where the topic can be dedicated to the issue. That said...

The remote/blaster that can be purchased with an MCE "kit" version of the Hauppauge tuners are MCE devices. Hauppauge intends for them to be used with MCE & thus does not provide support for the blaster, for example. They are supposed to fully function as MCE devices & be controllable via any MCE blaster control program. SageTV does not directly use an MCE blaster.

The Hauppauge 150 blaster can be used by SageTV, after it is configured by the Hauppauge software & that is mentioned on the manual. The manual was written before there was an MCE kit, so I'll try to remember to comment on that in the appropriate section(s).

- Andy

[evilpenguin]

New people ask a lot of questions about the Client/Server/Extender setup over on the HTPCforums. I think a few good diagrams showing example setups (Single Computer, Single Computer w/Extenders, Server w/Clients, etc.) and what each's respective capabilities/advantages/disadvantages are would go a long way.

[DaFrogBoy]

Being that I started with a TiVo and moved to SageTV, there have been a few "learning curves" that my wife and I have had with Sage.

1. Fast Forwarding - When fast forwarding through a recorded show, when you hit play, it does not "jump back" a few seconds like it does on TiVo. This makes it very difficult to get accustomed to skipping through commercials. One way I found around this was to hit the quick back "|<" button to jump back rather than hit play. This would help TiVo transitions.

2. I was a tad lost when Importing modules. There really isn't any feedback when you import an STVi. There also isn't an easy way to see what STVi's have been imported.

3. Deleting a recording was odd. I get the impression that you simply aren't supposed to delete shows. When I go to delete a show, my options include "I don't like it" and "wrong show". I can assume the wrong show is so that it attempts to record it again in the future, but I initially found this screen a bit odd.

4. No way to skip back to the beginning or end of a recording (that I know of)

5. I agree with a previous poster that the icons are not very intuitive in my opinion (although I did find them described in the Help)



I'll check with the wife when I get home, I know she had some learning curves with the switch; although I may have covered all of hers.

Note that these are just some of the hurdles we have run across in switching from a TiVo to SageTV. I absolutley love the new SageTV system, so please dont' take this as complaining. I'm just giving you what you asked ;-)

[sinodux]

It wasn't so much confusing as frustrating. My setup is in my signature below but origenally I had a board with a VIA northbridge chipset. I don't know the numbers of people who have the x00 sieres cards from Hauppauge, it seems like a lot, but finding out your card is not compatable with most of the Motherboards on the market was pretty sad. Since I am useing an older cip it was not easy to find a replacment. I could have paid $150 for a used one on ebay and had it quick but it took me 3 weeks before I could win a bid at a decient price.

It would just be nice to see something in the system requirments or something saying don't use VIA if you use blah blah blah.

Other than that everything was a breeze. Your setup instructions and installer work great I had no problems with the actual product at all

[IncredibleHat]

This isn't so much with the application itself, but rather in keeping the application up to date.

I find is extremely confusing to locate a possible update for download. The main website rarely says much in this regard, and most times the links are named the same, yet the version is newer.

It would be most beneficial if registered owners would get a mailing about new updates, with an actual useful URL to goto to download the new update from.

Or, better yet, a built in update checker to alert you in a small window on the main screen or something about "A newer update is available!".

Just my cents.