Thinking about using SageTV to replace my Replaytv 5040

[flabingo]

I have two D* sat receivers that were modified by nextcom. They work flawlessly. They have added the sage capability recently and the comments are positive. I also have replay and slingbox and each has a place for me. The Replay has wonderful commercial management but no HD Both Slingmedia and nextcom have good support.

[Fluffdaddy]

Originally Posted by flabingo

I have two D* sat receivers that were modified by nextcom. They work flawlessly. They have added the sage capability recently and the comments are positive. I also have replay and slingbox and each has a place for me. The Replay has wonderful commercial management but no HD Both Slingmedia and nextcom have good support.

I really want to do the nextcom thing, but $550 bucks is hard to swallow when I also really want that new HD-DVD player too. Choices Choices

[dotheDVDeed]

Has anyone built interoperability between ReplayTVs and SageTV?

I'm thinking of having ReplayTVs as backends to SageTV, stuffed in a closet, recording faithfully. SageTV clients could surf the program descriptions and select and watch ReplayTV MPEGs. Possible?

TIM

[waynedunham]

Originally Posted by dotheDVDeed

Has anyone built interoperability between ReplayTVs and SageTV?

I'm thinking of having ReplayTVs as backends to SageTV, stuffed in a closet, recording faithfully. SageTV clients could surf the program descriptions and select and watch ReplayTV MPEGs. Possible?

TIM

You won't see this happen. The networking on the Replay isn't robust enough to handle this kind of thing. Using DVArchive to transfer shows from your ReplayTV to your PC takes FOREVER, it will take you many times longer to transfer the show to a PC than it would take you to WATCH the show on a ReplayTv, or stream and watch it on another ReplayTV on the same network.

Plus Replay Mpeg's don't conform to Mpeg standards so a lot of players can't even play them without first processing them with an external program to clean up the Mpeg headers.

Believe me, I would like nothing better than something like this. Ideally I'd be happy to be able to use a ReplayTV as a Sage Client. I have 4 ReplayTVs (2 older 2000/3000 series and 2 newer 5040's) and love them dearly. I just had to replace a dying hard drive in my 3000 series.

But the handwriting is on the wall for them. They can't do HD, they don't work and play nice with PC's, etc.

So that HD extender for SageTV can't get here fast enough for me!

[dotheDVDeed]

Sorry, Wayne I can't agree with that.

With DVArchive I just click on a show and nearly instantly I'm watching it with VLC. No previous downloading of the file to the PC is necessary. Seems to "play nicely with PC's" if you ask me.

And what's this Replay MPEGs not conforming to "MPEG standards". Medium 5000 ReplayTV files even play fine on most DVD players. They only lack Dolby Digital and instead use MPEG sound.

OTA analog maybe going away, but cable and satellite will be providing standard def programming for many years to come. I can still see uses for the later ReplayTV models.

TIM

[waynedunham]

Originally Posted by dotheDVDeed

Sorry, Wayne I can't agree with that.

With DVArchive I just click on a show and nearly instantly I'm watching it with VLC. No previous downloading of the file to the PC is necessary. Seems to "play nicely with PC's" if you ask me.

I agree that streaming shows with DVArchive works great. I was talking about pulling content that you want to save/archive off a ReplayTV. It's A) slower than death, and more importantly B) makes the ReplayTV very unstable if you're trying to record or play something on it or worse yet trying to stream a show from another ReplayTV.

Originally Posted by dotheDVDeed

And what's this Replay MPEGs not conforming to "MPEG standards". Medium 5000 ReplayTV files even play fine on most DVD players. They only lack Dolby Digital and instead use MPEG sound.

I don't record in Medium, I use High to try and get the best picture on my crappy Comcast analog cable signal. Plus as I said, it is a moot point when it take many hours to use DVArchive (a great program, don't get me wrong) to pull a show off a ReplayTV rendering said machine unuseable (IMHO) for that entire time. Lots of people say, "well just let it download the shows in the wee hours of the morning". That's all fine and good, but I've got so many themes, favorites, etc that there's almost no part of the day that the machines aren't recording something. (sadly Nascar, or American Chopper since Replay thinks those fall into Auto Racing and Motorcycle Racing respectively when both actually fall into the LAME A** category. again IMHO).
And recording while trying to download something off a ReplayTV causes lots of troubles too.

Originally Posted by dotheDVDeed

OTA analog maybe going away, but cable and satellite will be providing standard def programming for many years to come. I can still see uses for the later ReplayTV models.

I agree that SD programming will be around for quite a while, but that's why I have 2 PVR-500's in my HTPC. As soon as there's a decent HD extender available my Replay's and my MVP will be headed for Ebay and I'll be 100% SageTV on both my TV's.

I can't fault either the ReplayTV, nor DVArchive for having troubles pulling content off the ReplayTV's to arvhive on your PC since the Replay's weren't built to do that and DVArchive put that feature in for "occasional" use, not basically using your ReplayTV as an extra tuner in your Sage setup.
Both ReplayTV and DVArchive work great for what they do and I love them both. For me at least they just can't blend well with my SageTV use.

I guess another thing is that I do not watch content on my PC. I have a much more comfortable place to watch TV in both my living room and bedroom. So DVArchive does me no good since I have a ReplayTV in both those locations and can stream shows between them. I've got an MVP in the bedroom and I'm using my Roku Photobridge to play SageTV files in the living room. The Roku has no Sage UI, I just play the shows by setting up the recording dirs on my Sage machine as shared dirs and manually selecting them on the Roku.