Forum suggestion

[mscottsimon]

Having fought with SageTV since May of 2006 (WHY does Sage want to charge me full price for a V6 upgrade after only 7 months of use?!?! Freakin' highway robbery since it has never worked right.) I am still on a quest for a good, working PVR based on Sage. There are always people here piping up to say "I have a great, working setup" so I'd love to see a "Known Good Configuration Forum" with very, very specific details about each working configuration down to the OS/SP level, BIOS rev, tuner card version and driver revs. From this forum you could guide the newbie to a "tested" configuration that is known to work in at least one wormhole in our worldly fabric.

[gplasky]

A lot of posters with known good configurations actually have a lot of that detail in their signatures. And again these would be more like guidelines. Usually the ones with the least amount of issues use the PC for Sage and nothing else. And also only have the bare minimum of installed apps on it. Sage, java, one decoder, drivers for tuner cards, driver for remote receiver, XP and SP2 and latest DirectX. Most stay away from motherboard with VIA chipsets on them. This might be a good thread simply to see and compare what is and isn't working for people. You could just start one in the hardware forum I would think.

Gerry

[blade]

Originally Posted by mscottsimon

Having fought with SageTV since May of 2006 (WHY does Sage want to charge me full price for a V6 upgrade after only 7 months of use?!?!

Just to be clear, upgrades have been $30 for a limited time and regular $40. They are not the full price of the software.

[jbarr]

I too would certainly welcome a forum devoted to SageTV success stories and successful configurations. If we are taking votes, you have mine as a "yes"!

And to gplasky's point, you are so correct. To be most successful with SageTV (or any HTPC) I highly recommend dedicating the PC to SageTV and SageTV-related apps only, and absolutely nothing else. The quickest way to have an unsuccessful installation is to muck it up with non-necessary apps.

Just remember that the PC you dedicate to SageTV will become your primary way of watching TV. If it is important to you to have a stable, always-on TV solution (and thus have a happy family) then you must be diligent in keeping things clean and simple. If that's not important to you, then install away.

I'm one of those people who loves to in tweak, test, and generally play with all sorts of apps from bulletproof "stable" apps to bleeding-edge, pre-alpha apps. And I'll wager that many of you share the same passion/affliction. But the best practice is to be as disciplined as you can and not install anything other than what you absolutely need for SageTV to work. I keep all of my "play stuff" on my laptop, completely separate from SageTV. In fact, I'm working on using VMWare to create a "sandbox" environment on my laptop to make things even "safer".

That said, if the suggested forum is created, I'll be happy to detail my "successful" setup!

[ctrlaltdel]

I think this is great idea. It would be useful for all to know what is being used and what what works and what doesn't.
Perhaps a webform could be filled out by each willing member and somehow everyone's data is tallied or graphed. This would show trends; might prove that dedicated systems are stable 95% of the time -or- that Linux is more stable than XP, etc.
By the way, my dedicated system setup is 99% stable. I don't recall it ever failing.
Paul

[Polypro]

I'll be building a new HTPC in the next couple weeks based on:

Zalman HD135
Asus P5W-DH
C2D E6600
XFX 7950 GT Passive (Yes there'll be some cutting )
nVIDIA DualTV
...and a lot of parts from my current rig (see sig).

Since I'll be wiping out C:\, I'll detail the build in the Hardware forum. My current build is rock solid, so it *is* possible.

P

[otakucode]

I'd like to see this as well. When I installed Sage and got jerky video, it would have been nice to be able to shoot a PM to someone I knew using the same video card and such and would probably have figured out a bit more quickly that ATI broke VMR9 on the 9800 Pro at some point and its still broken in the latest Catalyst drivers.

In addition to posting hardware and software configurations, it'd be nice to see a rundown of what they have actually done. If I didn't regularly play Xvid files with AC3 audio, I wouldn't have discovered the Sage bug that prevents Sage from resuming those files. Some people may have issues but not know it because they don't use HDTV, or they don't have surround, etc.