So Long and farewell to SAGETV

[sandor]

your problems are interesting, but i would think hardly the norm.

i built my sage box solely based on OTA HD, beginning with SageTV v4 and now running the latest 6.1.4 RC. Now i have a P4 3 ghz capture box running with two A180's, an AMD 3800 running as a client, and a placeshifter license for a 2nd "client" and outside-the-home watching on my mac laptops. 2 years in and the only problems i have been having are completely user-induced. I have 2 TB of recording space, as well as having about 250 DVDs ripped onto the SageTV server.

Most importantly, the WAF is extremely high, she can run it without problem, and only complains when i "tweak" and screw something up. that and the stupid DST change screwed up the server since Microsoft refused to release an update for Windows 2000.


As far as picture quality, I know in the Philadelphia area Comcast receives the same ATSC feed i get OTA, and then they compress it - so there is no way cable quality is anything but worse than my SageTV OTA picture.

[michaeldrock]

I have been running sage for over a year now, with the server upstairs and all of my TV's on MVP clients. The server is an AMD 2600 and the entire system has been rock solid! It plays all my DVD's, music, and streams SD television just fine (although the quality of this is HIGHLY dependant on the tuner!). I started with version 5 and have upgraded through several betas, and I will be a SAGE user for a long time. I can deal with the SD television until all the CableLabs crap works itself out and am looking forward to the supposed release of the HD extender Sorry to hear about your experiences!

[PhillJones]

Originally Posted by geogecko

That is a very good point, and basically what I've been doing.

It takes a fairly computer competent person to know what they are doing. If a person isn't into tweaking things around, to get good results, and enjoy doing that, then it will be a frustrating experience.

I've had several people at work talk to me about it, and most of them take a different route, after I talk to them. I don't downplay it, as you might think, but I let them know, that it's not a trivial thing to setup. It takes a lot of time, unless you do a lot of research up front (but that takes a lot of time also), and even then, with every new software release, there can be issues...

I'm satisfied with the way things have turned out right now, but the first year or so, was painful.

Well my system works well now and I know enough I think to keep it up and running with the help of these forums although I doubt I could do it without help. It's been recording HD for about a month now, but it took 2 years to get this far. Maybe one day I'll get it to play DVDs acceptably.

I do wish that when I first started looking into HTPC, I'd have realized just how painful the setup would be. I would never have attempted it.

[mayamaniac]

Originally Posted by PhillJones

I do wish that when I first started looking into HTPC, I'd have realized just how painful the setup would be. I would never have attempted it.

Sorry you didn't read my SageTV Review in my signature at the bottom. It was written over two years ago and here's a quote in it from myself:

After months, I realized that you have to almost enjoy tinkering with SageTV like if it was a hobby if you want to get into it, and I think most SageTV users are PVR or computer hobbyists. I know I'm one of them. I chose SageTV over Tivo because I like the many features it offers that Tivo doesn't. But if you want a simple PVR system that just work and not have to mess with it too much, go buy a Tivo system or "maybe" something like a Microsoft Media Center Edition PC. Your non-techie family and friends will enjoy it more. Stay away from SageTV, BeyondTV, Meedio, Media Portal, GBPVR, MythTV, Freevo, etc. Maybe one day, SageTV will work effortlessly like Tivo does for the non-techie people out there, but it’s not there yet.

And SageTV still isn't ready for non-techie people. Its gotten a lot better over the years. The MVP support as a client is one of SageTV's greatest innovation. Before that, I always thought that outputting good picture quality to the TV was one of the biggest problem, especially for SD TVs, and the MVP Extender solved that problem. And if the soon to be release HD Extender is as good, that will solve the picture quality problem for HD content. These extender clients are a BIG DEAL because getting good smooth picture quality is a pain in the a** and a source of frustrations for many SageTV users. It's the one of the things Tivo users never have to deal with, they just plug it to their TVs like a DVD player and the picture quality is great.

As I said two years ago, I still think you should get a tivo or a DVR from your provider if you want hassle free setups. if you are a bit more daring, then try the new Vista MCE. These solutions are much easier than SageTV. Choose SageTV if you enjoy tinkering with the computer and like the added features it has to offer.

[PhillJones]

Originally Posted by mayamaniac

Sorry you didn't read my SageTV Review in my signature at the bottom. It was written over two years ago and here's a quote in it from myself:

It's okay, I don't hold you personally responsible.

I see relying on media extenders as a problem. as I said in my thread about one box solutions, I don't really think having one box for tuning, one for scheduling, and one for playback to be a good solution but I seem to be one on my own. Especially if it's a shed load of money for a piece of hardware that ought to be a software fix.

I'm hopeful that the HD rendering problems will get ironed out for rendering on PC. A lot of these issue perhaps come down to shoddy deinterlacing and rendering by nVIDIA purevideo/forceware on one end and bad input on the other. Sage kind of get's caught in the middle and is trying to make everything talk to everything else. If vista takes off, nVIDIA and ait will be under more pressure to get their end of things working smoothly and the broadcasters will improve over time no doubt as more people upgrade to home theater level kit.

[Lostinpvr]

I've had my problems also but I have tweaked it to the point that I don't have many issues. I love sage and just purchased 2 MVP's.
Hate to see you say farewell.
Guess you just gave up?

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by jbarr

I think it all boils down to your expectations. I firmly believe that a home-built HTPC will NEVER rival or surpass the picture quality of a cable company-provided DVR/STB.

Then you really need to look at your system IMO. That is unless you've got an SDTV, if that's the case, then limitations of PC graphics cards will cause you issues, but the MVP solves all of those issues. My SD via my MVP looks just as good a live.

Now, if you've got an HDTV, that's a completely different story. The upscaled/deinterlaced video from Sage has always been the best (SD) picture I've seen on my HDTVs. For a comparison of upconverted vs not, see the first attachment.

And for HD recording, my 6800 with nVidia decoders (via Sage) is the best HD picture I've seen as well (save HD DVD via my 360). It bests even my MyHD 130.

Originally Posted by mayamaniac

After months, I realized that you have to almost enjoy tinkering with SageTV like if it was a hobby if you want to get into it, and I think most SageTV users are PVR or computer hobbyists. I know I'm one of them. I chose SageTV over Tivo because I like the many features it offers that Tivo doesn't. But if you want a simple PVR system that just work and not have to mess with it too much, go buy a Tivo system or "maybe" something like a Microsoft Media Center Edition PC. Your non-techie family and friends will enjoy it more. Stay away from SageTV, BeyondTV, Meedio, Media Portal, GBPVR, MythTV, Freevo, etc. Maybe one day, SageTV will work effortlessly like Tivo does for the non-techie people out there, but it’s not there yet.

I mean absolutely no offense by this but, that is something that just continually baffles me (and I suspect the Sage devs as well), that is, how people can have such vastly differing experiences with something like Sage.

Typically for me, Sage takes about 10 minutes to install, maybe another 10 to tweak the way I like it, and I'm done. That's it. I don't have to touch it again. Sage is more reliable than my Dish Network ViP 211.

And I know there are a number of others here have had the same wonderful experience, I'd say the vast, vast majority:
http://forums.sage.tv/forums/showthread.php?t=21728

But then there are the reports of "hours" of setup time, "constant" tweaking, instability, etc. I'm left puzzled by that, and must come to the conclusion that for these people, there must be some underlying issue in the OS, maybe wonky hardware/drivers, Dshow filter mess, something that's causing problems.

Originally Posted by PhillJones

I see relying on media extenders as a problem.

Who's relying on extenders? Sage and SageClient are really the primary products, in fact, SageClient on my HTPC is my primary interface to SageTV. It's what I use for all my "critical viewing". I use it to watch all my Favorites (well my favorite Favorites ), my DVDs, when we have Movie Night, my friends and I watch ripped DVDs via SageClient on my HTPC.

I've got an extender too, and it's great, I'm very happy there's a ~$100 way to get Sage on my secondary display, vs a ~500-1000 PC.

as I said in my thread about one box solutions, I don't really think having one box for tuning, one for scheduling, and one for playback to be a good solution but I seem to be one on my own.

I still don't understand the argument. Scheduling, recording/tuning, and playback aren't segregated like you make them out to be. You can quite easily do all of it from one PC. I do scheduling and playback from my HTPC. I ran "one box" for years, from SageTV 1.3 up until late in V2 (a year or two I'd guess).

I've expanded because I decided I wanted a media server (HDDs are too loud for the living room/theater), and because I wanted Sage in more than one room.

The extenders are an awesome option (will be even better when the HD one surfaces) but they most certainly aren't a requirement.

Especially if it's a shed load of money for a piece of hardware that ought to be a software fix.

I don't see what software "problem" the MVP is fixing.

I'm hopeful that the HD rendering problems will get ironed out for rendering on PC.

I've had my share of HD problems, and Sage 4 and to a lesser extent 5 definitely had some HD bugs. But as of 6.1 I can't say I have any HD problems I can attribute to Sage. All my problems these days are with getting reception, and that's probably largely due to my antenna placement which I was hoping to make work, but I'll probably break down and move to a better location soon.

Further, if you check some of the local reception threads on AVS it will become painfully obvious that HD, as a whole, is "inconsistent". Broadcasters are still treating their HD broadcasts as secondary to their analog ones, and it shows. Problems with audio, video, transmitters go down.

HD is still rather bleeding edge in general.

A lot of these issue perhaps come down to shoddy deinterlacing and rendering by nVIDIA purevideo/forceware on one end and bad input on the other.

FSE VMR9 on my 6800 is great, better than my MyHD. Runs about 10-20% CPU usage. 93.71 drivers I believe.

Sage kind of get's caught in the middle and is trying to make everything talk to everything else.

On that point I agree with you, Sage gets blamed for a lot of stuff that's not it's fault.

[mayamaniac]

Originally Posted by PhillJones

I see relying on media extenders as a problem. as I said in my thread about one box solutions, I don't really think having one box for tuning, one for scheduling, and one for playback to be a good solution but I seem to be one on my own. Especially if it's a shed load of money for a piece of hardware that ought to be a software fix.

Well the whole CableCard/QAM/DRM stuff is a mess and I have no idea who's to blame for that. So just be glad that the HDHomerun is a an option or else you get nothing besides OTA signals. That extra box is beyond SageTV's control. As for the extenders, you definitely need them if you have multiple TVs. I think they are better than building a mini PCs as clients. So you can't complain about extenders being extra boxes, I think they are necessary. As I said, if they are as good as the MVPs, they will output better picture quality than any software decoder solutions.

Originally Posted by stanger89

Typically for me, Sage takes about 10 minutes to install, maybe another 10 to tweak the way I like it, and I'm done. That's it. I don't have to touch it again. Sage is more reliable than my Dish Network ViP 211.

You sound like Ron Popel trying to sell SageTV, "set it and forget it!" SageTV is a PC software, meaning it inherits all the problems the PC has. This includes viruses, trojans, spyware, bugs, etc. Tivo or commercial DVRs don't have these problems. And there are all kind of problems that you may run into when installing SageTV, such as audio and video decoders, java versions, IR/RF remote controls, network connections, etc. And thats not including frustrations with customizations or other modifications. My point is if you are a non-techie computer user, you'll definitely be stucked with frustrations such as the OP of this thread.

[sandor]

I still dont understand the idea that SageTV somehow has inherent lower PQ than "regular" tv. My Sage setup easily has equal quality as my set top box ATSC tuner - it is great quality and was easy to setup (plug and play DVI to the back of my sammy DLP)

Perhaps people are running with underpowered hardware, or not using a HDMI or DVI for video... ? This isnt a problem with Sage, rather a problem with your hardware.

[Steve52]

Originally Posted by stanger89

I've had my share of HD problems, and Sage 4 and to a lesser extent 5 definitely had some HD bugs. But as of 6.1 I can't say I have any HD problems I can attribute to Sage. All my problems these days are with getting reception, and that's probably largely due to my antenna placement which I was hoping to make work, but I'll probably break down and move to a better location soon.

stranger89,
I started with V4 and now run V5. Almost eveything I record is HD. Do you really think I would see an impovement in HD if I upgrade to V6?

[BlueRidgeMark]

Originally Posted by mayamaniac

Well the whole CableCard/QAM/DRM stuff is a mess and I have no idea who's to blame for that.

Blame the FCC for forcing a digital format that was seriously questioned (if not outright condemned) by MANY, if not most, of the broadcast engineers in the business. It was politics, not engineering, that brought us to the status quo. I watched the fight play out in the trade journals, and it wasn't pretty. Naysayers were shouted down or ignored.


Kinda like critics of global warming today.

[jominor]

Originally Posted by mayamaniac

Well the whole CableCard/QAM/DRM stuff is a mess and I have no idea who's to blame for that. So just be glad that the HDHomerun is a an option or else you get nothing besides OTA signals. That extra box is beyond SageTV's control. As for the extenders, you definitely need them if you have multiple TVs. I think they are better than building a mini PCs as clients. So you can't complain about extenders being extra boxes, I think they are necessary. As I said, if they are as good as the MVPs, they will output better picture quality than any software decoder solutions.

You sound like Ron Popel trying to sell SageTV, "set it and forget it!" SageTV is a PC software, meaning it inherits all the problems the PC has. This includes viruses, trojans, spyware, bugs, etc. Tivo or commercial DVRs don't have these problems. And there are all kind of problems that you may run into when installing SageTV, such as audio and video decoders, java versions, IR/RF remote controls, network connections, etc. And thats not including frustrations with customizations or other modifications. My point is if you are a non-techie computer user, you'll definitely be stucked with frustrations such as the OP of this thread.

I agree with Stanger. The only time I had any real problems was when I went after plugins. The reason I selected Sage 1.4 is because it worked out of the box WITHOUT constant tweaking. In fact, niem wrote a plugin for the Remote Wonder that I *still* use to this day.

Tivo people who tweak their tivos will have problems also.

That being said, some people's configs are more complex than others, but a standard DVR or Tivo wouldn't work there either. SDTV Cable is simply a no-brainer with sage.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Steve52

stranger89,
I started with V4 and now run V5. Almost eveything I record is HD. Do you really think I would see an impovement in HD if I upgrade to V6?

Probably not if you're not having any problems. The best way I'd describe it is Sage has become more robust. Weirdness in transport streams that used to cause problems doesn't anymore.

[Steve52]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Probably not if you're not having any problems. The best way I'd describe it is Sage has become more robust. Weirdness in transport streams that used to cause problems doesn't anymore.

I am have some problems, but I am not sure it is Sage's fault. I am thinking about upgrading to V6 for that reason, and because I would like to stay somewhat current with their releases. I see 6.1.4 is available. Is that what you run, and what JAVA version do you run with your V6?

[stanger89]

I run Java 6 (which was a major performance boost) and 6.1, but I haven't yet installed 6.1.4.

[salsbst]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Probably not if you're not having any problems. The best way I'd describe it is Sage has become more robust. Weirdness in transport streams that used to cause problems doesn't anymore.

This statement is diametrically opposite to my experience. Sage v6 has problems with the transport streams that are available to me, where it had no such problems under v5. It seems that different setups are reacting to v6 very differently.

[salsbst]

It's strange, but for some reason the "New Posts" feature isn't bringing this thread to the top, even though it has been updated recently. Is this thread somehow marked as "not listed" under New Posts? Or has some change to the forum caused "new posts" to be less accurate? I've never noticed this behavior before.

[sandor]

Originally Posted by salsbst

It's strange, but for some reason the "New Posts" feature isn't bringing this thread to the top, even though it has been updated recently. Is this thread somehow marked as "not listed" under New Posts? Or has some change to the forum caused "new posts" to be less accurate? I've never noticed this behavior before.

What hardware are you running? (not in terms of the forum server, just in terms of SageTV and HD)

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by salsbst

It's strange, but for some reason the "New Posts" feature isn't bringing this thread to the top, even though it has been updated recently. Is this thread somehow marked as "not listed" under New Posts? Or has some change to the forum caused "new posts" to be less accurate? I've never noticed this behavior before.

It is actually more accurate now, because it knows you've already read the latest posts in this thread.

See the info in this post about a recently changed forum feature. "New Posts" will actually show only the threads w/new posts that you haven't yet read. So, since you made the last post prior to the quoted post, you've read the thread, so it isn't new to you any more. You can use the link for "Today's Posts" on the upper nav bar to see an extended list of recent posts.

- Andy

[salsbst]

Thanks for the explanation, Andy. I vote to return to the previous functionality. The "New Posts" feature was more useful to me when it would sort all threads in descending order of update time, regardless of what I had or had not done in the threads. With the new functionality, it is more difficult to find threads that I've been involved in... anyway, not a big deal, but thanks again for the response -- I know I'm off topic.

And now back to your regularly scheduled gripe session about other issues that are unrelated to the forum technology....

EDIT: I'll check out "Today's posts." It sounds like a partial substitute for what New Posts used to give me.