Why NOT BeyondTV?

[mayamaniac]

From my experience, if you don't tinker with SageTV, meaning don't mess with it after getting it to work properly, then your wiz.bin is pretty safe. I still have my original wiz.bin from over 2 years ago. If you like to install add-ons and experiment a lot with different settings, then backing up is a must. Because at some point, something will get screwed up and you need to restore from a backup. You need to backup at least once every two weeks. Its not very hard to set up a backup, follow the instructions in my signature.

But I would also like an option to store the meta data on a separate file, like including the .my file add-on and a way to generate those files automatically within SageTV as a built-in feature.

[Tiki]

I tried the BTV free trial first about 2 years ago, but after about a week I switched to Sage and never looked back.

The deal-breaker for me with BTV was something very simple: I had only one tuner card. I set up a manual recording for 8:00pm on Channel 4. At 7:30pm I was watching live TV on another channel. Sometime before 8:00pm I left the room. When I came back at 8:30pm, I saw that it was still on the other channel and didn't record the show I had requested for 8:00 on Channel 4.

I experimented and found it was repeatable - BTV gave preference to LiveTV over Favorites and Manual Recordings. There was no mention of this preference in their manual and I got no response when I emailed tech support.

Under the same scenario in Sage, I would have gotten a pop-up warning about a minute before 8:00 asking if it was OK to change the channel for the Manual recording. If there was no response, Sage would remove the message and change the channel anyway, thereby giving precedence to the Manual Recording.

This may sound trivial, but it can be really frustrating to miss an episode of your favorite show because someone left the TV turned to the Weather Channel or something and tied up the last available tuner on your DVR.

I have no idea if BTV still behaves this way, but when I got no help from them within a few days, I tried Sage. When I saw Sage handled things in a much more intelligent manner, I made the switch.

[lotusvball]

One of the main reasons for me is a Thread like this would never be allowed at BTV. There was one started a couple of years back and within an hour was taken down. If you don't compare yourself to the competition you can only grow so good.

[traker1001]

When I was looking at BTV, The first thing that turned me away was the fact that there WEB UI required internet access to use and could not be hardly customized, I know probably a petty, but yuck!

Long Live Sage...

[mickp]

Originally Posted by traker1001

When I was looking at BTV, The first thing that turned me away was the fact that there WEB UI required internet access to use and could not be hardly customized, I know probably a petty, but yuck!

Long Live Sage...

You must have missed Stephane's excellent web interface for btv then. Adds tons of features that are missing from btv such as keyword recording.

Mick.

[nielm]

Originally Posted by mayamaniac

From my experience, if you don't tinker with SageTV, meaning don't mess with it after getting it to work properly, then your wiz.bin is pretty safe. I still have my original wiz.bin from over 2 years ago. If you like to install add-ons and experiment a lot with different settings, then backing up is a must.

Just like to say that I have my original wiz.bin from nearly 4 years ago (Sage 1.4), and I do play around and experiment. I also do daily incremental backups

[clayfree]

I'm a recent convert to Sage. I had been with BTV for years. I finally got tired of waiting for them to combine the media center with BTV so that's my primary reason for moving.

Here are my initial thoughts after using both. BTV is easier to set up and the interface is nicer. I was surprised that Sage does not include a web interface and com skip. I was able to install both but it took extra time, those are just built into BTV and they work very well. I really like that Sage is an all in one media center, this is a big drawback of BTV. Thanks god for SageMC, it makes it a totally different program with the customizable menus, etc. Also like to see official support for extenders, there was a lot of discussion about the lack of it over at BTV. While there are some fantastic downloads for BTV it seems like Sage has a more active developer community.

[Wheemer]

Originally Posted by stevech

It seems to me that wiz.bin may be a relational database such as via MySQL, where the preferences and viewing history/status for each show is stored, likely with the EPG ID as the primary key. Nice design, but as CollinR says, SageTV disk reconfiguation or fall-back is frustrating and fragile to a fault because of this. I suppose it gets messy for shows with episode IDs and the like.

I dread the next time I have to change driver letters (thanks, Microsoft) and folders and try to again avoid losing SageTV recordings, given there's no user help at all on this from Sage (with recognition to well intended users here).

I think a cetralized database is the wrong way to go aswell... Having individual data files follow the recordings makes so much more sense.

[Wheemer]

Originally Posted by CollinR

BTV has good commercial skipping, I don't know about you guys but I have messed with commskip for hours and it's nowhere near as accurate as what comes with BTV.

Your's is an isolated case I am sure. BTV's commercial detection was horrible for me, and Comskip is over 95% accurate.

[AngelofDeth]

I wouldn't put a number on it, but Comskip works very well with a 3 sec start/stop delay. The biggest problem I usually have is it tends to cut off the last part of a show when the credits are showing.

[rickgillyon]

Originally Posted by stevech

I dread the next time I have to change driver letters (thanks, Microsoft)

When does MS enforce drive letters? Seems to me the only fixed drive letter is the boot/system drive isn't it?

[stevech]

Originally Posted by rickgillyon

When does MS enforce drive letters? Seems to me the only fixed drive letter is the boot/system drive isn't it?

I was complaining that Microsoft gave us drive letters back in the DOS days and they're still here. Unlike mount point directory names and soft links in Unix which make physical drives transparent. I know that XP and later now have similar things, but they're hard to use and problematic.

[rickgillyon]

I've never had a problem with drive letters. Why would you need to change them? If you install a new system or drive, just assign the same drive letters as previously, Sage will see the recordings. NP.

[stevech]

Originally Posted by rickgillyon

I've never had a problem with drive letters. Why would you need to change them? If you install a new system or drive, just assign the same drive letters as previously, Sage will see the recordings. NP.

The problem arises in migrating recordings from one drive to another. In Sage, the process is arcane, in that the requirements for matching the drive letter and folder names and so on are undocumented.

[rickgillyon]

I think arcane would be pushing it, and it is documented in a FAQ here. I take your meaning though, should probably be in the manual as an Appendix. As simple as:
Add new disk
Add as a Recording Folder
Close Sage
Move Recordings
Start Sage

I did it a few times, never saw any problems.

[mickp]

One thing that I miss in BTV is the way that it stores show metadata in the recorded mpeg files. There's never a problem moving files about. In most cases btv catches onto file moves instantly. This is particularly nice if you're archiving the raw mpeg files to a dvd (not authoring a real dvd). I used to have a video directory setup as the root of my dvd drive and could pop a dvd of recordings into the drive and have BTV recognise the show names, record date, description, ratings etc as if they'd never been removed. Maybe I should take a closer look at .my files.

Some things that I disliked about btv;

Lack of DVB support ever, ever, ever, ever. (deal breaker)

Separate apps btv/bm makes for a less satisfying media experience. Want to check the guide while you're playing some music? As soon as you enter btv (they both run at the same time and swap which app is in front fairly gracefully) the music will stop. When you return to bm you'll need to start your music playing again.

Requirement to designate a single directory where new recordings will be made. If you want to add an additional drive for more space then you either setup a volume set (or raid 0 array) or you manually change the default recording directory whenever you think a particular drive is getting too full and you would like to start making recordings to a different drive. There is no automagic process to allow recording to multiple discrete drives. Duh!

Occasional synch issues. May just have been my hardware setup but I've never had these problems since moving to sage.

Lack of any customisation inside the btv app other than skins (not real skins so much as graphic substitutes) and being able to set a custom exe path for archiving shows. BM allows for plugin developers to add new menu items and use the bm widgets etc. BM and this capabilty was going to be integrated with BTV but it doesn't look like this will ever happen now. Studio has it all over bm customisation anyway.

Lacks the little video window in the corner. If you need to go out and change something then the show stops until you navigate back to it. No nice video switching like with ctrl-v in Sage.


Mick.

[gtd885a]

Does BeyondTV work for firewire recording? That's the original reason I chose SageTV.

[stevech]

Originally Posted by mickp

One thing that I miss in BTV is the way that it stores show metadata in the recorded mpeg files. There's never a problem moving files about. In most cases btv catches onto file moves instantly.
...
Requirement to designate a single directory where new recordings will be made. If you want to add an additional drive for more space then you either setup a volume set (or raid 0 array) or you manually change the default recording directory whenever you think a particular drive is getting too full and you would like to start making recordings to a different drive. There is no automagic process to allow recording to multiple discrete drives. Duh!

Mick.

How does a not-so-tech-savy person deal wit this single-directory restriction in BTV?

[sainswor99]

Originally Posted by stevech

How does a not-so-tech-savy person deal wit this single-directory restriction in BTV?

Through their easy-to-use interface



Sorry, couldn't resist. Actually, from what I can remember, BTV warned you when the default directory was getting full, and you just went to the Setup option and changed the default directory to the new empty place. You could also tell BTV to record a specifc show to a specific location as a method of disk management. I'll admit, I do prefer Sage's auto-management of multiple drives, but BTV's setup of multiple locations was really no more difficult than Sages' setup; just different.

[Bigbird999]

I use both Sage and BTV as well as a networked HD media player (Linkplayer2) and a cable company dual tuner HD recorder STB. I run Sage and BTV Link (equivalent to Sage client) on the same computer often at the same time to watch 2 football games at the same time on dual monitors.

As far a which is better.........It is to-may-tos /vs. to-mat-os. Both have strengths and weaknesses. Both work well. IMO BTV has a slightly lower geek requirement (mainly because of the built in features like commercial skip and compressioning to divx) so setup is easier for a newb (however, I don't think either one is suitable your grandma). I think this thread has hit all of the features of both. Which one is best depends on what you want/need from this type of software. Either one is great.

WRT mods taking down posts on the BTV forums, that is a issue that stopped when Rakesh became president about a year ago.

BB