Starting over, best way to transfer Sage settings

[weeber]

OK, I bought my first house and I'm upgrading my entertainment center (no more 27" TV for me ). I started running SageTV 2.1 on a whim to see what my old hardware could do (Athlon 1.4, 256MB PC133 RAM, FX5200 video card).

My little experiment has turned into something that I can't live without. I'm going to get a 46" LCD TV and I have to get a new computer to process this "HD" stuff that everyone is talking about. I of course still want SageTV on it.

My question is, what's the best way to get my Sage configuration (watched status, favorites, TV shows I still need to watch) over into my new system? Right now, I'm running version 5, but I plan on upgrading to V6 for the upgrade. Is it as simple as copying all the recorded shows and then the wiz.bin file? What if I change the directory structure of where my recorded shows are located? Can SageTV still find them? Is there a way to do this without causing too much pain?

Here's a couple of other questions I have:

- Based on my reading it seems that there may be an issue with Sage, Vista, and Nvidia hardware. I was planning on getting a 8600gt and Vista for the new computer, but now I'm not so sure. Anyone want to comment? Should I stick with XP, go with ATI, or something else?

-From my reading, HDHomerun is the way to go to record HD content. Any other comments? I'm planning on using QAM decoding.

- I've been using the default sage interface since the beginning, but I gather SageMCE is the way to go for 16:9 viewing, any other must have add-ons?

- How cool is this stuff once it's up and running?

[Opus4]

This FAQ includes info about moving SageTV to a new PC.

- Andy

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by weeber

OK, I bought my first house and I'm upgrading my entertainment center (no more 27" TV for me ). I started running SageTV 2.1 on a whim to see what my old hardware could do (Athlon 1.4, 256MB PC133 RAM, FX5200 video card).

My little experiment has turned into something that I can't live without. I'm going to get a 46" LCD TV and I have to get a new computer to process this "HD" stuff that everyone is talking about. I of course still want SageTV on it.

My question is, what's the best way to get my Sage configuration (watched status, favorites, TV shows I still need to watch) over into my new system? Right now, I'm running version 5, but I plan on upgrading to V6 for the upgrade. Is it as simple as copying all the recorded shows and then the wiz.bin file? What if I change the directory structure of where my recorded shows are located? Can SageTV still find them? Is there a way to do this without causing too much pain?

Here's a couple of other questions I have:

- Based on my reading it seems that there may be an issue with Sage, Vista, and Nvidia hardware. I was planning on getting a 8600gt and Vista for the new computer, but now I'm not so sure. Anyone want to comment? Should I stick with XP, go with ATI, or something else?

-From my reading, HDHomerun is the way to go to record HD content. Any other comments? I'm planning on using QAM decoding.

- I've been using the default sage interface since the beginning, but I gather SageMCE is the way to go for 16:9 viewing, any other must have add-ons?

- How cool is this stuff once it's up and running?

Conventional wisdom says that the purevideo HD enhanced codecs coupled with Nvidia hardware is the way to go. However, there are lots of issues here with this working under Sage, and it's unclear what's broken. XP is more mature and if you only care about MPEG2, then I think the purevideo codec should work with the 8600GT fine.

That said, in this thread: http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=26227 the Sage folks finally gave us a little guidance about what they recommend, seemingly ATI over Nvidia, at least for Vista systems.

I would wait until they post again with more detailed information about recommended hardware/codec/driver info. Certainly, if you are building something new, and can use the same config they test software on and therefore is known to work well for HD playback, I would go with that.

There are probably a hundred threads on these forums about trying to get the hardware/codec/driver stuff to play HD back without problems. Unless you have quite a bit of time to do debugging, I would wait until we get back more info from Sage staff.

Thanks,
Mike