Myth to Sage questions

[Staudie]

I want to put together an HD/SD PVR using SageTV. I’ve already gone down the MythTV road and I wasn’t satisfied with the outcome. I wasn’t able to divers for my LCD and wireless card to work. Now with the scheduling issues and the distro I final set on (Mythbuntu) seems to have vanished. So I think its time to look at a Windows based solution. This is what I have now:

Silverstone GD01MX
ASUS A8N-SLI SE
Athlon 64 X2 3800+
2gig Corsair ValueSelect
WD 500 gig SATA2
Evga 7600GT
Hauppauge PVR-500MCE
PCHDTV 5500
StarTech FireWire (Motorola 6200 STB)
Comcast Digital Cable w/ HD

I have 4 questions about this setup working:

1. Now that SageTV can do clear QAM I thinking of swapping out the PC-5500 for a HVR-1600 for HD viewing. I’m hoping it will work like the PC-5500 and be able to pick up the QAM stations off my cable feed. The PC-5500 can do QAM-64, QAM-128 and QAM-256. Yet I don’t see any reference to that on the 1600 just clear QAM and I’m not sure they are the something or what.

2. OS... Vista or XP. What’s better to run SageTV on? I don’t have any experience with Vista so I’m not sure what added befits it has.

3. Video Card... I keep reading about the new 8000 series and its ability to do H.256(?) I think this for HDDVD/Blueray but again I’m not sure. I was thinking of pulling the 7600GT for a 8500 or 8600. Do I need the added horsepower to help the CPU out?

4. The last question is on the STB. I’m reading the STB thread on these forums and it looks like I can do this. Is there anything improvements to the hardware/software that would help the STB feed. I plan on using the firewire STB connection as my main channel watching feed and just use the cards for recording. Since the box will get all of the channels.

Anything other helpful ideas/pointer would be great. I’m want to get it up and running before the next session so I don’t miss my favorite show again.

Thanks
-Staudie

[matt91]

Not an answer to your questions, but there is a Linux version of sage (and sage server).

Forums here: http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=38

Matt

[fyodor]

I'd consider getting an hdhomerun for QAM tuning. It's pretty well supported, it has two tuners, and you can use it with pretty much any windows pvr program.

[jturner421]

I'm in the process of moving from Mythtv myself. I did have my system running fairly well, but there were minor issues always cropping up. I set up a system yesterday. My OS is Win XP SP2, running on an AMD 3500+with a Leadtek 6200TC (this combo played HD material is Myth). I plan on order an AMD 4200+ X2 as a replacement processor tonight as an upgrade to better handle transcoding duties. I have an HDHomerun that is currently using an OTA antenna. It worked well. I plan on using the second tuner for QAM when I have some time to go through the channels. I tried to setup firewire yesterday, but the drivers needed appear to be offline at the moment.

I did miss that there was no commerical skip, although setting the FFWD to 30 seconds takes care of that. I'm evaluating a commercial skipping add-on that seems to be working fairly well at identifying breaks. YMMV with HD material.

Overall I'm impressed with it. It behaves much closer to my old Series 1 Tivo than MythTV ever did. Using the Windows Nvidia drivers is a step up from the Linux drivers since it supports the Purevideo Decoder. As a bonus, I've been able to play my recordings from my Myth system in Sage since they are standard mpeg's.

My last suggestion to you is no matter which OS you use, do a clean install and only install what you need.

[Staudie]

My last suggestion to you is no matter which OS you use, do a clean install and only install what you need.

Yeah... I just placed an order for Vista Home premo and Ill just format the drive Myth is on. Also I'll go ahead and take a look at the Homerun.

Thanks for the advice,
-Staudie