Sage6 GUI flaws in abundance

[KeithTX]

Originally Posted by ben_95sl1

I have to agree that the gui is worse for me with 6.2.10

I agree as well, the gui for the recordings screen is just too much. Perhaps it works for HD but for a 32" SD it's a disaster. Luckily I did a full backup before upgrading and was able to quickly go back to version 6.1. To be honest, if the gui keeps going in this direction I will likely skip any future versions.

[Shield]

Originally Posted by DFranch

I switched from Sage to MCE for about 1.5 years, and now I have switched back to Sage. With MCE I hope you like every feature right out of the box, because if you don't, there's nobody to complain to about it, and probably no way to change it. Also, they rarely make any kind of enhancements to it, and the only way to get it is to install a new version of windows. There is the occasional plug in, but nothing to write home about. There is one thing about MCE though, it works and it rarely crashed. I have two complaints which were enough for me to switch back. I could rant for a few pages saying what they are, but I'll spare you.

The 2005 Media Center Version or the Vista one? Please do tell me your complaints with MCE - I'm thinking about giving the Vista one another go just for fun.

[stevech]

I've tried MCE now - for the people in this household who were happy with Sage 4, and very unhappy with sage 6.2 in terms of ease of use via the UI with the low resoution of the MVP, Sage MCE is a good compromise. It has squelched a mutiny to TiVo.

I am trying to change the fonts in the listings of recordings and recording folders to be fat fonts, and/or larger. The stock ones are not viable for us using the MVP.

[DFranch]

I'm sorry guys. When I was talking about MCE before I was talking about Windows MCE 2005, not the SageMC Theme. I hope I did not confuse anybody with my comments about MCE 2005.

[Shield]

? You didn't confuse me, I knew what you were talking about. Tell me some of your beefs with MCE2005? Lack of more than 2 tuner support? Can't join the box to a domain (without hacking the registry)? Proprietary .ms files?

[DFranch]

Originally Posted by Shield

? You didn't confuse me, I knew what you were talking about. Tell me some of your beefs with MCE2005? Lack of more than 2 tuner support? Can't join the box to a domain (without hacking the registry)? Proprietary .ms files?

Those are two of my complaints, but not the 2 big ones. The biggest problem is with conflict resolution. Basically MCE has none. if you don't check the recordings schedule every couple of days you will never know if a program is not going to record because of a conflict. If you happen to be watching tv when the conflict happens you will get a message 5 minutes before the recording is scheduled to start saying there is a problem. You then have 5 minutes to find a solution to your recording problem. Sage gives you a screen dedicated to resolving your conflicts, and gives you the first warning up to 14 days in advance. The second biggest pain is In MCE when you set padding on back to back favorites. Which I do on Sunday nights for shows on Fox and CBS because of football. In Sage if it sees 2 recordings on CBS and they both have padding Sage is smart enough to remove the padding on the earlier show and use only 1 tuner to record both shows. MCE will record the padding and use 2 tuners. Because of this I had to check every Sunday to see what recordings I would have to pad that week. The only reason I switched to MCE in the first place was I was having problems getting stutter free playback in sage. If not for these 2 things I would happliy continue to use MCE, as it is in most respects rock solid, and has a great interface.

That is not to say I am not having any problems with Sage. I can't put the computer to sleep because with FSE enabled it does not resume correctly and I have to kill the sage process and restart it. I have had some strange results with compressing files. One worked fine for the 1st 20 minutes and the rest sounded like the chipmunks, a couple would not play, and a couple were perfect. But these are minor problems which don't affect the core functionallity which is recording TV. All in all I'd rather have Sage than MCE any day.

Edit: MCE can only record to 1 drive. If you have 3 drives like I do, you have to create a dynamic disk out of the 3 drives. Only then you will have all your space to record to. If you don't do that you have to manually move recordings to the extra drives to make room on your recording drive.

Told you I could rant a bit on the subject.

[stevech]

Originally Posted by DFranch

Edit: MCE can only record to 1 drive. If you have 3 drives like I do, you have to create a dynamic disk out of the 3 drives.

Can you "mount" a drive (with no drive letter) under a directory name on the one drive that MCE permits, (as in Unix) rather than using dynamic drives?

[DFranch]

Originally Posted by stevech

Can you "mount" a drive (with no drive letter) under a directory name on the one drive that MCE permits, (as in Unix) rather than using dynamic drives?

I don't know I never tried. I just created the dynamic drive. If you want to add an additional driver later you have to recreate the dynamic drive again. With Sage you just add the drive and you are done.

[nielm]

Originally Posted by stevech

Can you "mount" a drive (with no drive letter) under a directory name on the one drive that MCE permits, (as in Unix) rather than using dynamic drives?

No, MCE handles only one destination directory.

[Shield]

I completely forgot about that limitation with MCE 2005. I wonder if that was fixed with the Vista version.

You know, we're spoiled with Sage - I have recording and media import directories split all over my network! One drive fills up; plenty more to spare. Hard drive dies? No big deal; I have a simple script that does a dir output piped to a .txt file every day so I know what I'm missing.

I initially took the approach that I'd create a huge "softraid" Raid5 for sage and my DVD rips / tv shows. Now I'm just waiting for my 250GB / 320 GB sata drives to die so I can begin upgrading them to 750GB!

I'm doing a true hardware Raid1 mirror on the boot os, and my home movies, pictures and mp3 are all on u320 scsi Raid5 just across the gigabit Lan. Can't afford to lose those pictures!

[stevech]

Since this thread has drifted off the original thread topic, may I suggest that further discussions as above move to a different thread?

[DFranch]

Originally Posted by stevech

Since this thread has drifted off the original thread topic, may I suggest that further discussions as above move to a different thread?

You're right, Sorry for Hijacking!