Prospective New Customer For Sage WHS - Questions

[scoob101]

First post, so please be gentle

I`ve been waiting for what seems like forever to get a media centre style experience which actually works in a coherent way. A few months ago I built my own Windows Home Server machine, and I love it, but its missing media centre style functionality....

Today I discovered Sage TV - and you guys aparrently have a Windows Home Server Product (can you tell I`m getting excited?). I want to order one of these right now.. if it needs my needs!!

SO... Questions::

If I buy Sage TV for WHS, and a Sage HD extender for my Plasma TV, can I get the following services in a PVR style (Live pause and rewind, series link recordings etc etc) way ::

DVB-T (UK Freeview)
DBV-S (UK Freesat including HD services like BBC HD and CH4 HD)
DVB-S (UK Sky Subscription services including Subscription HD channels)

I appreciate I`ll need to purchase the relevant tuner card harware, and a CAM for subscription services.

Ideally, I`d also like to view my media (pictures, music, video (Xvids, Divx) via the HD extender also but thats less important than the TV and PVR aspects.


Please say Sage can do all this (and it works!) via WHS, and my order will be with you shortly!!!!

[Polypro]

Your fellow countrymen will have to provide the details for those content providers, but WHS can do everything you mentioned. Search for "Sage WHS" and there are a few threads that go into more detail.

P

[matt91]

And this link will provide some information on tuners which will and won't work.

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=24615

If you search for "freesat" and "sky", etc, you'll see many posts about getting setup with them.

[scoob101]

Thanks for the reply. Would appreciate some feedback from any UK based sage customers who have already done what i`m trying to do!


Do Sage only ship their hardware from the US, or are there any European distributors?

[ric melia]

you can get the HD extender and also the MVP extender from Tranquil PC - I think they're based in Manchester (??)

Here's a link for the HD extender:

http://www.tranquilpc-shop.co.uk/cgi...21101#a1_21101

[jaminben]

I currently have 6 DVB-T (freeview) and 2 DVB-S (freesat/free to air) tuners running just fine with Sage on 2 extenders. Yes you will be able to play, pause and rewind live TV.

The extenders make life so much easier and they are more or less plug and play, once one is setup adding another is a 5 minute job. The extender also allows you to play the vast majority of your media including dvix, xvid, mkv, ts, dvd, mp3 and photos, however their are a few files which I have that dont play but I'm hopefull they will get fixed and will work in the future.

I did have Sage running on WHS for a while and it worked really well but decided to go with Windows Server 2003 in the end.

No major issues with Sage in the UK and theirs loads of info on these forums for UK specific users.