SAGETV Newbie

[ksiegel35]

I was hoping someone could point me in the right direction. I have a bunch of questions in regards to the SAGETV products. I do work for high end residential homes in the Hamptons of Long Island NY. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find a contact phone number for sales at SAGETV.

Also who are the main competitors of SAGETV.. I have a project I'm working on right now where I may need to hook up 5-10 tvs with SAGETV and also 5-7 PC's... Has anyone used SAGETV on such a large home network before

Please Help!

[tmiranda]

Well, since I grew up not far from the Hamptons (in a middle class blue collar house, not one of those mansions) I'll try to lend a helping hand.

You probably will not easily find a phone number for SageTV on their website. Google is probably your best bet. Look for Frey Technologies in CA. You may also want to try PMing Narflex since he is one of the company founders and appears on the forums fairly often.

You may also want to try clicking on the "Contact Us" link at the bottom of the forum page!

The size of your deployment will not be a problem but I'd recommend using HD100 extenders wherever possible and minimize the use of client PC's. You'll save a lot of service calls that way. Get one decent server and it will easily drive many HD100's since most of the "heavy lifting" is done by the extender. The server just streams data.

Make sure you think out the network to avoid bottlenecks.

You will also have to get a good storage solution to handle that many concurrent video streams. I think this will be your biggest issue.

As for competitors, none that I know of.

[ksiegel35]

TMiranda is there a way I could maybe contact you and we can chat a little bit on the phone. It sounds like you are very knowledgable. Do you still live on the Island?

[Opus4]

As I mentioned in a PM, send an email to SageTV -- the store has an email link you could use.

- Andy

[ksiegel35]

I emailed them 3 times today and I haven't gotten a response.

[GKusnick]

I advise patience. Give them a day or two to get back to you. Also check your spam folder in case the response is getting eaten.

I'd also strongly suggest that you set up SageTV in your own home and get comfortable with its capabilities before committing to a large customer install.

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by ksiegel35

TMiranda is there a way I could maybe contact you and we can chat a little bit on the phone. It sounds like you are very knowledgable. Do you still live on the Island?

I moved to Florida in 1983. I am not the most knowledgeable person on these boards but would be happy to email/chat. PM me your details.

[ksiegel35]

I have a questions how is Sage when it comes to responding when there is an issue with equipment/support. They seem to be very slow in regards to responding to an email where I'm inquiring about spending several K on hardware/software.

[Opus4]

I asked whether your email(s) have been received & was told that a reply was already sent to you, then you sent in another email with many more questions. You aren't the only person sending emails to SageTV. Support responds on a first come, first serve basis and states that it may take up to 72 hours for you to receive a reply. You will receive a reply when it is your turn.

- Andy

[reggie14]

It depends on what you mean. Compared to other companies' e-mail support, I think Sage is pretty quick. But that just means they usually get back to you within a couple business days. They have no real-time support, which I suppose is a drawback, but one shared by the other third-party DVR software vendor, Snapstream. Expecting a response within a few hours, or even a day, is completely unrealistic- not just with Sage, but with just about anyone.

On the other hand, there's an active community on these forums that typically can answer questions pretty quickly. In many cases you just need to do a search on the forum and you'll find what you need. Maybe it's not as convenient as a true knowledge base, but the same basic idea.

[pjpjpjpj]

Let me start by saying that I LOVE SAGE TV and I think it is a wonderful product.

But if this is a large-scale installation in a mansion of a rich fat cat who expects everything to work flawlessly, and who would expect someone to drop everything and show up immediately the second something has the slightest glitch, then SageTV is NOT the product to use in this mansion.

If the owner is a tinkerer and has general knowledge of PCs... or is just patient and not the stereotypical "Hamptons rich guy", then fine. The owner will probably greatly appreciate the benefits of an HTPC setup over just cable/satellite and a stock DVR/Tivo.

I worked for a rich "silver spoon fed" type guy a few years ago, and any time anything in our office had the slightest glitch - from a copier needing service to our ISP going down briefly - the guy was on the phone screaming (literally) at some poor customer service rep, telling them that "Someone better be at my place within the half-hour or I am taking my business elsewhere and you'll be hearing from my lawyers!!!!!". In other words, this guy had been raised with the understanding that money fixes everything, and if you have the money to throw at a problem, it will get fixed immediately.

So what I am saying is, THIS IS NOT THE CASE with SageTV. For one thing, the HD Extenders are out of stock, and no amount of money will bring them in stock more quickly. Also, customer service "is what it is", as described above. This is a small operation, not Time-Warner Cable. The resources just aren't there. But more importantly, Sage is a work-in-progress. There are still glitches, no matter how simple your set-up is, and how little you fiddle with it. My Extenders occasionally just freeze up. Sometimes when I wake one up (turn it on with the remote button), it takes 3-5 minutes to even get me to the main menu. Sometimes, a bunch of little glitches add up where I just simply need to go reboot the server. These are all things that I don't mind, because it's "my baby". Is this customer the kind of person who can handle this?

And most importantly, ksiegel35, if you are the one who is going to be getting calls at all hours, and being yelled at, because the homeowner had to get up off his couch and do a hard restart of the Extender, and he wants that fixed... well... I would go another direction.

[GKusnick]

"Rich fat cat" characterizations aside, I think the real point is that if you're installing a system in a customer's house, then that customer (regardless of socioeconomic status) has a right to expect you to be expert in the system you're installing and to be prepared to solve problems yourself. Having good support from Sage is important as a backup, but keep in mind that it's a small company. If you're thinking you can just get them on the phone on a moment's notice and have them talk you through any issues without having to spend time learning the system yourself, that's not going to work.

I think Sage can work as a reliable turnkey system if you know what you're doing and set it up properly on well-tested hardware. But the key to that is spending the time to get familiar with the product and to qualify a stable hardware configuration you feel comfortable putting into someone's home.

[autoboy]

@pj

As a "rich fat cat" i take a bit of offense at your striking generalizations and preconceptions about what kind of people we are and I am getting tired of the attacks by people that just assume we are the asshats the media and TV display us as. We are successful people who provide the country and the world with services that people want, need, and are willing to pay for. We are the backbone of the economy and the vast majority of the tax base in this country. We care about the people that work for us just like they are our family but at the same time we have to make difficult decisions to maintain our businesses in an ever changing environment, sometimes cutting off the foot to save the leg.

The person you described could have just as easily been anybody regardless of his money. There are a lot of bad people in this world and I would argue that they are evenly distributed among the population. We are a minority and while we hold much of the financial power in the country, we have worked hard to get there and continue to work hard to maintain it. Yes it is nice to be rich and not have to worry about money but we generally sacrifice to get there. People should be encouraged to make the best of themselves and not punished for making a profit, creating jobs, and generally improving people's standard of living. Rich people and middle class people rely on each other and I do not think that is is appropriate to treat us like jerks when you can find jerks everywhere.

Sorry if this is off topic.

I would personally stay away from a large install of SageTV because it is not designed for it. IMO, for customers that need personal service, simple is better. Some people have tried and a search on this forum will yield some of their stories. I wish you luck.

[CollinR]

You might be better off buying a solution from an OEM provider to aquire their support.

[reggie14]

Actually, I think Sage is pretty well suited for a moderately large install. You're certainly going to have a hard time serving video to all 10 TVs and 7 PCs at once, but it seems like you ought to be able to serve 5 or more things at once given the proper hardware (which might involve a RAID setup). Certainly most people use Sage with much smaller setups, but it seems like Sage setups have tended to be larger probably because Sage was the first DVR program to support a large number of tuners.

That being said, while I'm not willing to say Sage isn't scalable enough to work in the situation ksiegel35, I will say it's really geared towards enthusiasts that want to tinker. The HD100 media extender does make it bit more "turnkey friendly", but ultimately computers will crash, they'll need to be updated, and HD100s will occasionally lockup.

Beyond that, the options for HD are limited (which I assume is important for a job like this). The R5000s are nice, but not always a possible solution. The HD-PVRs really are a hack job. It's a new piece of hardware that's still experiencing growing pains. Even if it were to work as designed, it's still pretty apparent changing channels on the set-top box via USB-UIRT, or even firewire, are not perfect solutions. They make channel changing very slow, which a substantial portion of the population (the ones devoted to watching TV live) will find annoying.

I am curious what ksiegel35's plans were. Were (are?) you planning to set up a home with Sage and leave it to the homeowner to administer it? That seems like a bad idea, given that Sage is moderately difficult to set-up maintain. Or, were you planning to service these systems for homeowners regularly and as necessary? If so, you really need to create your own setup that equally complicated, but perhaps smaller (in other words, if you want to install multiple HD-PVRs in a homeowner's system, you should have your own system with multiple HD-PVRs). Then you can decide whether or not that's something you want to deal with regularly.

[pjpjpjpj]

Originally Posted by autoboy

@pj

As a "rich fat cat" i take a bit of offense at your striking generalizations and preconceptions about what kind of people we are and I am getting tired of the attacks by people that just assume we are the asshats the media and TV display us as. We are successful people who provide the country and the world with services that people want, need, and are willing to pay for. We are the backbone of the economy and the vast majority of the tax base in this country. We care about the people that work for us just like they are our family but at the same time we have to make difficult decisions to maintain our businesses in an ever changing environment, sometimes cutting off the foot to save the leg.

The person you described could have just as easily been anybody regardless of his money. There are a lot of bad people in this world and I would argue that they are evenly distributed among the population. We are a minority and while we hold much of the financial power in the country, we have worked hard to get there and continue to work hard to maintain it. Yes it is nice to be rich and not have to worry about money but we generally sacrifice to get there. People should be encouraged to make the best of themselves and not punished for making a profit, creating jobs, and generally improving people's standard of living. Rich people and middle class people rely on each other and I do not think that is is appropriate to treat us like jerks when you can find jerks everywhere.

Sorry if this is off topic.

I would personally stay away from a large install of SageTV because it is not designed for it. IMO, for customers that need personal service, simple is better. Some people have tried and a search on this forum will yield some of their stories. I wish you luck.

Thanks for the laugh, autoboy. I laughed because you completely missed my point. Admittedly, I should have omitted the "rich fat cat in a mansion" line, but the rest of it is a fair statement - and even one that you, in your last paragraph, agree with!

I was referring (as you can see in my post, but apparently missed) to people like my old boss - who is an impatient "asshat", expects everything in his life to work flawlessly, and treats every service person who he can get in touch with like worthless scum. I am not biased by TV and movies, I am biased by him. And you don't know my financial status either. My use of the term "rich fat cat" was referring to a type of person, not ALL rich people. But hey, if people didn't take things the wrong way and find reasons to get offended, this wouldn't be the internet.

If you have a client - even if he lives in a trailer - who is completely impatient, expects every gadget to work flawlessly, and expects service to fix things to be immediate and near-painless, then would you not agree that Sage is a bad idea? Simply because there are glitches, the system is complicated, and it's a small company so the customer service is limited. My original post even said, if the client is a patient guy who enjoys tinkering, then it would be fine. Perhaps you are "that type" yourself?

My Sage system is basic - HD Homerun OTA, a server with XP, and two HD Extenders. Period. No HD-PVRs, no fussy internal cards (seems like most have SOME issue with Sage), no cable/sat STBs, no Vista/MC compatibility issues. But if I had to call someone to come fiddle with it every time I had a glitch, well, then that person might as well live in a spare bedroom at my house. My post was just trying to illustrate a situation that ksiegel35 might prefer to avoid.

We don't know what his client is like - but if his client needs 5-10 TVs and 5-7 PCs, his client is going to have a LOT of glitches and the system will need a lot of tinkering, either by the client himself, or by whoever the client calls, likely ksiegel35. So that client better be an infinitely patient person and have a very patient family as well.

[davephan]

Perhaps the best way to become more familiar with SageTV would be to set up a system for yourself first before setting up SageTV for customers. I agree with others about SageTV requiring some tinkering to perfect things. The upside is the features SageTV offers that are not available with other products like Tivo. Some people can be extremely intollerant, and rich people are probably more likely to be intollerant - they may not be suited to SageTV.

If you do decide to deploy a scaled up system, it would be helpful to first determine the limits of how much you can scale up one SageTV system. You may need multiple quad-cores, a lot of memory, and multiple network cards.

You will also need to consider redundancy, using RAID and perhaps clustering or DoubleTake if you really want a lot of redundancy. You will also need to also have a backup / recovery process in place so you can quickly recover a system if and when it fails. The system could be setup to automatically take images and backups of files. Usually RAID does not fail, but it can fail on rare instances. If you have enough disk space, you can also backup the video files to a separate backup system.

You will also need to have remote control setup so the system can be fixed by remote control to avoid traveling to the location to resolve problems. One solution for the remote control is LogMeIn.com, which is free.

So, it all boils down to how flexible the customer is to SageTV, the trade off of how much money can be spent to achieve enough performance and redundancy, and the expectation the customer will have for your SageTV support, and your ability to support the customer.


Dave

[autoboy]

My apologies if I misinterpreted your post. I am getting really tired of corporations and successful people getting a bad rap by a few bad apples like the Enron guys (who if you study what actually happened is not as bad as the media and pop culture portrays it)

We are becoming a scapegoat for the entire country under a premise of greed. That is completely ridiculous. Some of us are greedy, most of us are huge philanthropists.

As for not using SageTV in customer systems, I support all my families computers and it is a hastle. My sageTV box goes down on occasion and I need to perform maintenance on it. It is not something I would want to support on a regular basis unless I was intimately familiar with SageTV and I had remote control over the system. I get enough complaints from my wife. I can only imagine the complaints from customers paying $10000 or more for a HT system. They would be better served by a Tivo.

[mistergq]

I am a big fan of SageTV. In fact I switched from using BTV for a number of years to STV because of the HTPC functionality.

Having said that, if it is a rich fat cat, I hate to suggest this, but maybe you should consider BTV Enterprise edition. Because of the cost, you are purchasing a technical support contract. I am not sure what the fat cat is looking for, but if they are looking just for TV, you are good to go with BTV. If they are looking for a complete HTPC (tv, photo, music, movies, etc), then you will need to something else.

Also, you probably need to be fairly comfortable with what ever program you are installing prior to installation.

[reggie14]

BeyondTV doesn't have any HD capable extenders, which I'd say are necessary for any large, reliable setup. Plus I doubt Snapstream's support, even for the Enterprise edition, is much better than Sage's. It looks like its only advantage is that there is a telephone number. Who knows if they actually do technical support over the phone though.

Sage doesn't have telephone support. Maybe if someone were able to drive enough business in Sage might be willing to work out some kind of telephone support agreement. I kind of doubt the OP can do that, but its at least a theoretical possibility.

Windows MCE probably isn't much of an option right now. The lack of H.264 support rules out the HD-PVR from working, at least partially rules out the R5000. That eliminates the only 2 reliable methods for getting HDTV. Firewire might work, but doesn't for a lot of people.