What is your WAF?

[Peter_h]

Mine is very high.

I've only had sagetv up and running for about a month.

She was very excited when I was first started testing. I try to test as much as possible before I unveil anything. Before I even showed her how it worked, I came home to the tv on and her scrolling through the pictures and movie library saying, "wow, this is really cool!".

A week later she came home with a story about how SageTV came up during lunch with her coworkers. They spent the entire lunch hour asking her questions about it and how they could get one.

I got my first complaint last night and that was, "You need to stop tinkering, it's becoming an obsession."

My response, "It's not an obsession, it's just not done yet."

[paulbeers]

Mine is through the roof.

About a month ago we came home to our Sage Server dead (I really should update my signature) and she handed me her credit card and said "what's it gonna take.." which if course meant don't go crazy, but get it fixed. We are constantly watching television shows in the living room and then move to the bedroom to finish watching before we go to sleep. She loves having mp3's available to create music lists to listen to while cleaning. We have 1 HD200, 2 HD200's, and 3 MVP's hooked up throughout the house. We are still using the stock STV since she got used to it back several years ago and to change to any other would give me that look of "what did you do...." that it just isn't worth it.

The only issue we have with our Sage setup is that the OTA channels I capture (several of the local Weather sub channels aren't available via ClearQAM) seem to be hit or miss. This is not a Sage fault obviously, but of course my wife equates any television issue with it being a "Sage issue" in a broad sense.

Anyway, I will never go back to full PC clients. Okay, technically in my office I run a full PC client software, but I would never put a full PC client in my living room (I can deal with things not being perfect as I only use it occassionally, but my wife won't).

[evilpenguin]

My GAF is great for everything TV/Video/Movie related, but after I showed her Boxee's Last.fm music and visulization capabilities she's been asking why the HD200 can't do that. Come to think of it, so have I.

[AWS]

Very high as well! We use the SageMC interface and it along with a stable version of Sage makes a hgh WAF. The only negative she gripes to me about is when I'm browsing the Sage forums, she's watching TV and when she goes to navigate the menu or stop/start a show it won't because the focus isn't on Sage. I've read Andy's/Opus' post #15 about the Hauppauge a dozen times ... Beside that very minor hiccup, WAF IS VERY HIGH

[mbowe]

Core Sage has been Rock solid for about 3 months now, I switched from VMC w/ a 360 extender in Sept and it took me a couple months to get everything worked out. But, pains in that transition period were mostly me learning the full extent of Sage after the dark ages of VMC, aka tinkering with new stuff. But, now that we're settled in, it's great.

And I have to say, it was huge to drop a new extender in upstairs and immediately replicate the experience found downstairs in the living room with no pain. And I'm excited that I'm only $199 away from replicating anywhere else, whenever I want. Extenders are fantastic, but hardwire them to save yourself some pain. I'm using NIM-100's over coax upstairs and it's great.

The one area I'm holding out hope, is in streaming. I want Hulu/Netflix/SqueezeCenter/??? in extended mode on the HD100/200 and MVP. Today, Netflix/SqueezeCenter and the required loop back hack for extender use are the only areas where we occasionally have issues, or quality concerns. Transcoding network streams via SD capture is a little underwhelming, but I'll take it for now and am grateful for the members in this community that came up with solutions to holes in the extenders, and grateful that Sage is extensible enough to overcome those holes.

All that said, my wife and 8 year are happy and have no problems getting anything done. But, I'm still working on the 6 year old that just holds the remote pushing buttons wondering why her stuff doesn't magically appear. But, at least it's not a PC now that would inadvertantly end up with 56 inches of Windows desktop and icons.

[jtt88]

Used Sage for a several years now. My WAF is great. She wouldn't want to go back to regular TV again. She's not tied to watching things at particular times. We can record good things we would normally never been able to watch before (and instead are spared from having had to watch more "real time TV airing" crap). The countless hours of life saved by not having to sit through commercials... how can you put a price on that, really?

KAF is great too. My younger kids barely know what all the commercials going on are on TV, so they really are less "commercially" minded. We homeschool our two youngest kids and we are able to easily record quality/higher educational value shows from different channels and different times, and then save them to provide a supplement to school work they're doing. For instance, my son is having lessons in our school curriculum on the universe. I had saved for a while now a bunch of History channel shows called The Universe, and it has provided a real re-enforcement for the lessons.

I don't tinker as much as I used to. Probably have to reboot server every month or two, but that's not always Sage's fault either.

[ghostlobster]

My WAF is running about a 80-85 out of 100 these days. Ever since I switched from XP, to Vista, and finally to WHS as my server, implemented firewire channel changing and got SA working on h.264 files, things have been beautiful. Everything records, no channel changes are missed, commercial skipping works automatically, all the music is there, our DVDs are readily available and it all just plain works.
Now, from a UI standpoint, I'm always the first one to bash Sage for the UI (and NO, I have no desire to participate in another UI thread!) however, with SageMC in place, implementing FanArt and just general tweaking and tinkering, the UI is more than acceptable.

The reasons it is not higher are:

• She can't channel surf. Things get all out of whack when she flips all over the place. And no, don't tell me "well it was not designed for live TV, it's a DVR app!" That's not an answer.
• She wants a "favorites" channel button. A way to c reate a list of favorite channels for live TV viewing and a single button that advances to her next favorite channel.
• When watching something while recording it, she wants to hit the stop button and be able to just stop recording and delete the recording all in one fell-swoop.

It's a pretty small, very specific list which speaks volumes for just how good SageTV is!

[AWS]

Originally Posted by jtt88

My younger kids barely know what all the commercials going on are on TV...

Commercials? Oh yeah. I had forgotten about those. Great point. One adverse side affect is that when I don't watch the commercials, I miss out on what's coming up - new programs. Oh well. Small price to pay!

If WAF is based on a 10-scale, no commercials will automatically increase the WAF quotient by 3 points.

[scott2020]

WAF is high on this end. Higher than our Tivo now that we have a stable setup and I quit messing with it so much. It was not so good when I was playing with millions of settings on decoders, audio settings, all of that. What helped me was the HD200 extender, so I could get rid of all of the PC wires and garbage around the new flat screen TV. Now I just have the extender with power, network, and HDMI and the server is off in the junk room. She loves the music part, DVD movies on the hard drive, commercial skip the most. We do only OTA so have not had problems with channel changing and whatnot.
Scott

[matt91]

Originally Posted by AWS

Commercials? Oh yeah. I had forgotten about those. Great point. One adverse side affect is that when I don't watch the commercials, I miss out on what's coming up - new programs. Oh well. Small price to pay!

I find myself in this same situation. People at work are always saying "Oh, did you see the trailer for that new movie?" or "That commercial is so funny - you have to watch it!". I just stare blankly before saying that commercials simply don't exist in my house.

I had to troll Brent's blog postings last fall to see what new shows were on. (Thanks Brent!)

My kids only see commercials when they get up early and turn on the TV by themselves - they can't run Sage yet, but can flip the channels to get to their Disney or PBS station.

Oh, and WAF is high here (I actually asked her tonight specifically about it.) She said that as long as the commercial skip is working she's delighted. We only use two extenders, so the system isn't huge. Rarely do we require a restart of anything, however, which certainly helps the WAF.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by ghostlobster

The reasons it is not higher are:

• She wants a "favorites" channel button. A way to c reate a list of favorite channels for live TV viewing and a single button that advances to her next favorite channel.
  

It's a pretty small, very specific list which speaks volumes for just how good SageTV is!

Favorites Channel List

Updated SageMC version to be compatible with SageMC 6.3.4 the Default STV version has NOT changed.
Moved the Detailed Setup menu configuration option to the SageMC Options Extras menu
Old version of FCLforSageMC have been put into an archive in the STV\SageTV3 directory
Updated code to work with changes needed for SageMC 6.3.4 - this will NOT import into prior versions check the archive for older versions

This should work for you. You can make this server based so her Favorite channels list is available wherever she is watching.

Grab the download from the download section (It has the manual for it) and grab this FCL for SageMC

Gerry

[ghostlobster]

Originally Posted by gplasky

Favorites Channel List



This should work for you. You can make this server based so her Favorite channels list is available wherever she is watching.

Grab the download from the download section (It has the manual for it) and grab this FCL for SageMC

Gerry

Wow, I had never even seen that. Cool, I've got a project for later tonight. After looking it over, I'm unclear as to whether it just shows the favorite channels in the guide, or if it uses them for channel surfing, though. I'll mess with it tonight.

[pjpjpjpj]

Originally Posted by matt91

I find myself in this same situation. People at work are always saying "Oh, did you see the trailer for that new movie?" or "That commercial is so funny - you have to watch it!". I just stare blankly before saying that commercials simply don't exist in my house.

So I imagine that this coming Sunday is one of the few "shows" that everyone watches live and no one uses comskip on? You know, that football game Sunday night, with the great commercials?

Originally Posted by matt91

My kids only see commercials when they get up early and turn on the TV by themselves - they can't run Sage yet, but can flip the channels to get to their Disney or PBS station.

Yikes, that's the one demographic you DON'T want seeing commercials! ("Daddy, can I have that? Can I have one of those? Can we get that snack? Can we get that cereal???")

[Beefcake550]

My gosh, I dreaded the day that I had to take down the Server machine and the kids had to watch live TV for this very reason. It was in early December and the kids all of a sudden started asking for things from Santa every time they say a commercial....funny, but not really!

I'm soooo not looking forward to this Saturday when I have another scheduled "server update" day. aka. - Daddy's messing with the server, so lets pray he doesn't mess it all up!

Originally Posted by pjpjpjpj

So I imagine that this coming Sunday is one of the few "shows" that everyone watches live and no one uses comskip on? You know, that football game Sunday night, with the great commercials?



Yikes, that's the one demographic you DON'T want seeing commercials! ("Daddy, can I have that? Can I have one of those? Can we get that snack? Can we get that cereal???")

[ghostlobster]

Originally Posted by Beefcake550

My gosh, I dreaded the day that I had to take down the Server machine and the kids had to watch live TV for this very reason. It was in early December and the kids all of a sudden started asking for things from Santa every time they say a commercial....funny, but not really!

I'm soooo not looking forward to this Saturday when I have another scheduled "server update" day. aka. - Daddy's messing with the server, so lets pray he doesn't mess it all up!

Youch! Messing with the server the day prior to Super Bowl Sunday??? Poor planning! I put a code freeze in place on my rig beginning Wednesday and lasting through Monday to avoid any "Whoops, my bad!" scenarios. It's absolutely killing me not to tinker with anything for this long, believe me.

[Fuzzy]

My WAF is somewhere near fully acceptable. It was starting to drop slowly for a while, until a major crash of my sage server, while I was out of town, caused a significant outage. This resulted in my wife temporarily getting my cable companies DVR. It was a Moxi unit, and the interface/recording schemes/lack of storage all brought my SageTV WAF immediately through the roof as soon as I got the system back up and running.

[Beefcake550]

ghostlobster:
Trust me.....I hear you. The problem is that my server machine has developed some anomolies when it comes to Sage. It seems like an improper shutdown is causing some weirdness. The issue has so far been Sage losing it's configuration for no reason and it studdering heavily to thep oint where it stops until you hit rew/ff on playback of a video.

I decided that I had to fix it before Super Sunday. I stayed up late last night and I'm almost done moving files/adding disks to the drive pool. Oh yeah, I also decided to go for the gusto and install WHS again. So, let's hope I'm the hero instead of the loser.

Back up scenario is that I bring my DirecTV box and connect it directly to the television.

So, at least I have a backup plan that I already tested out and it's pretty painless.

[coryking]

The GAF is about 100%. She always brags about it to her sisters and friends and loves pointing out stuff our SageTV setup can do that their Tivo's and stuff can't (like, can they get an Extender? Nope!) I love teasing her that if she dumped me, she'd have to give up the SageTV :-)

It took a little while to get used to the idea the SageTV server is a production box that I have to schedule downtime for. The only big issue these days is my hardware is all hand-me-down so it is starting to flake on me. Once we make the switch to hi-def, I want to dump some money into doing things right so it is rock solid.

Biggest hits to the GAF are when ShowAnalyizer flakes out and when I had it running Vista prior to SP1. The other mistake was trying to use the Extender wirelessly. Always wire those things! Oh, and she *hated* MythTV, but that was years ago and if I didn't switch it probably would have ended the whole HTPC adventure.

She, like probably all of us, has a laundry list of things the SageTV could do better, but she (like us) knows that what we have now is really awesome and anything more is bonus points.

[webwalker]

Well, my WAF just fell through the floor. And my parents, who were over for the superbowl for the first time in years.

Sage crashed THREE times. The HD200 huge FOUR times.

But my lowest point came when my mother told me she was so relieved that she had Comcast and didn't have these kinds of problems.

So right now, I look like a $1000 fool. Because that's how much cash I have sitting in hardware and software that can't even stay running for the extent of a football game.

Way to go Sage.

[btrcp2000]

Its a super bowl thing. I had an hd100 extender freeze during springsteen's second song (the obscure new one, fortunately). This was in front of the exact same crowd that saw it freeze right after Tyree's catch last year. I restarted the hd100 and left the the room to see if the server had pooped itself. Then, to top it all off, she had the game up and running before I got back to the room to the delight of all our friends. WAF had been at an all time high after I set up an mvp on her treadmill, but she certainly got her shots in tonight.

And then the Cardinals scored too soon and it all went to hell from there...