Starting over

[oopsydaisy]

OK, I had been using guho's excellent firewire network encoder with Sage Media Center on a PowerPC Mac mini. Life was good. Then all of a sudden, recordings stopped happening. It turns out that somehow the network encoder was detecting my SA4250HD as a 4300(?)! Anyway, I had been looking to upgrade my little old mini as it could never playback any HD. I will be doing this and trying to set up everything as it was, but if the network encoder still does not work, I want to know what my options are.

Here's what I want out of my setup. One thing to add is that I am on Cablevision Digital in the Bronx. I will have a new mac mini, probably running Snow Leopard(I can downgrade to Leopard, if necessary). I would like to be able to record everything I receive via the 4250HD, including HBOHD, MaxHD,etc. What tuner would best work with Sage, OSX, and Cablevision? If possible, I'd like to be able to record one channel while recording another, but that's a bonus as I never had that going.

I'd also like to be able to schedule stuff via the web or something. I've used Visual Hub and VideoRedo(on VMWare Fusion) to remove commercials and transcode to iPhone-sized versions of my recordings. If there's a reliable automated way to do this, I'm all ears. Any other suggestions for anything I might be missing would be much appreciated. I've used Sage since it was only available on PC with USB-UIRT and comskip, so I love this software. Great community!

[merneric]

Originally Posted by oopsydaisy

I will have a new mac mini, probably running Snow Leopard(I can downgrade to Leopard, if necessary).

Hey oopsydaisy, can you tell me if you are using an external hard drive when recording, or do you record to the internal drive of the mac mini. I am thinking of just getting a mini as well just to run as a sageTV server, as I am not having much luck with my current setup. Unfortunately, when I tried recording to an external drive using my macbookpro, I cannot get it to go, despite setting all permissions to read/write. Can you tell me what kind/brand hard drive you use, and if you had to do anything special to get it to record?

Thanks!

[oopsydaisy]

I am recording to an external drive. If you're using guho's firewire network encoder, make sure there are no spaces in your directory path, ie "my drive" should be "mydrive" I am using a WD laptop drive in a USB enclosure. If you are using guho's encoder, make sure the command(after cd to directory where you unzipped his encoder to) ./MacOS/SageTVFirewireNetworkEncoder --configfile config.txt returns an entry for your STB. Also, if your machine is not able to change the channel on your STB, make sure you check in the config.txt that channelchangemethod is either scientific-atlanta or blank. Depends on what changes your cable company have made. Lastly, make sure you quit Sage app as well as turning off the service in the System Pref. Then open sage.properties with Textedit and append all the mmc lines from guho's site to the ones in this file. Then set encoder host to whatever you want. I use 127.0.0.1. also set video capture device name to whatever model you have, ie SA4250HD in my case. Then go through the device setup in Sage. I hope I answered your questions and good luck

[merneric]

Thanks for your reply. For some reason I just could not get my hard drive to work, but it is an older WD Mybook 1 TB, which really has 2 500's somehow Raid 0'd together...I don't think it plays nice with Sage. Anyway, when I mounted a network drive, and then pointed the recording directory to it, it seemed to work. Now I am going to try to setup the Firewire encoding stuff again, and see how it works...