PC Magazine PC-based DVR reviews

[Opus4]

The April 20, 2004, issue of PC Magazine has a few reviews of PC-based DVR solutions in its First Looks section (see:Use Your PC like a TiVo): ATI All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro, Pinnacle PCTV Deluxe, SnapStream Beyond TV 3, and a side article on the ReplayTV 5504 as an alternative to a TiVo. They concluded that all the PC based systems have lower quality than the dedicated set-top boxes, with SS using a Hauppauge 350 coming close but still not as good as a TiVo. A couple comments:

1) Does SageTV not exist? Or is it still not being taken seriously because V2 is still in beta? It is hardly ever mentioned in any reviews, yet I don't know of another PC/Windows based product that allows multiple tuners... who wants to watch & record just 1 channel!?

2) TiVo has better quality? What quality setting were they using on the 350 in SS? A friend of mine has TiVo & low quality has been one of his complaints. I see on this forum that DirecTiVo is supposed to be quite good due to its recording the digital signal it receives. I don't see any quality issues with my recordings in SageTV.

As with everything else that magazines review, I find that if you know something about the subject, the reviews become less useful, as they seem to be extremely superficial and miss important points. It always makes me wonder about reviews for topics that I'm not overly familiar with...

- Andy

[mlbdude]

BTV does not support the 350's output so they just used it as a 250. In that case with a standard def TV output would require deinterlacing and would reduce quality compared to a Tivo. Using the hardware decoder of the 350 would match Tivo though.

Also, they obviously were not using HDTV because as we know you can actually improve the picture with the software decoders.

I can only hope that once 2.0 comes out there will be a marketing push. Maybe before you had that initial knee-jerk reaction to the UI.

Maybe some people should post that BTV does not support the 350 but Sage does?

[Brett]

Andy - Its because they have a workforce of people trying to market their product. This is one area Snapstream is very good at. It also has an added advantage that their product will work (somewhat?) for ATI tuners, which appear to be what a crapload of people own.

-Brett

[Crashless]

I think we've talked about this before, but it isn't a bad idea to keep it fresh in people's minds:

I think that we (the collective we) as satisfied sage users, should be out in force when v2 goes gold. it would definitly help the guys at frey out, and us as users per the trickle down, more units shipped=more income=more liquid captial for development.

[kny3twalker]

SHS has a nice article at his website about a man that would not get a TIVO
returned snapstream and found SageTV
spent a ton he says but it can do a alot more

[jominor]

Originally posted by Crashless
I think we've talked about this before, but it isn't a bad idea to keep it fresh in people's minds:

I think that we (the collective we) as satisfied sage users, should be out in force when v2 goes gold. it would definitly help the guys at frey out, and us as users per the trickle down, more units shipped=more income=more liquid captial for development.

I don't know if I agree. I think it is up to Frey to send copies around to the various tech rags as opposed to the users stumping the product.

Users who preach to loudly tend to come off as fanatical. Plus, people will ask why the users trumpet more loudly than the software maker.

While Snapstream, IMO, will still retain the edge in GUI even with Sage 2 comes out, Sage is competitive. They need, IMO, to get beta copies into the hands of reporters specifically mentioning the multi-tuner, client, and always liveTV as the advantages. Anyone who has changed a channel and either lost the buffer, or had the beginning of a show age out will appreciate the latter.

Also, they need to specifically address why they don't support ATI AIW. Perhaps state how Tivos and mediaPCs all come hardware encoders because of the quality issues.

[Lester Jacobs]

Originally posted by jominor
...
Also, they need to specifically address why they don't support ATI AIW. Perhaps state how Tivos and mediaPCs all come hardware encoders because of the quality issues.

Beating a dead horse here but I've maintained for a while now that Live TV only support for ATI AIW cards (i.e. no encoding, just straight live TV) would increase the number of people downloading SageTV to try it out a great deal. Yes they wouldn't be able to record shows, etc but they could play with the interface. Once they had it installed and saw it working, then they might go out and pick up a Haupppauge 250 to unleash the full capability; one more purchase for SageTV. With no ATI AIW support, most of those users wouldn't even bother downloading to try out and thus never make it to the next step of getting a Hauppauge 250 card and purchasing SageTV.

Cheers
Lester

[jominor]

Originally posted by Lester Jacobs
Beating a dead horse here but I've maintained for a while now that Live TV only support for ATI AIW cards (i.e. no encoding, just straight live TV) would increase the number of people downloading SageTV to try it out a great deal. Yes they wouldn't be able to record shows, etc but they could play with the interface. Once they had it installed and saw it working, then they might go out and pick up a Haupppauge 250 to unleash the full capability; one more purchase for SageTV. With no ATI AIW support, most of those users wouldn't even bother downloading to try out and thus never make it to the next step of getting a Hauppauge 250 card and purchasing SageTV.

Cheers
Lester

I used the ATI and it looked pretty bad. Originally, I was building a server to play divx movies and mp3s. I tried the tv out on my 8500 because of the novelty, but the tv software never worked right. I would have chucked the whole idea of TV if it wasn't for a pair of articles. One extremetech that compared showshifter, sage, and snapstream. Just after was an article on techreport.com that spoke of Snapstream.

Again, the quality was bad. In fact, Snapstream with an ATI looked much worse than did the ATI software. What turned it around, of course, was the PVR 250. But I found out about this only because I checked the forums, both Sage and Snapstream.

Most people won't do this. You've got to grab them hard because you will only get one change. I believe that most people will have no problem buying the hardware card and the software provided you explain why they need it. But if the picture quality is bad, they will go "Shrug. A novelty only some computer geek could love."


People are intelligent. Just explain in english why the HW card is necessary. Explain that this is all a Tivo is, explain the benefits.

But it starts with explaining. And that's marketing, and that's where Sage must improve.

[Ralphjb]

I get this article yesterday as well, but did not get a chance to post. I was disappointed that SageTV did not get a mention. I looked for a link on the article to comment, but could not find one.

At the point that it is helpful, I am happy to add my voice to other satisfied customers about the excellence of this software.

[AJ Bertelson]

One of the reasons I picked up sageTv was because I heard about it on a forum.

I got sage because the quality of the recordings was the best and the UI for 2.0 was impressive.

To answer your question, word of mouth would do well for the frey guys.

[thatdude90210]

I'm sure at some point Frey will be sending out 2.0 bundled with a pvr250 (can't expect reviewers to have to buy their own) for reviewers.

My own motivation for trying Sage was initially some talk at Shacknews' comments section about building your own PVR (and I had a new 160GB HD that I got a good deal on just sitting around). Most of the pvr software were mentioned, including beyondtv, sagetv, mythtv, etc. I did my own research and concluded that Sage had the two most important features: multiple tuners, and client for my laptop. My other consideration was picture quality. So I built a dedicated Sage box and have been happy with it since.

[falchulk]

narflex has said many times that sage could se the ati software encoder stream. He said more then once he might eventualy add support. There was even a post , I think last summer, where he said he would if there was enough requests. We shall see....

[Opus4]

Ironically, I got introduced to SageTV when a friend told me about it & said not to bother with it since it was so ugly. I don't care about pretty interfaces, so I peeked at it anyway. My key items were hardware encoding/decoding & multiple tuner support.

I think most of the reviews I've seen that mention SageTV miss those important items: they seemed to give up when the software encoders didn't work, or else they used a 250 set to a low quality recording setting & then usually never bothered to mention that you could use more than 1 tuner -- all with great picture quality & w/o using every possible cpu cycle, especially if a hardware decoder were used. In fact, one of the consistent complaints I see in PC-based PVR reviews is the 'fact' that picture quality isn't very good & that TiVo is much better.

Finally, it seemed like the most important part of many reviews was what the menus looked liked. Pretty interface... wheeee

Reviewers should be educated about the important points, as mentioned above: picture quality & multiple tuners

Oh -- and it costs a more than TiVo to set up initially? Maybe so, but not in the long run, after factoring in monthly subscription fees. (Something the PC Mag article did mention.)

- Andy

[nielm]

Another thing Sage needs before going to review is a decent manual... The one for 1.4 was just not good enough: you had to figure out how to use it (ie really how to use it, not just what the buttons did).

This is important because Sage uses a completely different idea of PVR usage compared to most PC-based PVRs and even TiVOs -- no buffer for timeshifting, and everthing is always recorded.
The number of posts in this forum about 'Its recording everything', and 'Its using all my disk space' is evidence to how most users who are used to buffer-based timeshifting are not used to this way of working, and cannot initially see the benefits.

If the manual would explain clearly how it works like this, why it works like this, the benefits of working like this (change channel: no lost timeshift buffer, you can always go back and re-watch a program, provided it has not been deleted), and the best way of working like this (assign a partition to Sage and let it manage the disk space itself), then a reviewer would easily see the benefits..

Also, IR was poorly explained in the 1.4 manual, and was disabled by default, if it even hinted about how it worked, then it would become a killer feature in the eyes of a reviewer (IMHO!)

Finally comapring sage to Tivo's is possible for North America (and to Sky+ in the UK), but for us in the rest of the world, there are hardly any commercial available PVRs for sale, and those that are (mostly DVD recorders with a small HD) are prohibitlivly expensive, and don't have an integrated EPG.

[nielm]

PS a pretty interface is very important: it is the first impression a user gets, and most reviewers (whether professional, or just possible future purchasers doing a trial) never get any further than the first impression because they have not got the time...
I was initially put off Sage 1.4 by the non-intuitive keyboard/mouse UI (ESC to do options?!) and wasted a good two months trying (and failing) to get Snapstream to work

[Cayars]

Originally posted by nielm
<snip>
If the manual would explain clearly how it works like this, why it works like this, the benefits of working like this (change channel: no lost timeshift buffer, you can always go back and re-watch a program, provided it has not been deleted), and the best way of working like this (assign a partition to Sage and let it manage the disk space itself), then a reviewer would easily see the benefits..
<snip>

Just so you know, this isn't exactly true even with multiple tuners.

[falchulk]

I went from showshifter to snapstream betas to sagetv. I looked at early versions of sage but they required the 250. No way was I going to buy a $179 card! Well, eventually, the ugly picture in snapstream and the lack of integrated guide in showshifter convinced me to buy a pvr250 and try sage. It was love at first site. The interface was never ugly to me. It did everythign I wanted and did not bring my system to a halt while doing it. I must admit that I am a "customizer" and enjoy playing with everything until it does exactly what I want. Others might not be willing to put in the time as I am. Someone that intends to do review 3 diffrent packages in a week surely cannot get things just right. They look for what works best installed. That might be BTV. Unfortunately, if you use it more then a week, it can make you want to puull your hair out. There were too many limitations and the cpu usage was very high. It was hard to use myhtpc as a htpc and not just a pvr. I imgine this will be better now since I just recived an email about btv having overlay support. It still gets me that sage can use vmr9 at 14 to 20% cpu. With btv, it hits 75%!

[AJ Bertelson]

Originally posted by thatdude90210
I'm sure at some point Frey will be sending out 2.0 bundled with a pvr250 (can't expect reviewers to have to buy their own) for reviewers.

My own motivation for trying Sage was initially some talk at Shacknews' comments section about building your own PVR (and I had a new 160GB HD that I got a good deal on just sitting around). Most of the pvr software were mentioned, including beyondtv, sagetv, mythtv, etc. I did my own research and concluded that Sage had the two most important features: multiple tuners, and client for my laptop. My other consideration was picture quality. So I built a dedicated Sage box and have been happy with it since.

Hi2u,

Whats your shacknews name? I believe that was the PVR thread that I talked about sageTV.

[nielm]

Originally posted by Cayars
Just so you know, this isn't exactly true even with multiple tuners.

Ok, I mis-phrased: What I meant was: if you change a channel while watching a program then change back, you have not lost the first part of your program (unlike what happens with buffer-based timeshifting)
If, after you have watched an entire program, you can go back and re-watch it later...
And I missed one other major benefit: while timeshifting a program, you can mark it to be recorded, and the whole program (not just the remainder) will be kept.

[Ralphjb]

Originally posted by nielm
PS a pretty interface is very important: it is the first impression a user gets, and most reviewers (whether professional, or just possible future purchasers doing a trial) never get any further than the first impression because they have not got the time...
I was initially put off Sage 1.4 by the non-intuitive keyboard/mouse UI (ESC to do options?!) and wasted a good two months trying (and failing) to get Snapstream to work

I've never understand the issue others had with SageTV and the interface. I have always found it intuitive, easy to use and unobtrusive. The only real criticism I had of it is the Detailed Setup was not available as part of the program (always had to go grab a mouse and keyboard to make changes). The other issue was not having a preview window when changing channels. Actually this later point never effected me, because I use SageTV primarily to record, not to watch live TV. But using Guide menus on TV's for other things, I understand the convenience of this.

At any rate, Sage 2 has addressed both issues. I actually find the interface a little less intuitive (like the right clicking of a mouse does nothing but switches video on and off), but I assume once the program is done, many aspects of the interface will be under user control.