SageTV and Snapstream 3

[Watter]

I purchased SageTV a few weeks and haven't regretted it for a moment, so don't take the following question as trolling, but has anyone tried the new Snapstream version? Is there anything intersting there?

SageTV's use of a hardware encoder alone is enough for me to prefer it (not to mention how excited I am to have at least partial use of the hardware decoder of my WinTV PVR 350), but to be quite honest, I don't like the interface much. I'm sure it's fine for people who are using SageTV on their computer monitor, but I bought it as a Tivo replacement. I want to be able to do everything simply and easily from remote control. The myriad of buttons and complex controls that currently exist don't allow for that in SageTV yet. My old Tivo remote had more than enough buttons to allow me to do everything I wanted very quickly with Tivo. Not so with Sage.

Anyway, I was just curious of anyone's impressions of Snapstream. Is there anything innovative there that might make it into a future version of SageTV? etc..

-Watter

[sennbj]

Originally posted by Watter
I purchased SageTV a few weeks and haven't regretted it for a moment, so don't take the following question as trolling, but has anyone tried the new Snapstream version? Is there anything intersting there?

SageTV's use of a hardware encoder alone is enough for me to prefer it (not to mention how excited I am to have at least partial use of the hardware decoder of my WinTV PVR 350), but to be quite honest, I don't like the interface much. I'm sure it's fine for people who are using SageTV on their computer monitor, but I bought it as a Tivo replacement. I want to be able to do everything simply and easily from remote control. The myriad of buttons and complex controls that currently exist don't allow for that in SageTV yet. My old Tivo remote had more than enough buttons to allow me to do everything I wanted very quickly with Tivo. Not so with Sage.

Anyway, I was just curious of anyone's impressions of Snapstream. Is there anything innovative there that might make it into a future version of SageTV? etc..

-Watter

I purchased SnapStream a few weeks ago in anticipation of the “free” upgrade to version 3. I then got very involved in the Beta testing of the last few releases before they went gold.

I was very impressed with their interface, very well thought out and easy to navigate, but while trying to get a system that was stable, reliable, and watchable I stumbled across the PVR 250. Once I picked up the PVR 250 and found SageTV I never looked back.

I could never get SnapStream to change my channels on my Satellite receiver consistently, it would crash on a regular basis, and the CPU utilization for software encoding brought even my AMD 1800 to its knees when trying to record, watch and stream.

The things that I would like to see that SnapStream has to offer are the “TransCoding”, it can schedule to take an MPEG file and turn it into almost any format you want automatically. I actually installed my purchased copy on my other machine and use it as a transcoding station for SageTV recordings. I guess my $49 was not entirely wasted. Another thing that they offer is ease of navigation; I would have to agree that SageTV is not the most ergonomic interface to use while using a remote control.