Save TV 2.1 concerns? New system?

[Brent94Z]

Hey Guys,

I purchased SageTV 2.0 a couple months ago. Well, with some of your help, I have finally decided on what hardware setup to go with and that is on the way and should be here in a day or two. WOOHOO!!! I'm very excited to get my HTPC up and running!

Anyway, with my new found motivation to get my stuff ordered and on the way, I came back here to read up a bit on getting my SageTV installed. However, it seems that I'm seeing an alarming number of problems with 2.1 Looks like 2.1 has some great new features but I'm a little concerned about all the problems.

But, after reading quite a bit it may be the problems are primarily coming from installing over old installs? I'm a bit confused on if I should install 2.0 or 2.1?

My system consists of:

P4 3.4
1 gig dual channel memory
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256 meg card
Either XP MCE2005 (with the HTPC parts disabled) or XP Pro... not sure which yet I'll use.
the normal other stuff.

I'm building this from scratch. Do you guys think I'll be OK with installing 2.1 or since I'm a newbie and haven't even seen Sage work, should I start with 2.0? I'd really like to do 2.1 but I'm afraid if there are problems I won't know if the problems are with the software or the hardware because I wouldn't have a baseline

Thanks!

[mls]

I'd say go with 2.0 until you get all the bugs worked out first since there are a number of things that just are not right with v2.1 yet.

I've installed v2.1 over 2.0 and installed v2.1 all by it self in my testing and haven't had any of the problems others have been listing. However, I do NOT run it as a service and that may be why I've had better lock. Besides that service stuff does confuse things because it may be using the properties file at some point, and then later it uses the sagetvclient properties file.

I have a sneaking suspecion if they would have set it up to not use the service first and get everything setup that way they might have had less problems. Then set it to use the service later. Don't know.

Besides, by not running the service I can start up another copy of sagetv.exe with the -client option and use it for Picture-in-Picture since the settings for the main server display stay in the sagetv.properties file, and those for the 2nd client instance stay in the sagetvclient.properties file. That way they can each have different setups (especially since can't use the save video mode and decoder with both running).

Anyway, I think it best to start with 2.0 until you are sure there are no other hardware problems.

[Brent94Z]

Thanks for the advice mls. I also forgot to mention above one of the major parts of the system... the capture card! I have 1 of the PVR-250MC cards and two standard PVR-250 cards.

Also, since this is going to be a new install of XP, if there are problems with putting 2.1 on top of 2.0 a bit down the road, it shouldn't be that huge of a deal to reload XP. It would be an absolute nightmare to reload the operating system of my main PC but for a dedicated HTPC, I can't see me accumulating too much "junk" on it

And, speaking of this "service" thing...

I see a lot of talk about running Sage as a "service" and all but, what exactly does that mean? I read the 2.1 manual section where it talks about running Sage as a service and from what I can gather, it means it sounds like it means Sage is more "integrated" with the OS... or something along those lines

If somebody could explain to me what running Sage as a "service" means and maybe your personal benefits and non benefits, that would be great! I notice the one you mention about not being able to use PIP when running as a service. Bummer.

Thanks!

[mls]

When running the service the UI ends up using the client properties file and that's why I don't think the PIP idea would work with the stock v2.1 SageTV. Might be able to copy some of it over to a different folder and edit things to get another occurance of it to run. Don't know if anyone has tried that or not yet.

Or, could install the seperate Client software in another folder. That should work.

Anyway, I'm avoiding the service idea since I don't have any real reason to use it. My system runs 24/7 and doesn't crash anyway. That's the only real advantage the service offers. If the UI side crashes it can be shut down and restarted while the service is supposedly capable of continueing to record in the mean time.

But, then again, they set the service to restart if it crashes itself... so I'm not sure what they think they are accomplishing. If their systems aren't stable to start with, seems to me like the service just adds one more thing that could cause problems. Oh well, apparently some people want the service (I know I'll never run it that way though).

[Brent94Z]

Thanks! My system will be running 24/7 as well.

I had a DirecTV Ultimate TV box running for a couple years. I never turned it off... all I did is turn the TV on and off. No failures of the drive in the Ultimate TV box which kinda surprises me actually I'm hoping for as good of luck running my HTPC

[mls]

The main thing is finding all the right combination of drivers and a codec that all work together. On my server machine I use the Cyberlink (PowerDVD) decoder since the others seem to have problems on that system. The client has nvDVD 2.55 video decoder and Cyberlink for audio decoder (because the audio decoder in nvDVD is known to cause problems).

Took a while to find the right combination of things, but after that v2.0 ran here for over 2 months without a glitch. Of course, now I'm messing with v2.1 and other customizations (STV's), so I am getting some odd things every now an then until they get all the bugs worked out of things with v2.1 and/or the STV's I'm using.

Wish you good luck with your project and be sure to come back and let everyone know how things work out.

[Brent94Z]

I definitely will! I really like what I see for the customizations so I'm sure I'll be back often just checkin' up on stuff even after I get my setup running.

I'm guessing the combo I have is fairly common. Is there a good starting point for these codecs or do people just try different options/ones until they find a setup that works?

If it matters for my setup, I have a Soyo Dragon V2.10 black edition mb.

Thanks!