? Sage vs TiVo Getting Started Problems

[Hector]

Heh well I guess I can only say never for me. I can't speak for a Series 2 either. I've had a Series 1 since 98 or so and its never once missed one of thousands of recordings. It crashed one time something awful after I installed that Tivo Control Center hack as that thing was brutal. Otherwise I expanded the drives, and run Tivoweb, Tytool and all that stuff. Never once a problem.

There are a few things I miss from Tivo.

Wishlists and/or Saved searches - nothing more annoying than having to type out the same search terms over and over and over. Plus being able to schedule recordings based on saved search terms is awesome.

Guide data filtering - Tivo is much better suited for those with lots of channels because you can slice the guide a number of ways AND persist it. By cateorgy, favorite channels, etc. I can mash a key or two and just see all the football in the guide. Or just a list of say my favorite 20 channels.

Smooth transport - Tivo's transport is much more elegant. Single frame advance, slow motion, smooth ff/rew. Sage's can be faster tho as long as you don't care what you're skipping over. Sometimes when its not commercials you do.

Things I would miss from Sage would take pages.

peace . . .

PS I had problems with time sync too. Now I use a pc service to sync to a time server and its perfect. Apparently this is a problem of some motherboards. Some Asus for example.

Originally Posted by oolong

Never say Never....

I can't speak for series 2 but my series 1 Tivo has crashed and missed recordings at least twice.

I've had to reboot my Tivo at least 4 times since I've had it. This is over a 3 year or more period. So still not bad, but not perfect.

I just got a SageTV server up and running last weekend so I'm wondering what kind of milieage I'm going to get now that I've weened myself off Tivo. Of course my sage server is an old old <600mhz Compaq Deskpro so I'm not holding my breath. But so far so good. It's humming along fine

Still having a time zone problem though So I've disabled the time sync for now.

Experienced some severe Tivo withdrawls the first couple days after going cold turkey, but as I get more familer with Sage and the different controls (helps if you take the time to read the manual ) I don't miss Tivo at all.

[oolong]

Originally Posted by Hector

There are a few things I miss from Tivo.

Wishlists and/or Saved searches - nothing more annoying than having to type out the same search terms over and over and over. Plus being able to schedule recordings based on saved search terms is awesome.

Guide data filtering - Tivo is much better suited for those with lots of channels because you can slice the guide a number of ways AND persist it. By cateorgy, favorite channels, etc. I can mash a key or two and just see all the football in the guide. Or just a list of say my favorite 20 channels.

Smooth transport - Tivo's transport is much more elegant. Single frame advance, slow motion, smooth ff/rew. Sage's can be faster tho as long as you don't care what you're skipping over. Sometimes when its not commercials you do.

Never even heard of most of those options... I guess I was never a Tivo power user Though this weekend I plan on getting all the files I want to keep off the Tivo so I guess I'll need to become learnid. Although I suspect that it will be painful....

But yeah the fast foward and rewind in Tivo was genious.

But I also love that fast skip in Sage, although I would miss out on the occasional really cool commercial. Even with Tivo I would find myself clueless about what was going on in the world (upcoming movies, events, news, etc) just because I stopped watching commercials. Oh well, the price we pay.

Originally Posted by Hector

PS I had problems with time sync too. Now I use a pc service to sync to a time server and its perfect. Apparently this is a problem of some motherboards. Some Asus for example.

That's good to know. At least I know I'm not crazy.

[Hector]

Re: tivo - For guide options just hit enter when the guide is active. Or on the newer remotes use the display key. As for wishlists an example is I wanted a particular Twilight Zone episode titled 'The Hunt'. So I just set up a wishlist (saved search) for 'Twilight Zone Hunt' and if found to auto record it. It was almost 9 months later but it finally came on and Tivo recorded it. That is really way cool. Bottom line is you can schedule shows that are not even in the guide. Movies you've always wanted to see or any work by a particular actor no matter how far in the future or what channel or movie/show he's in.

As for video extraction the trick is to get the bash shell running on Tivo so you can telnet into it. Once you have that done its not hard at all. I don't know how far you've gotten but there is are cookbook examples of how to do it. Feel free to PM me if you need some guidance.

One cool thing is that if you install the Tyshow Directshow filter Sage will even play Tivo .ty files.

peace . . .

Originally Posted by oolong

Never even heard of most of those options... I guess I was never a Tivo power user Though this weekend I plan on getting all the files I want to keep off the Tivo so I guess I'll need to become learnid. Although I suspect that it will be painful....

But yeah the fast foward and rewind in Tivo was genious.

But I also love that fast skip in Sage, although I would miss out on the occasional really cool commercial. Even with Tivo I would find myself clueless about what was going on in the world (upcoming movies, events, news, etc) just because I stopped watching commercials. Oh well, the price we pay.



That's good to know. At least I know I'm not crazy.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Hector

Re: tivo - For guide options just hit enter when the guide is active. Or on the newer remotes use the display key. As for wishlists an example is I wanted a particular Twilight Zone episode titled 'The Hunt'. So I just set up a wishlist (saved search) for 'Twilight Zone Hunt' and if found to auto record it. It was almost 9 months later but it finally came on and Tivo recorded it. That is really way cool. Bottom line is you can schedule shows that are not even in the guide. Movies you've always wanted to see or any work by a particular actor no matter how far in the future or what channel or movie/show he's in.

FWIW:

Custom STVs (like malore's and ones based on it) offer "sticky" ways to sort the guide data.

Also Sage can do "Wishlists" now, it's called Keyword Favorites.

[Hector]

Cool thanks for the tip on keyword favorites. Favorites actually are much more flexible than Tivo season passes so this all good.

As for slicing the guide data the problem is none of these actually work in the guide itself. In other words when you're watching TV you cannot just slice the guide the way you want to. Plus its only by category not by channels.

Example. I just want to see channels showing college football. Or I just want to view my favorite set of channels. All I can figure is that Jeff doesn't have a lot of channels to contend with himself. It takes me over SIXTY key presses (pages) to view my guide data. And because you cannot EVER view channels that you don't have in the guide (channel setup) you are stuck carrying channels you rarely care to watch. Plus there is no jump list.

If you're a sports nut or a newshound or anyone trying to follow a few things at once, it is really painful. The custom malore searches are helpful for finding stuff, but not practical for viewing and jumping between channels.

And again thanks for the tip on favorites.

peace . . .

Originally Posted by stanger89

FWIW:

Custom STVs (like malore's and ones based on it) offer "sticky" ways to sort the guide data.

Also Sage can do "Wishlists" now, it's called Keyword Favorites.

[stanger89]

You should try the custom guides in malore's (or Maldude2, or probably some others). You can group by:
All, Title, Channel, Channel Number, Category, Date, Year (movies), Rated (movies) Parental Rating, Language
You can sort by:
Show ID, Date, Original Air Date, Title
And you can filter by:
Favorite, Manual Record, Watched, Like (not sure what this does), Don't like, First Run, Category

It won't do everything you want, but it sounds like you hadn't seen that yet.

[Hector]

I know how to search the database via the Malore type custom1, custom2 searchs, good for searching, no good for jumping channels. But I do not know how to effect what channels/shows appear when you hit the guide key.

When I hit the guide key I have 60+ pages of live guide data. Are you saying there is a way of filtering that guide and only having the GUIDE show the channels that are showing the search criteria?

peace . . .

Originally Posted by stanger89

You should try the custom guides in malore's (or Maldude2, or probably some others). You can group by:
All, Title, Channel, Channel Number, Category, Date, Year (movies), Rated (movies) Parental Rating, Language
You can sort by:
Show ID, Date, Original Air Date, Title
And you can filter by:
Favorite, Manual Record, Watched, Like (not sure what this does), Don't like, First Run, Category

It won't do everything you want, but it sounds like you hadn't seen that yet.

[m1abrams]

Originally Posted by stanger89

FWIW:

Custom STVs (like malore's and ones based on it) offer "sticky" ways to sort the guide data.

Also Sage can do "Wishlists" now, it's called Keyword Favorites.

Keyword Favorites is very close to "Wishlists" but is missing an important part, and that is to be able to filter down the keyword to "Actor", "Title", "Description" and filter out by category too. Without these filters you will get a LOT of junk most of the time, however it is a useful addition just needs a bit more tweaking.

[stanger89]

Re: guide

I don't think anyone's tackled that guide yet.