soul_stalker

Sorry for the late reply, I was out of town for the holidays...

Wow... Sounds like you are pretty close. I cant test just now as I'm still fully reliant on 7MC and my 4 extenders.... so much so I cant really even afford to have it offline for more than an hour at a time, but I'm building a new test rig soon and then I will definitly let you know as I am ready to explore sage. If I can get a good working solution with BEV I will likely make the full switch.

I really like the virtual tuners!! and the "no more scanning". I hope to have my test PC ready for this in FEB. I am desperate to eventually ditch dvbdream as running three instances simply triples the bugs and crashes. I will definitley let you know when I'm good to go. I have an extra genpix just for this ready to go as well.

Thanks for the detailed reply.

If your not familiar with dvbe4sage the selling points for me are:

1. No more scanning. The software reads all the channel and transponder info from the satellite.
2. Virtual tuners! All of my locals are on 1 transponder so I can record all 4 networks in hd at the same time on 1 physical tuner.

The downside is it's a little more complicated to set up in sagetv. I'm working on a spreadsheet that will ease that pain alot though.

sorry to run on, let me know

It got even better when I switched to windows 7 on the server. I used to have to reboot the server about once a week with xp but now I rarely reboot. In my opinion it's well worth it.

With dvbdream you know you have to do scans pretty frequently to keep up with the channel changes.

If your interested in testing I've been working with Codemonkey on DVBE4SageTV. We have it pretty darn close and another tester would help get it done once and for all. I have it working on a test system but there is a glitch in the video every so often I don't see with dvbdream. could be my system, I'm going to try another one this weekend.

Anyway, you could try the network encoder with dvbdream and sage I know it works I'm watching it right now. If you feel like testing dvbe4sage let me know and I'll upload an alpha program for you.

Sage does not support mdapi plugins at all so no n3xt support. It does support dvb-s but without mdapi it useless for dish or bev and with the bda driver for genpix Sage can see it but again it's useless for our purpose. I've been using DVBdream and and the network encoder module for it since it came out and it works well with sage. I love it!

When I first started with it and sagetv I used client pc's and it was a pain. It was a bitch to set up, had constant lockups and an overall underwhelming performance. Once I purchased a network encoder that all changed. The server install is simple. I don't have to worry about codecs (I don't use the client on the server) and best of all where can you purchase a client pc that will do h264 video for $149?