A couple of noob questions

[Hoystory]

I've been using Sage TV for a couple of weeks now, and for the most part I've very happy with it. I have a few questions and I would appreciate any answers/tips I can get from the old guard around here.

#1: The Web server extension looks quite impressive. Is it possible to watch video over the Internet from my home computer using the Sage Client on my laptop and the Web server?

#2: I've got a Hauppage 500 dual-tuner card. Is it possible to open up two separate Sage TV windows and watch, say two separate baseball games live at the same time?

#3: Cayars Ultimate STV looks quite impressive and has a ton of features I'd like to take advantage of. Is it relatively simple to install? How widespread are bugs/problems with it? If you look at the thread, it looks like there's tons -- of course that only represents people having problems, people who don't have problems don't post. So, how stable is it?

#4: Intelligent recording -- how many days/weeks of telling it that you don't like stuff does it take to have the thing settle down? It seems that even after I've told it don't like a certain program, the next day's program gets recorded (these are mainly news programs).

All comments/insight are much appreciated.

[nielm]

Originally Posted by Hoystory

#1: The Web server extension looks quite impressive. Is it possible to watch video over the Internet from my home computer using the Sage Client on my laptop and the Web server?

Not really -- unless you have a very high bandwidth internet connection or recompress the file to a very small size (DVD quality MPEG2 is about 5000Kbit/s, most internet links are a few 100Kbit/s).
There is a page in the advanced section of the webserver docs (see the link in the wiki in my sig) detailing how to get a link to the video files on the detailed info page, which is a first step.

There is also a thread in the customisations forum for how to recompress video to a very small WMV file for viewing over the internet.

#4: Intelligent recording -- how many days/weeks of telling it that you don't like stuff does it take to have the thing settle down? It seems that even after I've told it don't like a certain program, the next day's program gets recorded (these are mainly news programs).

You can (using the additional airings search in the webserver) mark all the news shows in the immediate future as 'don't like', and also do a search for the news shows 'in the past' and with the watched flag 'set' -- you can then clear the watched flag these shows... These can also be done via the Viewing History page of some custom STVs (Malore, Maldude, Cayars)

Sage has seen that you have watched a few news shows, and it thinks you like them, doing both of this will correct that impression!

IR always seems to need a little 'taming', even with a lot of viewing history. There is no way of saying 'never record this show', only tuning it by making sure shows you don't want recorded are not marked as watched...

[dblaine2]

Cayars STV has been very stable for me. I run 18E. If you read the thread, most people feel 17 and 18E are pretty stable. There are always little issues that some would like fixed or see new functionality. Of course, there are still others that have all kinds of problems. Maybe their system is not up to the task, maybe they don't follow directions, maybe their systems are used for other things that cause problems. There is a link in the customization forum for the "Official Cayars documentation" that steps you through the install.

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9894

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by Hoystory

#2: I've got a Hauppage 500 dual-tuner card. Is it possible to open up two separate Sage TV windows and watch, say two separate baseball games live at the same time?

Yes. The easiest way is to run multiple instances of the client. You'll have to experiment with the best combination of video + audio renderer/decoder settings to get playback to work in both windows, but it can be done.

- Andy

[Crashless]

Originally Posted by Hoystory

#1: The Web server extension looks quite impressive. Is it possible to watch video over the Internet from my home computer using the Sage Client on my laptop and the Web server?

I use orb.com to watch all my TV remotely. It's pretty easy to setup, and is now FREE. You'll need a relatively strong system to run it (I have an AMD 2500+, and it runs at 80% usage) because it transcodes in real-time to wmv.

Give it a try, you'll like it.