Questions From a Potential Mythtv Emigrant

[OnTheFence]

I'm not entirely satisfied with my current Gentoo/Mythtv setup, so I'm thinking about switching to SageTV. Before I do so, I still have a few nagging questions that haven't been fully answered in the FAQ or the forum. I'm sure that most of these would be answered by installing the trial version, but doing so whould require the removal of a Mythtv setup that I've invested a lot of time and effort into. Consequently, I'd prefer not to get rid of Myth until I'm sure that SageTV has everything I need. Anyway, enough rambling from me; here are my questions:

1. Can SageTV control a Motorola DCT-2000 series digital cable box via the serial port? I saw a post about an external plugin that provides this capability, but the post was from 2003, and I was wondering if anyone has any more current information regarding this. Lack of reliable support in this area would certainly be a show-stopper for me...

2. (This might be a dumb question) Does SageTV's commercial skipping feature edit the commercials out of the recorded MPEG streams, or does it just detect and skip commercial regions in a recorded MPEG during playback, without actually removing those regions?

3. Has anyone tried running SageTV on a VIA MII 6000E motherboard with a PVR-350? I'm worried that my hardware may be a bit underpowered.

Any relevant responses would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading!

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by OnTheFence

I'm not entirely satisfied with my current Gentoo/Mythtv setup, so I'm thinking about switching to SageTV. Before I do so, I still have a few nagging questions that haven't been fully answered in the FAQ or the forum. I'm sure that most of these would be answered by installing the trial version, but doing so whould require the removal of a Mythtv setup that I've invested a lot of time and effort into. Consequently, I'd prefer not to get rid of Myth until I'm sure that SageTV has everything I need. Anyway, enough rambling from me; here are my questions:

You could always make an image of it

2. (This might be a dumb question) Does SageTV's commercial skipping feature edit the commercials out of the recorded MPEG streams, or does it just detect and skip commercial regions in a recorded MPEG during playback, without actually removing those regions?

No, what happens is an external program (ie comskip or ShowAnalyzer ) will create a text file that lists the beginning/end frame of the commercial. Then an STV that supports it, reads the file, and then marks the commercials on the progress bar and allows skipping (like chapters) or optionally auto-skipping of the commercialls.

Both SA and comskip can output project files for various MPEG editors to speed the cliping if you wish to remove them.

3. Has anyone tried running SageTV on a VIA MII 6000E motherboard with a PVR-350? I'm worried that my hardware may be a bit underpowered.

If you're using the hardware decoding of the PVR 350 you'll have plenty of power. If you don't use the 350's decoding, I'm affraid you're probably screwed

Any relevant responses would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading!