hdtv questions

[ryansebiz]

i'm an owner of beyond tv 3 and am a little hesitant to pay to upgrade to version 4. i've heard really good things about sage tv and am considering purchasing the software to watch hdtv on my pc.

on my computer i don't have any extra pci slots (taken up with hauppauge pvr 250, audigy 2 zs and linksys wi-fi cards). i'm going to buy the fusion 5 gold usb and connect it to the zenith silver sensor indoor hdtv antenna. i'll use the pvr 250 to record analog shows and the silver sensor to record hdtv.

how does sagetv 4 record and store hdtv shows? is it mpeg 2? beyond tv 4 uses its own file format which cannot be used by anything other than beyond tv. which really sucks.

thanks for your help. any additional advice is appreciated. thank you.

[lovingHDTV]

I don't use that tuner, but I do know that I can play the HDTV recording from Sage on other media players. They have worked on Zoom, WMP, and directly in filtergraph for me.

[etk29321]

Sage "records" to transport stream. Pretty much any HD editing software out there will read the ts file and split out the mpeg for you if you want to, but I have seen any reason to bother. I've got a fusion 5 lite PCI card working with Sage 4. The one big thing I've noticed though is that you might need to make sure your sage recording drive is local to the server unless you have gigabit ethernet. Recording and watching HD from a client at the same time drove my usage up high enough that it wasn't keeping up (ok, it was really more the adapter than the line speed, but I don't trust ethernet over 50% util unless you have really good cards). Moving to a local drive for recording fixed the issue.