Newbie advice, be patient it's worth it!

[planetc]

Having spent several weeks working on my Sage based htpc setup I have finally reached a point where I can honestly say it's worth having. It would be nice if the product worked perfectly straight out of the box, but in this market it is impossible to produce anything that will be perfect for every possible setup it may be introduced into. If you are looking for it to be perfect without a fair amount of effort then get someone to build it for you.

For me at least it's been a roller coaster journey. Although most of the functions work in basic form more or less from the initial install, it's worth taking the time to learn as much as possible about the software and hardware to get the best from it.
Research the hardware you are using within these forums, almost everything I am using had suggestions from other people that have already played with it.
Be prepared to play trial and error with different settings for your htpc including resolutions, decoders, colour, brightness and contrast, even process priorities. It may well cause mayhem at home, especially if you have a partner that has no understanding of what you are doing except the volume control!
The point is the end result will be worth it when you hit the right combination of settings.
I had headaches making the initial picture quality acceptable, getting the epg to work properly (xmltv), getting everything to play friendly with my soundcard, sponteneous crashes and reboots, stuttering client and more and more. Take each issue one step at a time, the answers are there if you search for them.

We are rapidly approaching a time in the UK where prebuilt htpc boxes are likely to hit the mainstream with some of the high street PC stores advertising them. I cannot see that these boxes can possibly get anywhere close to the performance we can achieve with a product like Sage with some effort, but if you want easy then I suggest you go get a demo