Showshifter is dead.

[jominor]

http://www.showshifter.com/index.htm

It really wasn't that good of a product. And then there were 3.

[Fluffdaddy]

Never heard of it.

[nielm]

It was the first PVR I tried, using an ATI AIW 7500 as a tuner...

(PS: 3? hmmm, I guess you mean Sage, BTV, MS/MCE...
but what about Myth, CTPVR, GBPVR, freevo, and yahoo's Go TV... There is still some competition left )

[jominor]

Originally Posted by nielm

It was the first PVR I tried, using an ATI AIW 7500 as a tuner...

(PS: 3? hmmm, I guess you mean Sage, BTV, MS/MCE...
but what about Myth, CTPVR, GBPVR, freevo, and yahoo's Go TV... There is still some competition left )

It was just a quick guess!

[edbmdave]

It was the first PVR I used as well, but they quickly lost touch with their users, and were not innovating the product. I have stuck with Sage for exactly the opposite reason.

Sad to see them go, but I believe it was self-inflicted.... Just because you are first on the market does not allow you to rest on your laurels?. (I know they got bought out as well, but the fact they haven't been able to sell the assets or the IP....) I don't think many place too much value on the product nowadays... Most of the alternatives are much richer.. Even the opensource product (MediaPortal)...

So long Showshifter.. You were my first..

[m0ng00se30]

Seems to be a pattern. Showshifter was my first too. I quit a long time ago... it just wasn't going anywhere. Suprised they held on as long as they did, but thanks for getting me started!

--Mike

[nielm]

What killed showshifter for me was that at the beginning they were SW-encoders only (I was using an AIW7500), and saving to MJPEG with auto recompression to DIVX.

This meant enormous files even if you were capturing at half-res (320x240), and because I was using a 1GHz EPIA M10000, it also meant lengthly re-encoding times.. (I know they started supporting MPEG2 HW encoders later, but it was too late for me)

So ATI's MMC was better than showshifter (it could capture to MPEG2!), but as I was not in the US, MMC had no program info, and no way to import it from an external source... So, I used MyHTPC with XMLTV to program recordings into the ATI capture program... Hackety hack!

A PVR-250 and Sage or BTV were the next attempt at a PVR...

Sage 1.4.10 did not work at all Always crashed on startup and the 14-day trial expired before I could figure out why..

BTV was the next attempt, but that didn't work too well either: at the time they were VMR9-only and the old M10000 didn't support VMR9 (unless you consider 5fps 'support')... However they gave me a free licence for writing a tutorial (the channel number reg hack), and they supported XMLTV in the EPG, so it was better -- but I still had to use an external program for playback...

Finally a windows reinstall allowed me to retry Sage, and this time it worked -- and I have not looked back since!

I think it took a total of 6 months from buying the hardware to having a working PVR

[Ryokurin]

I used it at first, but mostly because I got a free copy of 1.0 from a magazine, and they allowed a upgrade to the then new 2.0 for like 20 bucks. All I had back then was a ratty old bt878 on a Athlon 850. It was rather hard to setup, and not really reliable. I think I used cyberlinks old powerVCR with deinterlaceing more than I used showshifter. The last straw was when 3 came out which was basically like 2 but hardware card support. I tried a few open sourced things and got Sage 2 soon after it came out.

[JUC]

my first too! Oh so sad. Unfortunately, once I heard of Sage and after using the trial I immediately knew what was missing from showshifter....couldn't have been happier making the switch. I actually used to check in on their forums from time to time just to see what was going on.....not much.

JUC

[Freegoo]

Wow my first too. Didn't go all that well. Ended up taking all my hardware back to best buy for a refund and swearing off HTPC's forever. (Was going to use it to back up our Tivo at the time).

Then our Tivo got fried in a lightning storm. At first we replaced it with another Tivo, but brother kept insisting we go back the PC route. I resisted because the first experience was so frustrating, but that's what we ended up doing. We built a PC and trialed both Sage and Snapstream. At the time I didn't really care for Sage's interface (1.4ish) so we went with Snapstream. It actually wasn't too bad, and it was a pretty comparable experience to Tivo without the monthly bill. But problems built up. The worst was some weird bug where we got playback stuttering whenever a new recording started. I emailed support about it and they said it was a known problem but was hardware related - hard drive's throughput just wasn't fast enough to handle playing a video and recording at the same time.

My BS detector went off, and besides Sage 2.0 was just released. We installed it and haven't looked back since. Oh and with 2 tuners recording, commercial detector running, and occasional DIVX recompression all while watching a recorded program we have yet to run into that hard drive bottleneck! Now if only we could get an OTA HD signal here.

[flashbacck]

yeah, this was my first pvr software too. IMO, it was the best for a while and was the first to have a PVR/Video/DVD/Music integration. I liked it because it let you use SW encoding cards, and you could encode to Divx or Xvid directly. It seemed like they stopped doing development after they released v2 though.