What did you find confusing about SageTV?

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by stevech

The on screen displays are illogically organized.

The authors assume the new user knows many acronyms.

Do you mean the OSD during playback, or what? I'm not sure what type of acronyms you are referring to.

- Andy

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by Wakecrash

The most confusing to me was matching one of my 3 PVR cards, to the comm port and audio/video ports of the STB. Is thier a way for Sage to tell which PVR card is in a particular slot.

Just a thought but you could install the PVR cards one at a time and give each card a "friendly name" to identify them better like in this thread.

BobP.

[tfurlong]

My biggest difficulty was getting SageTV to look good on my standard-def TV. I still spend time tweaking the settings because I'm not sure they are at their best. I use S-Video out of an Nvidia card, which I'm guessing is fairly typical, and I spent a lot of time choosing:
A. Desktop Resolution,
B. A good codec, and
C. VMR9 versus Overlay

I think some guidance in that department would help new users to be happier with their SageTV setups. I ended up using a desktop resolution of 640x480, the Nvidia codec, and overlay rendering to get the best quality on my setup. I've read that a desktop resolution of 720x480 is what I should be running, but I haven't figured out how to show video in the correct aspect ratio in that resolution.

Similarly, I'm sure HDTV users could use some guidance as to how choose the same settings.

[Coastal]

Sage newbie, purchased the software about 6 weeks ago.

I echo the previous poster, I have a similar setup and spent a bunch of time figuring out best video settings. I would like the manual to cover all the settings in some detail. It would be great to see a chapter covering common configurations and suggested best settings to match. Then again, this information may be a bit dynamic in nature and perhaps it would be better to have a well organized sticky in the forum...

[Goodspike]

I want to record the evening news every day, but not by name because that records everything that affiliate broadcasts in the way of news.

So, basically I want a Monday through Saturday at the same time option. There's one way I do that where it only records for one week and then stops. I don't know when you'd ever want to do that, so I don't know what the point of that option is. And I accidently select that option a lot if I ever cancel that recording and then want to re-start it. So it's just not clear which one to use. [Edit: It sounds like Timed Recordings are being used; try a Favorite limited to a specific hour instead.]

Also, none of the icons make any sense. As I recall there's a square with an 1 in the middle of it, and one with an A. HD makes sense, but none of the others do (without reading the manual). [Edit: The Setup -> Help -> Interface Guide menu was added to help clarify UI items w/o referring to the manual. ]

[bluezone]

One of the annoying aspects of Sage TV is the fact that it so consideres itself a DVR that it doesn't have some of the simple functionality that you would expect of a program of this calibre. I'm talking about the ability to start and stop a recording immediately like a standard VCR. I, occasionally, record on demand and I've got to go through all of kinds of gyrations in order to record them.

[hllord]

I think the hardest part about getting the system running was knowing what to configure and what to leave alone. The new wizard helps, but the average person wants to look around and see what changing an option does. For me, changing some options made the system stop functioning.

I guess my best suggestion would be to add a [?] button on each option so an inquisitive user can get some help on the option.

Another option would be to have a "Novice" mode where most of the settings do not exist on the screens therefore keeping people from changing settings. Along the same lines could be a Novice mode for the whole app where only the simple options are included. Advanced mode could be turned on to change what a novice can see. I would like to remove several menu items as I do not use the functions, and make it so I am the only one that can change the recording settings. This is starting to ramble so I will just stop now.

[jlindborg]

By far and away the most complicated thing to setup was the video/audio configuration on a client with HD content involved. Spent hours and hours twiddling, reading posts, fiddling some more before I got SD, HD and DVD content to all play properly with audio. Complicated stuff... not sure how you can make that easier but some improved documentation on how to go about some of this would be good. Or just put out an MVP style client that supports HD output! That'd make the issue go away for many of us.

I was also whip-sawed like an earlier poster to find out that Sage does not handle simple Audio CDs. The bad news was I figured this out _after_ getting rid of my DVD/CD player. Not good for the WAF...

Oh, and the picture browsing interface is confusing or buggy, I'm not sure which. We had some folks over for a thrilling evening of vacation slides on the plasma but other than putting it into automatic slideshow mode and letting it go, you couldn't do much. I wanted to go into a folder and manually navigate around using the forward/back keys on the remote. The manual dances around this a bit and implies it may work but it doesn't. You have to pop out, look through the thumbnails and jump back in. We spent about 10 minutes banging heads with this until we gave up and just looked at them on our laptop instead. I guess this fits in with the general complaint that besides being a great DVR, the other media functions in Sage are quite weak.

[sjc999]

When you are using STV Client and start making setup changes, it is never clear whether the changes being made affect the client or the server or both. Would be nice if that was obvious - but since it is not including this in help files would be useful.

[dshields]

Originally Posted by Coastal

Sage newbie, purchased the software about 6 weeks ago.

I echo the previous poster, I have a similar setup and spent a bunch of time figuring out best video settings. I would like the manual to cover all the settings in some detail. It would be great to see a chapter covering common configurations and suggested best settings to match. Then again, this information may be a bit dynamic in nature and perhaps it would be better to have a well organized sticky in the forum...

I echo both previous posters.

In addition, one confusing thing to me was the difference between the SageTV client and the server software. I purchased SageTV with the intention of running it as a Windows service with a MediaMVP. It took a while before I realized that many of the settings I made on the server had to be made separately on the MVP client. This was very confusing to me in the beginning, so a few words on that issue in the manual would help.

Another thing that has been very confusing is the terminology related to STV's or STVi's or whatever they are called. I still don't understand the acronyms, although I did manage to get the comskip stvi installed and working. I wish I understood what stv and stvi mean and what they are. (I assume an stvi is an xml file... but it isn't clear).

The other really confusing thing to me was that a lot of info in the forums and the wiki is not clear about what version of SageTV the info applies to. I know this isn't a manual-related issue, and I don't know if there is an easy solution, but it would be cool if the forum had a drop down list for selecting the applicable version on each post, and the search could utilize this.

I would appreciate an introduction to customizations as well. Maybe that already exists, but I haven't searched really hard yet. Something with a basic overview, aimed to simply reducing the confusion of newbies who go searching the forum would be helpful. Sometimes a newbie just needs to know what terms he can ignore until he has a basic setup working.

Overall, I think the manual is really good. I would like more detail, as mentioned above. I would also like a more concise quick-start section.

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by dshields

Another thing that has been very confusing is the terminology related to STV's or STVi's or whatever they are called. I still don't understand the acronyms, although I did manage to get the comskip stvi installed and working. I wish I understood what stv and stvi mean and what they are. (I assume an stvi is an xml file... but it isn't clear).

I don't know exactly what STV stands for, but its function is that of the User interface that you see in Sage. It can be either an .stv or an .xml file, but that is just the internal format of the file. You must have an STV for Sage to run.

STVi is an import file to tweak an STV file, to give it extra features. Your comskip stvi that you installed imported in the compskip feature to the STV that you use.

[Malfunction]

Confusing things? Sure:

Hardware, for the most part. SageTV should come with a shopping list, so people don't buy the worst choices to save a few bucks.

Mainly the Roslyn card, and fighting with the third party IR blaster. If I could go back in time I'd just get a Hauppage PVR 150 card...which happens to bundle with an IR blaster.

Getting the Roslyn card to work, downloading the beta Hauppage drivers that really work with it, tweaking the colors. The registry hack.

Untweaking the colors back to default after replacing my composite-in TV with a decent VGA capable LCD.

Believing this would run decently under Win98 or WinME. (Nothing does that.) It runs nice under XP Pro.

[snarlyboy]

Though the idea of a PVR is not magic to me, this was my first experience with one (I've been travelling overseas alot in the past few years and didn't have a tivo) but there is one or two major confusing things about SageTV from my VCR mentality. (I asked this in another thread, but am posting it here for your usage in manual creation etc).

1. How to instantly one-touch record a CLIP off TV without setting up times or recording a whole show block - for example if you don't have the EPG set up at first (or don't use one at all), it is really cumbersome - or at least not obvious how to do this.
   
2. I understand the delay and why all Live TV is recorded - I can live with that. What I want to know is why these recently recorded instances of me watching "LiveTV" don't show up in the SageTV Recordings, but are in the folder if you look in Windows Explorer? I know that you can configure Sage to auto-delete LiveTV instances for space, but I have tons of space so I don't understand not showing them, but seeing some of them in the file manager but not Sage?
   
3. Also why does LiveTV keep recording when you switch back to the menu? is that for people with multiple tuners? Sometimes it seems to leave the REC logo on the top while it is continuing to record liveTV and othertimes not - I don't get why sometimes some of my liveTV clips continue and others dont?

Again, please just add these to your list of issues to address for improving the product or manual - again I would like to think I am fairly technical and also fairly video savvy (at least in editing and fx etc) but this is my first usage of a PVR...

[jamjam]

No too confusing, but it would be worth mentioning 5hat the network encoder has to be ran in service mode. Took me a few mins to realise that it would be imposible to run with 2 UI unless the one on the network encoder was in client mode.

[Edit: You shouldn't have to run in service mode. As mentioned in the manual, run the 2nd instance of sagetv.exe with the -client parameter. If there are still conneciton problems, use the -connect parameter too. - Opus4]

JJ

[Athfar]

Not sure how many people would agree to these...

1. Forums need to be sorted by version. I still read threads that are for 2.x on accident (and they are "sticky" posts even!)
2. It confuses me that there is not an option to play a random video from a directory/playlist (or that you can't select a whole directory to add to a playlist)
3. When I first started using SageTV (3.x) I had trouble figuring out if I set the EPG correctly because there's no details about it's status (ie: updating EPG / downloading guide / etc.)

[rfutscher]

When I first did a channel scan I notice that there was a bar that gave the signal strength as each channel was scanned. The problem is that it is behind the dialog box that list each channel. I still haven't figured out how to see the signal strength.

[smthomas]

Originally Posted by tfurlong

I ended up using a desktop resolution of 640x480. I've read that a desktop resolution of 720x480 is what I should be running, but I haven't figured out how to show video in the correct aspect ratio in that resolution.

If you calculate it out 640x480 is 4 by 3 (standard TV aspect Ratio) whereas 720x480 is 9 by 6 (widescreen TV).

[oblique]

Setting up multizoned IR-out for the USB-UIRT can be confusing. It would be nice if there is an easier way to do this that didn't involve manually inserting zone codes before each IR code.

[IncredibleHat]

Originally Posted by jlindborg

Oh, and the picture browsing interface is confusing or buggy, I'm not sure which. We had some folks over for a thrilling evening of vacation slides on the plasma but other than putting it into automatic slideshow mode and letting it go, you couldn't do much. I wanted to go into a folder and manually navigate around using the forward/back keys on the remote. The manual dances around this a bit and implies it may work but it doesn't. You have to pop out, look through the thumbnails and jump back in. We spent about 10 minutes banging heads with this until we gave up and just looked at them on our laptop instead. I guess this fits in with the general complaint that besides being a great DVR, the other media functions in Sage are quite weak.

I wanted to agree with this.

We have a couple of digicams, that use the slim SonySticks. My HTPC has a front bay that reads all memory sticks.

Many times we have big family get togethers, and we take photos, or we had photos of things we wanted to show the family... so, simply sticking in photo sticks and watching the images, would make sense, no?

What I had tried to do... or WANTED TO DO... was simply stick a stick in, and have it automatically slideshow through the images on the stick. None of this crazy navigating through countless menus, clearing caches, changing folder names, importing media, clearing old stick media, and initiating a slideshow, which then you have to rinse and repeat ALL OVER again for each stick!

I find that very user unfriendly. I have searched and searched for a simple "Memory Stick Temporary Slideshow". Can't seem to find one. Everyone believes they have to make a full fledged image editing utility! LOL

[fox22cz]

one thing that i have found to be confusing is which imput sage will choose to record a show on. I have a hp500 card with dual imputs, and i never know how it will record.