Considering the switch from Beyond TV... and have a few questions

[horseflesh]

I am an increasingly disgruntled BeyondTV user and I have some questions about SageTV that I could not fully answer from the product web site and forum searches. Many thanks in advance if you can take a sec to set me straight.

There are only a few things I need to do with my HTPC, and I am hoping that SageTV will let me do them all in one place without a lot of additional software costs and without picking up the mouse once I have things set up properly. (Oh, my system is an A64 3000+, GeForce 6150 video at 1920x1080, 1 GB RAM.)

1. Timeshift OTA HDTV. I have a Fusion5 PCI tuner card so this should work fine according to the web site. (BTV does this fine--but I need video clips and hopefully DVD playback integrated too.)

2. Commercial skipping in recorded HDTV. Looks like I need to configure a free detection program and a SageTV plugin, but then it works OK. Correct?

3. Playing DVDs with ffdshow processing fun turned on. I get the impression that this works pretty much out of the box though if course you need to spend time tweaking things. Correct?

4. Is it possible to play DVDs from ISO images? I'm not afraid of setting things up, but in the end I need to cruise through a list of titles in SageTV with the remote, then fire & forget.

5. Playing videos that I have downloaded. I get the impression that anything I can play in Windows Media I can play with SageTV. Yes?

Many thanks for your input. If Sage TV can deliver on this it will be a lot better than switching between BTV for TV and MediaPortal for videos.

[Narflex]

Yes to all 5 of them. Welcome to the 'real' world. (say it in a Morpheus voice inside your head)

[PGPfan]

Hi horseflesh and welcome to the SageTV world!

Sage can certainly do all of the things that you need. Your hardware should be just fine as well (I use a 6150 based mb for my Sage server also )

Fwiw, take note of who gave you your first response. It was Jeff Kardatzke, who is one of the founders (and THE major author of Sage) and CTO of the company. I could be wrong, but I don't think you'd get that 'direct' of communication from the folks at BTV.

Imho, this is one of the many reasons that we all like Sage soooo much.

-PGPfan

[xlr8shun]

#5 needs to be elaborated on a bit, you can play your downloaded videos (more than likely) however saying you can play anything you play in wmp in sage isnt the case, unless perhaps you possibly have a plugin for it (that may or maynot be developed yet).

for instance sage doesnt play (out of the box) mov files, even though i have the codecs installed and it plays in wmp, sage throws an error (80040200) about not being able to download the codecs. sage doesnt play (out of the box) rm files, it just crashes to the desktop, again even though it plays in wmp. and it also seems sage cant play a playlist (asx, m3u, pls, wpl). sage throws an error (80040111) about the right codec not being installed, even though the playlist points to an mpeg or xvid/divx file, both of which sage supports out of the box (assuming you have the codecs installed).

-edit

im not trying to turn you off of sage, or badmouth it, or say that jeff is wrong either, nothing of the sort. i dont want anyone to get the wrong idea. just thought that horseflesh should know, if hes buying on the premise that he thinks he can play anything in sage, that he can play in wmp. thats not going to happen.

[mike1961]

Well - does it really matter much whether one can play it in Sage or not (except for the immediate LiveTV stuff)? Not really to me because of the customizability of Sage. Once something is saved if I want to keep it permanently, I compress it into mpeg4 AVC High Profile or Nero Standard AVC and then use GermSage to have Sage automatically load the media player of my choice to play the video at an amazingly compressed 250mb/hour. I use HIP for my remote control and then everything integrates seemlessly anyway. But, back to the main point which is that I like the customizability of Sage and the awesome plugins. For me, Sage is an entire media center including video, radio, dvds, music, pictures, internet movie db, movie times, weather, customizable menus and more. Is it perfect....well no and there are things I'd like to see but it works well for me and I'm not looking to switch to anything else.

Mike

[horseflesh]

Thanks for the help everyone. I'm looking forward to installing the trial this weekend now that season finales are over. And yeah, it's not like this over at the BTV forums.

xlr8shun--I understand what you mean about not everything that plays in WMP playing in Sage, thanks for the clarification.

[mayamaniac]

Originally Posted by xlr8shun

for instance sage doesnt play (out of the box) mov files, even though i have the codecs installed and it plays in wmp ...

if by mov files that you mean Quicktimes, then most of it won't play in WMP anyway, only QT can play mov files, especially when they use QT specific codecs (sorenson, photo jpeg, animation, etc...)

Originally Posted by horseflesh

I am an increasingly disgruntled BeyondTV user and I have some questions about SageTV...

Seems to be getting more BTV users switching to SageTV lately. This must be putting a smile on Jeff/Narflex's face. All the hardwork is paying off, SageTV is a better product.

An yes, welcome horseflesh. Don't know what your name implies, but we are not here to judge. I switched two years ago from BTV also.

[Wheemer]

Sometime you can also experience problems like me... no wmv playback. http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=17366

[horseflesh]

Horseflesh was the missing 7th dwarf in Time Bandits.

[Opus4]

One thing I'm not sure about is playing DVDs from ISO images. SageTV will play DVS ripped to VOBs in the VIDEO_TS file structure (Appendix I, p. 250 in the v5 manual), but I'm not sure how easy it is to play via ISO images. If someone is doing that, perhaps they could comment on it...

- Andy