Help Expired Trial !

[tarrant_ino]

All,

I wonder what the possibility of obtaining a temporary key for sage as my 15 day trial has now expired but I am still having setup issues with video stutters at the end of each program. And a few other minor issues besides

I had mailed support about this and had gotten a response with a few things to try but now my trial has expired and there is nothing I can do.

I was getting really interested in purchasing sage with placeshifter but do not want to do so unless I am certain I can get it to work the way I would like.

Can anyone help?

Thanks in advance

[mayamaniac]

I had the same gripe with SageTV tech support when I first tried SageTV. I was in the middle of troubleshooting some problems when the trial expired. I emailed them and they said that I had to buy the license to continue using it. The only other way around it is to reinstall the OS, which is just stupid. The tech support guy, I believe it was George, said that they would refund me the license fee within 30 days if I change my mind. I bit bullet and just bought it anyway.

I think 15 days is too short of a trial period, especially for such a complicated software as SageTV. And for people who has a regular job, you don't have a lot of time to spend troubleshooting the problems. In my case, I work weekdays and only have weekends to mess with SageTV. So for a 15 day trial, that gives me only 2 weekends to install and configure it. Sure if everything works, then thats great. But when they don't and you are unsure about spending your hard earned money on a product that isn't fully working, there's a problem with that. I don't know why they don't or can't make it a 30 day trial instead, or even 45 or 60 day. That'll give people sufficient time to figure things out.

But for tarant_ino, ask them about the 30 day refund offer, I'm not sure if thats standard policy, but they probably will give it to you as they offered it to me years ago. Chances are you will keep SageTV like I did.

[tarrant_ino]

I am quite worried about purchasing the client and awaiting a refund also as I have had bad experiences with Beyond TV previously, whereas I had to pay because the trial expired then after months of trawling through forum posts finally found out that the Blue Screens I was getting were because Beyond TV does not work well with Via Chipsets ! (not surprisingly it was mentioned in a really obscure post and was not stickied ! )

I had thought it was many things and had even swapped some hardware in case of a fault !

And now I am too late to get a refund as it took more that 30 days to determine the software didnt work with my hardware (even though it does not state on the Beyond Tv Website when purchasing that Via chipsets have issues ! AAARRGH £50 down the drain )

I don't see this as a realistic solution as I am certain there are many pieces of hardware that Sage will probably have issues with also !
no offence guys .. love what I have seen so far

Please can some one help me out here ! When sage trial does run out on me it says "if you dont believe you shoud be seeing this screen please contact technical support" which sort of says to me that something can be done to extend the trial .. maybe .. I dont know.... just clutchin at straws now

PLS HELP

Thanks all

[Hades]

I concur,15 days is pretty short for such a complex (will it work/how does it work /and how the hell do i make it work) situation.
Also i note ? you are from the UK,and getting the EPG setup is not exactly straight forward to start with.

[paulbeers]

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but older via chipsets don't work well either. I have a K8T800 chipset mobo by MSI, that I am able to use as a server but I know a lot of the older chipsets for the Athlons and Athlon XP (462 pin procs) especially were not good. Something about the PCI slots having issues (I don't remember what the story eactly was but I haven't owned a via 462 pin board since back int he KT133 days, all others I have used have been nforce2's or Sis chipsets which have worked great for me). I have also seen that the K8T800 chipsets have have some issues too as servers and am counting myself lucky that mine is working flawlessly (and for months on end).

[stevech]

I have an old-ish AMD socket A/462 PC (1800+) with the via chipset of that era. It runs the Sage client fine. The integrated graphics has just 16MB and so I put in a 32MB video card so I could see the videos. No reliability problems.

I also ran Sage Server on a socket 462 ECS motherboard, AMD2400+ CPU. No crash problems. ATI S80 video card.

This PC is a barebones "ASUS Terminator". Nice and small. Old and crashless.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by tarrant_ino

... Via Chipsets ...

The issues with Via chipsets around here seem to usually involve trying to use certain PCI cards with certain chipsets/motherboards, not the software itself.

Maybe if you post what motherboard you are talking about & what hardware you are using w/that board, someone could mention whether they ran into problems with it.

- Andy

[tarrant_ino]

Not entirely sure you understood me there,

I havent had any blue screens with SageTV it was with BeyondTV. sorry if that was not clear in my first post sage seems to work fine with my hardware, I am just having small issues with jerking at the end of every program when the recording stops and then starts (even if not set to record ) .. its just a big risk to buy the software like I did beyond tv and then have something crop up or be unable to solve the problem and lose out on £50 again !

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by tarrant_ino

I am just having small issues with jerking at the end of every program when the recording stops and then starts (even if not set to record)

You can't set SageTV not to record -- anything you watch is recorded. You might just be experiencing the small delay caused by closing out one recording, starting the next one, and buffering it enough for playback to start from the next file. It is hard to judge that when no one else can see your system, but a similar thing would happen while watching 'Live TV' and you change the channel -- it has to switch recordings in that case too.

- Andy

[tarrant_ino]

Thanks for the advice but I cannot try anything at the moment now anyway !

Surely this should not happen though, surely it should be seamless. I get 2 jerks once when stopping recording and once when starting again

I do not a low spec machine either 2800+, 512MB ddr 400, 250gb sata, ATI Radeon 9200 direct DSUB to LCD TV

Not really much point speculating as if I cannot be sure of a fix for this I am not going to buy SageTV only to then find out after 30 days i still cannot fix it and also cannot get a refund.

Thanks

[stevech]

note that the drives used for video recording are often/normally dedicated partitions formatted with large 64KByte clusters whereas the typical NTFS partition uses much smaller. May not be your issue though.

[tmach]

I know this wasn't the actual problem, but for those who may be skimming the forums with the similar issue... VIA chipsets (as someone mentioned) do NOT play well with Hauppauge cards. I fought with this issue for months. I know it isn't software specific (since I tried every bit of PVR software out there with the same results) and I don't think it has specifically to do with PCI slots since I was using the USB2. I got a hard lockup every time without fail (tho sometimes it would work for a couple of days at a time.)

It has, however, worked perfectly on anything other than a VIA motherboard. Fortunately, at this point, Nforce2 motherboards are really cheap. Tho that isn't much consolation if (like me) you have a SFF Shuttle case.