A few words from a new user

[Roadrunner777]

Thank you for such a fine product.

Some time ago, I was looking for a way to have PVR capability and integrate video sources from the Internet. I put together the hardware last week, and tried Myth. Despite deep research, selecting recommended hardware, and 10 long hours of work, I could not get it to work at all. The next day, I moved on to the software that came with my PVR-150 tv card. It functioned, but was disappointing. The integration of the various tasks (guide, managment, etc...) was not very good. It functioned, but not all that usable. Then, I tried SageTV. What a difference!

To start with, SageTV works and is extremely usable. There is a feeling of maturity in the product that is hard to describe. It's rock solid, the menus make sense, and I have run into very few problems.

I see paths to integrate my internet needs, and although I am on version 5 at the moment, I have read about version 6 and it is an even better match for my needs. I also see that I can apparently modify menus, and do all kinds of stuff that will keep me busy for a long time to come.

Sagetv is exactly what I was looking for. I'm going to run the trial for another week and try out some more advanced stuff, but I can tell you right now, I'm sold. Thank you!

Phil Avery

[IncredibleHat]

Welcome to the community!

[Roadrunner777]

A month has passed since I started using SageTV and once again, I must applaud the developers and the community of users. As of yesterday, I had a very short list of irritations that I was perfectly ready to live with. Then I downloaded the V6 beta and you guys fixed everything! Well done. To be honest, I was a little bit skeptical of the Google Video addition, but it really adds a new dimension to the experience. One of my greatest disappointments was in the performance of wmv files. They were choppy and the audio sync was all over the place. In V6... perfect!

My only complaint is my own character defect. The system is meeting my needs quite well, but I find myself thirsting for more drive space and a second, maybe a third tuner. And a DVD burner, and a nice theater case and...

Anyway, thanks again. I'm sharing my experience with the guys at work and I'm starting to snicker a little bit at my wife's Tivo. I have the best DVR system on the block, thanks to SageTV.

[lobosrul]

... the thirst for more disk space never dies.

[blade]

I can't believe you can get by with 1 tuner!!!

[Lucas]

Roadrunner777 your experience is pretty normal.

I started the same, with 1 tuner and one 200Gb Disk.
It lasted about a month.

Some 2 years on, 5 tuners and 3TB on about 13 Hard Disks......

[Roadrunner777]

I can see the whole terabyte thing happening to me... it's really tempting. But, I am fanatical about back-up and I'm just not ready to go into terabyte class backup. I'm saving a lot of shows to DVD as mpeg2 files. And I absolutely see a second tuner in my future. I'm using a 40GB drive right now, I think I see an upgrade there pretty soon too. I just can't figure out how big of a drive my motherboard will support.

I'm going to sneak in a question: I did a couple of things at once on Friday: Went to V6 Beta, and turned on the recommendation system. When I look at the hard drive from another system, I still see shows that I deleted with SageTV. I am confident that, when I need that space, that Sage will overwrite and use that space. The thing is, I am transferring files to another PC to burn to DVD and these phantom shows are going to make that a lot more difficult. Is there a setting or hack to make the delete actually delete the file immediately? If not, can I manually delete the files without corrupting something in Sage? I'm sorry if this has been discussed in another thread, I have looked around, and while I am a fan of Sage... not so much a fan of the search engine for this forum.

Also, a few weeks after starting with Sage, I started getting this disconnected from service message. The audio keeps going, and a few moments later I can navigate back through Sage to continue watching. Any ideas? I don't have any other software running in background other than Juice, a podcast catcher. Juice does periodically go out on the net to check for new files... (Sorry, I guess that's 3 questions...)

AMD Athlon 1200+
Gigabyte 7ZMMH
500MB @133MHz
Haup PVR-150
Windows XP SP2

[Opus4]

I'm not sure what those 'phantom' files are... SageTV should be deleting files when the deletion of the recording occurs.

One thing I know of, though: if you have something like Norton Recycle Bin, make sure it is turned off for the drive where your recordings are stored. Otherwise, deleted files aren't truly deleted & they still appear to take up space as far as SageTV can tell. It could delete a file to make room for a new recording, see that there still isn't enough space, delete another file, still not enough space, delete another file... and so on.

Oh -- and you can manually delete existing recording files (those not still recording, of course) from the drive via Windows at any time. I used to do that before v6 added a list of partial recordings as a hidden feature.

- Andy

[Roadrunner777]

Manual delete works great, thanks. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't messing up some internal database.

[ybrew]

I started with 2 tuners. That lasted almost a month.

I also started with 2 250 gig drives. That lasted 3 months. I just recently added a 3rd. Eventually I'll replace those drives with 400 or 500 gig drives.
My recording quality is good for default but most of my scheduled recordings are set to great. I've never used higher than great for anything.

I was using fair for a bunch of stuff but wasn't happy with the quality so had to upgrade the drive.

My drive stats:
Video Disk Space

* Available: 279.93 GB
* Used: 440.80 GB
o [Partial Recordings]: 1 recording using 0.12 GB
o [Auto-Delete Recordings]: 650 recordings using 396.30 GB
* Next 48hrs has 68 upcoming requested recordings requiring: 56.41 GB
* Total Video Content: 385.20hrs

Yeah, I'll never watch everything, but I have a true video-on-demand system and never watch live tv anymore.

Funny thing is, i had tivo for 4+ years. I never could get away from live tv.
1 month into sage, and live tv was gone. What a difference unlimited disk space can make.