How's the beta?

[horseflesh]

I am wondering if it's worthwhile to switch from v5. I'm not afraid of a little tinkering... but if it's still kind of janky I'll wait a while.

(I use SageMC 16x9 if that makes a difference.)

[Lucas]

If stability and WAF are very important to you and you don't have a test system, I would suggest to wait until the next beta.

The latest beta is pretty stable but there are some issues that someone less patient could flip over.....

[cmaffia]

I installed the first public beta and noticed a performance hit with the same hardware that was running v5.0. Navigating was very sluggish and innacurate. Has this been addressed or do I need to get a 4ghz machine for 6.0 or higher? :-)

[jbarr]

Beta v6.0.12 works very, VERY well for me.

After reading the release notes for v6.0.13, I decided that most of the updates and fixes really d0dn't apply that much to my specific environment. Also, based on comments from those who have installed v6.0.13, I'm a bit hesitant to install it just yet due to some issues.

That said, compared to v5, I REALLY like v6 better. It's not perfect, but it is very stable on my system, and more importantly, the WAF is very high so far.

[cmaffia]

The chore for me is making sure that the 7 or 8 stvi's and the few Studio tweaks I currently use in 5.0 can be duplicated on the 6.0 platform. I've tweaked 5.0 on all my systems and it is rock solid now. I am much more busier these days and don't have alot of time to invest on tweaking a new major release. However, I don't want to be left behind and not with the times by not upgrading to 6.0....decisions, deicisions

Originally Posted by jbarr

Beta v6.0.12 works very, VERY well for me.

After reading the release notes for v6.0.13, I decided that most of the updates and fixes really d0dn't apply that much to my specific environment. Also, based on comments from those who have installed v6.0.13, I'm a bit hesitant to install it just yet due to some issues.

That said, compared to v5, I REALLY like v6 better. It's not perfect, but it is very stable on my system, and more importantly, the WAF is very high so far.

[blade]

v6 has some quirks, but nothing show stopping for me. When I first installed the beta I immediately had problems and blamed v6. Come to find out one of my non-sage drives started dying almost immediately after installing the beta. It was a tiny 10 gig that I used to store downloads on (it was the drive I installed the beta from) and it was causing the other drive (a recording drive) on the same channel to crap out. Once I removed it almost all my problems went away.

Originally Posted by cmaffia

I installed the first public beta and noticed a performance hit with the same hardware that was running v5.0. Navigating was very sluggish and innacurate. Has this been addressed or do I need to get a 4ghz machine for 6.0 or higher? :-)

Sage doesn't require that much power. I was running v5 on my old server which was only a celeron 366 mhz machine and my client is an underclocked Athlon XP running at 1300 mhz. I never had problems with sluggish menus. I upgraded the server just before v6 was released so I don't know how it would have performed, but I expect it would have been fine and my client is very responsive with v6.

I'm not saying yours wasn't sluggish, just that something was wrong because you don't need a barn burner to run it. There was a bug where the sagetvtranscoder.exe would peg out the cpu even when you weren't transcoding. I never experienced it myself, but others did. Also I had some problems when trying to launch the service at bootup that would cause my server to slow to a crawl. I don't recall what I did to fix it or if the problem was resolved in the next beta release. Either way it is no longer an issue for me.

[jbarr]

Originally Posted by cmaffia

The chore for me is making sure that the 7 or 8 stvi's and the few Studio tweaks I currently use in 5.0 can be duplicated on the 6.0 platform. I've tweaked 5.0 on all my systems and it is rock solid now. I am much more busier these days and don't have alot of time to invest on tweaking a new major release. However, I don't want to be left behind and not with the times by not upgrading to 6.0....decisions, deicisions

I understand where you are coming from. I was very new to SageTV when the v6 beta came out, so I didn't have many tweaks to deal with when moving from v5 to v6. That said, I have to admit that when I upgraded from v5 to v6, I ended up really hosing the config. Being new to SageTV, instead of trying to fix it, I just uninstalled everything and started from scratch with v6. Yes, it was a hassle, and yes, it took time, but it was clean.

I'm not implying that going from v5 to v6 will cause problems--in fact, many have had pretty much zero problems, but the reality is that others have had issues. My advice would be to do a full, recoverable backup using something like Acronis True Image, do the upgrade, and see how it goes. If you have major problems, just restore back to v5. It's not a perfect solution, but it is a relatively safe one.

Also just be aware that some plugins broke between v5 and v6, so make sure you get the latest versions. The developers of most of the plugins were very quick in providing updates.

[horseflesh]

Thanks everyone!

[mkanet]

This thread was actually pretty useful for me. Although, I've already paid for my upgrade for version 6, I'm going to wait. I already have a polished, rock-solid sageTV 5.

[tmiranda]

"v6 Beta has been berry, berry, good to me." - Pedro Martinez (Did't he say that? )

I've had only one minor problem, the photo slideshow screensaver occasionally stops. I use a few STVi's and they all work fine. nielm's webserver also works fine.

Things are a little sluggish at first because the system has to generate some new information like thumbnails.