Sage TV and HDTV Recordings

[w2jo]

I just setup my Sage system after using BTV for awhile. I have a few questions that I will appreciate help with..

1) I receive both Over-the-Air and Cable TV with two separate cards. Only the OTA signals have HD programming at present. Many programs appear both on Cable and OTA channels. How do I insure that a "Favorites" recording will first check if an HD channel has the program before testing for Cable having the same program. I always want to favor HD when a particular program is available in both medias.

2) Is there any way to give "priority" to HD recordings (which are also usually the New/First Run programs) such that they will delete and replace previously recorded "not first run" programs which are already recorded when the "max recording count" is exceeded?

3) Am I going to run into any "stuttering" type problems with Sage (as I did with BTV) when recording one HDTV and one regular TV program while playing back an HDTV program? My system is ASUS A8N-SLI Premium, Athlon X2 4200+ dual core CPU, Giga/ATI Radeon 1600Pro video, and one ATI HDTV Wonder and one Dvico Fusion HDTV5 gold tuner card. Mem is 1GByte.

4) I would like to be able to add a second HDTV tuner along with one analog TV tuner. Is this possible without running out of CPU Mips and other resources during HDTV playback? Playing back while simultaneously recording seems to be the big resource hog.

Thanks for your advice!
Joe

[rfutscher]

Originally Posted by w2jo

I just setup my Sage system after using BTV for awhile. I have a few questions that I will appreciate help with..

4) I would like to be able to add a second HDTV tuner along with one analog TV tuner. Is this possible without running out of CPU Mips and other resources during HDTV playback? Playing back while simultaneously recording seems to be the big resource hog.

Thanks for your advice!
Joe

I solved this problem by using separate computers. I have a server in the attic, close to the antenna. Lots of hard drive space but also noisy. But who cares. I think the CPU is a 1.8 GHz. Won't play back but has the power to record.

I have two HD cards and one analog with hardware encoding.

I have two computers set up as clients. That way both my wife and I can watch separate programs.

[wheelrandolph]

Hi,
When you set up a Favorite, go into Favorite options (?) and "specify" what channel to record on (5.1 instead of 5). This has always worked for me. I have 2 A-180's (HD) and 2 PVR-150's. Even when I had just one machine I could multiple record and view with no problems. I now have a client/server setup. (Athlon64x2, 3800+ server)

Randy

[w2jo]

Thanks for the info..
I think you are telling me that there is no way to insure that SageTV checks the listings associated with the HDTV tuner for a program BEFORE it tests the tuner on the non-HDTV channels. In BTV, the system always checks the programs on the first tuner you installed first, then the second next and so on. In my ignorance, I "supposed" that SageTV had some sort of equivalent feature so that the user would not have to contantly worry about this.

Using two computers (server and separate client) seems like "overkill" for three tuners plus simultaneous playback. I can appreciate that HDTV record/playback is taxing on a system however as when I had my BTV system setup on my machine, when it was recording one HDTV and one regular channel, plus playing back one HDTV channel, I would get "some" stuttering which became very aggrivating. That is why I am trying out Sage.. If a dual core Athlon 4200+ system can't handle it, there is little more to do beyond going to dual computers. That is making the new TiVo 3 dual HDTV machine look better and better! I am told that the new TiVo box also looks for HDTV programs on both tuner ports before recording a non-HD presentation.

I have not given up.. I like "doing my own thing", but getting the HDTV programs to be searched out automatically as a first choice is one of my criteria for a "suitable" system. No stuttering on playback with 2 HDTV tuners while playing back another HDTV program is another.

What about using either Dvico Fusion, ATI, firefly mini or firefly remote controls with SageTV? Is that possible?

[blade]

Capturing HD is not taxing. All it does is write the already encoded stream to the disk. Almost every HD card uses software encoding to capture analog SD, this is a little demanding. Also playing back HD can take a good bit of power depending your decoder and video card.

Many people are running setups just like you're asking about. The only way to know is to try it. If you get stuttering post a specific question and give a detailed description of the problem and your hardware so that people can help you troubleshoot it.

Most people are running a client/server setup for stability and flexibility not because their computers aren't fast enough.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by w2jo

I just setup my Sage system after using BTV for awhile. I have a few questions that I will appreciate help with..

1) I receive both Over-the-Air and Cable TV with two separate cards. Only the OTA signals have HD programming at present. Many programs appear both on Cable and OTA channels. How do I insure that a "Favorites" recording will first check if an HD channel has the program before testing for Cable having the same program. I always want to favor HD when a particular program is available in both medias.

Sage will see the airing on both, and from there you can set the encoder merit so it will record on the desired tuner (ie your ATSC tuner) if possible first.

The other option is to limit your favorite to only the digital channel.

2) Is there any way to give "priority" to HD recordings (which are also usually the New/First Run programs) such that they will delete and replace previously recorded "not first run" programs which are already recorded when the "max recording count" is exceeded?

Not sure what you're asking for, by default there is no max recording count. As for Sage's deletion logic, there's no way to modify it, but it will delete (in general) LiveTV recordings, watched recordings, intelligent recoridngs, etc in that order.

3) Am I going to run into any "stuttering" type problems with Sage (as I did with BTV) when recording one HDTV and one regular TV program while playing back an HDTV program? My system is ASUS A8N-SLI Premium, Athlon X2 4200+ dual core CPU, Giga/ATI Radeon 1600Pro video, and one ATI HDTV Wonder and one Dvico Fusion HDTV5 gold tuner card. Mem is 1GByte.

Sadly, I'm going to guess yes (hopefully not), for ATSC recording, most all programs work mostly the same, if you're having stuttering issues on recording/playback, in indicates a performance bottleneck in you system.

The first question I'll ask is if you have your recording drive formatted with 64k clusters?

4) I would like to be able to add a second HDTV tuner along with one analog TV tuner. Is this possible without running out of CPU Mips and other resources during HDTV playback? Playing back while simultaneously recording seems to be the big resource hog.

There are many Sage users with multiple ATSC tuners. Most run analog tuners as well.

If you're talking about using the analog tuner on the ATSC card, then you might have issues as those are almost universally software encoders, which take a good deal of power.