Newbie questions

[drin]

Hi all. I'm planning a home HDD recorder/DVD recorder and I want to use SageTV, but I have a couple of questions that hopefully the experts out there can answer for me before I purchase the software. I've searched the forums and haven't found complete answers to my questions so I'm posting here. Please forgive me if these have already been answered.

I'm in Japan, and we have two cable systems coming into our home, one Japanese and one American (Armed Forces Network). The American one I can get a web-based guide for so using EPG with XMLTV should be possible. The Japanese one, unfortunately, doesn't have an English guide - it's only in Japanese, although it'll probably appear in English within the next year or so. I'll be using composite inputs for both cable sources so I'll need to control the cable boxes via the SageTV box.

My questions are as follows:

1. I know I can use two tuners with a single instance of SageTV, but what happens when one of the sources has no EPG? Can I still switch between tuners and see the EPG for the other source?

2. Without the Japanese EPG how do I tell the system to record a program (for example) on channel 9 from 5pm-6pm? If I can't see the program on the EPG (because there is no EPG) can I still tell SageTV to record it?


Thanks in advance for your help! This looks like exactly what I've been looking for so far!

-Adrian

[salsbst]

1. SageTV combines the guide data for all available sources into one EPG.

2. SageTV's sister product, SageRecorder will allow you to record something without the EPG.

[drin]

Thanks for the reply! So there's no way to record from SageTV without an EPG?

-Adrian