Thinking of switching but have a few questions

[bobhaze]

Hi all,
Currently I'm using Vista32 MCE, but I have a Nextcom R500 Dish 211 box which Vista does not support as a tuner. So this led me to Sage, and I downloaded the trial. Its mostly working, but not 100% which brings up a couple of questions:
1. I have one Aver MCE180a tuner and a Hauppauge WinTV1600. The Hauppauge card seems to work fine, but Setup crashes when I attempt to setup the MCE180, I'm wondering if there may be something I need to do either with Vista or AverMedia drivers to make this work in Sage. Any ideas?
2. Does Sage support the FM tuner on the Hauppauge card? I don't have a receiver connected, just a multichannel power amp so the tuner functionality is something I use in Vista.
4. Does the R5000 connection work seamlessly enough for spouses and kids? Nextcom doesn't have a trial of the Sage app. and I'd rather not spend the $50 and be disappointed. The forum thread makes it sound like some people had problems but its mostly worked out and runs pretty smooth now. Is that an accurate assessment?
3. Is there a way to make Sage interact with PDVD for Blue Ray playback so you don't have to pickup a keyboard, and also use the Cyberlink codecs for DTS, DVD-Audio and TrueHD? (Same spouse and kid usage concerns.)

Finally, would I be better off ditching Vista and rolling back to XP if I make the move or does Sage live OK with Vista?

TIA

Bob

[Slipshod]

Everything I've read and heard from others says the R5000 works fine once you get it setup correctly. The only "gotchas" I know of are:

Slower Channel changes surfing live TV
No Music (CD/Sirius) channels on Dish
No easy, built-in commercial skipping for the MPEG4 stations (yet)
Cost

I'm satisfied enough from talking to the other users here that I'm moving ahead with it. When I talked to Nextcom they were getting close to releasing an MCE compatible software pack. I decided on Sage over MCE largely because of the HD Extenders and the customization...

I'm pretty sure you can get power-DVD working, but it may require some other apps (Eventghost? Girder?) to unify the control. I haven't looked into this very much yet since I'm using the HD extenders. I don't have a blu-ray player yet, so I decided to focus on maximum WAF before getting fancy.