AMINO STB

[enterpryse]

Has anyone tried to get other STB's working with Sage, beside the Hauppauge and Sages own?

These seem to be great little boxes and there are variants that do HD and Dolby digital too I think.

http://www.aminocom.com/products/pdf...T110_flyer.pdf

[stuckless]

I'm not sure how easy it would be to get Sage to render on these devices. Sage doesn't use UPnP to expose it's services so UPnP MediaRenders are out. This means that there would need to a native Sage cient for these types of devices, and I doubt that Sage will write one, and the API isn't open, so the community can't write one.

Personally I find the pricing for the MVP and HD extender to be reasonable, and I don't mind spending the money to support Sage with these devices.... But I can see where people who have have other UPnP clients would want to use those clients for viewing their content. The UPnP spec on TV recording is pretty weak, so I doubt you would get a decent Recording experience. (ie, setup recordings, epg etc)

I have, in the past, looked at writing a UPnP MediaServer api into Sage (or including another 3rd party), but I never finished it. In the end, the cost of the extenders was cheaper than the cost of me building something The UPnP specs are quite good, but they are also very complex.

[enterpryse]

Originally Posted by stuckless

Personally I find the pricing for the MVP and HD extender to be reasonable, and I don't mind spending the money to support Sage with these devices.... But I can see where people who have have other UPnP clients would want to use those clients for viewing their content. The UPnP spec on TV recording is pretty weak, so I doubt you would get a decent Recording experience. (ie, setup recordings, epg etc)

.

The main problem I have with this is that I am in UK, need PAL and I could do with one now! Hence I am looking for alternatives.

I find the Hauppague boxes adequate, I have two. They are a bit basic and I don't find them reliable on the network.

The Amino boxes, for the price, seem to be exceptional value

Are there any alternatives to Sage???

[stuckless]

There are lots of alternatives to Sage... but Sage is a pretty mature system and relatively easy to setup compared some other Solutions.

While Sage's primary bread and butter is as a PVR, I use it mainly as a Media Center. As a media Center there are tons of alternatives to Sage that are better functioning... but I'm hooked because of the HD extender

In looking at the Amino STB, it looks like it's a general purpose IPTV box. I didn't see any screen shots of a UI, so I'm guessing it's more of a development platform on which your can build your own STB? It appears to be a modular system, but I would think, from my reading, that it's more of an OEM stolution where you can user their hardware to build your own solution. I don't think it's an out of the box solution.

[emveepee]

I work on the mvpmc project and have emulated the Hauppauge client code on several machines including the MVP, PCH, Roku 1000HD, with more to come, and I don't see any exceptional value in these Amino boxes unless you are really into IPTV/RTSP. It doesn't have any distinguishing features that I can see even if the development platform was open.

Martin