Does anyone use SageTV in Japan???

[k_kirk]

Hi everyone. I used to use & love BeyondTV when I lived in Singapore. Used it for a long time using XMLTVImport. Recently I moved to Japan with my family due to work commitments and one thing we are desperately missing is our PC-DVR. First of all, the ads are even more annoying when you don't understand a word and secondly we can't catch the shows we like as we lost our ability to accept slavery to TV schedules... In short, my family is demanding of me to bring our intelligent TV back on line.! Its almost like an insult to live in this high tech society and yet have to accept the low tech form of watching TV. There are run-out-of-the box DVRs of course but you guessed it... the interface is all Japanese too...

So in short, Beyond TV does not seem to support the TV system and capture cards in Japan. I am ok to make the switch to anything really but all along SageTV was something I wanted to try. Can you kindly let me know if anyone out here is succesfully using SageTV in Japan?

If so any guidance on the capture cards used and EPG integration will be wildely appreciated. Thank you so much in advance for all the time you will need to respond to me.

Regards
KS

[steven017]

Hi k_kirk,

I live in Japan too and have been using SageTV for about a little over a year now. I'm currently only capturing SD.

Here's my setup. I'm currently using just one PVR-350 capture card. My sources are the regular over the air broadcasts and BS satellite channels, although I get them from a community antenna/dish system. I also get SkyPerfecTV, which is my main source of English programming. I am using XMLTV for my guide data. I collect the data from www.ontvjapan.com for regular channels and from the SkyperfecTV website for SkyPerfecTV channels. My guide data is in Japanese. I am not aware of any sources of detailed English data, but I suppose it might be possible to collect it it you filter your data through a machine translation software or online service, such as babelfish, excite, or Google trans.

I'm using a slightly older version of SageTV at present (from last year), so I'm not up to date with any new features. But when I installed SageTV, I had to customize it to be able to display Japanese properly. You may have to do so as well. There are pretty clear instructions on the SageTV customizations page on the main website.

As for recommending a capture card, I can't really help you there. I'm just capturing SD at the moment. I haven't really spent any time looking into the hardware available, but I think Japan is heading in a direction slightly different from the US, with it's new Dubbing 10 restriction scheme. I'm not sure what impact that will have on capture devices. So, that is something to consider and look into. There are cards available (I'm not aware of any cards by non-Japanese manufacturer that will work for digital TV). They are the kind that you have to slide an IC card into. They make both internal and external models. So, capturing regular TV with these would seem to be no problem. As far as I know, there are no capture cards capable of tuning/decoding SkyPerfecTV. You must capture from their tuner. Here are a couple links to hardware for capturing digital TV in Japan (two manufacturers):

http://buffalo.jp/products/catalog/m...c-chideji.html
http://www.iodata.jp/product/tv/tidegi/index.htm

As I said, I haven't spent any time really looking into this stuff.

If you search around the forum, you should also be able to find info about customizing Sage to your needs.

Hope this helps.

Steve

P.S. I just noticed your other post about needing help setting up XMLTV with TVxB. Let me know if you still need help. I'll do what I can to help you. I don't live in Tokyo, so my channel setup is a bit different, but I should be able to steer you in a hopefully useful direction. :-)