SageTV vs MythTV

[hackmeister]

As a long time MythTV user and general F/OSS advocate I wondered if I could get your honest opinions. Generally I don't have a problem with proprietary commercial software if it adds some kind of value that the Free alternatives don't currently offer. In the past the biggest barrier to entry for MythTV was the install and tweaking involved to get it up to speed. This barrier has diminished greatly with Myth specific Linux distros like Knoppmyth, Mythbuntu and Mythdora. Yes, there is still some tweaking to get everything just right but it has gotten a lot easier. One area that's still a bit of a pain is setting up digital cable QAM capture devices to match correctly to the channel lineup in the Schedules Direct channel lineups. It was pretty tedious. So for your $79 what does SageTV give you that MythTV doesn't? I'm not trying to start flame war I just want an honest opinion. What in SageTV do you love? What's annoying?
Some basic questions:
By default can you share out your recordings to other computers on your network or is it only available to other sagetv clients?
Can you export your recordings to portable players (I have a Nokia N800)?
Is there any way to burn recordings you made to DVD?
How well does Sage handle media located on network shares (Samba or NFS)?
Does SageTV do commercial skipping? (my favorite feature of Myth)
How often do you have to re-up your license? Major releases only?

On another note, I read the reviews of the HD200 extender and I have to say it's looks a pretty sweet device. I currently have a Hauppauge MedMVP that I use as a MythTV frontend and would love to get an HD version that can handle h264 recordings (made by the PVR-1212). There is a very strong case for extenders.

Thanks for your input

[stuckless]

As a long time FOSS advocate and former mythtv/xbmc user, I find a great deal of value in using SageTV. I must admit, the thing that finally pushed me over to SageTV was the HD extender.

By default can you share out your recordings to other computers on your network or is it only available to other sagetv clients?

Sage doesn't have a built in upnp server, but their recorded media is NOT DRM protected. You can use other tools to serve up the files if you wish.

Can you export your recordings to portable players (I have a Nokia N800)?

Yes... but you may have to tweak/add a profile for that particular device. I had to add a profile for my blackberry curve, but they do have many built in profiles (ipod,iphone,psp, etc). And, because the media is not drm protected, you can also use handbrake or ffmpeg directory to re-encode.

Is there any way to burn recordings you made to DVD?

Not built in.

How well does Sage handle media located on network shares (Samba or NFS)?

I think it's pretty common for people to have their media on a fileserver. I Sage is actually running on my fileserver, so I can't speak of any issues.

Does SageTV do commercial skipping? (my favorite feature of Myth)

Not directly, but there is a plugin to do this.

How often do you have to re-up your license? Major releases only?

I think it's major releases only.

Even though SageTV is a closed source/commercial application, their API is very fairly open. You can access all the internals of SageTV through their documented api. So, if you are developer, you can certain, extend and add features to sagetv.

[mayamaniac]

Originally Posted by hackmeister

Some basic questions:
By default can you share out your recordings to other computers on your network or is it only available to other sagetv clients?

They are MPEG2 or H264 files on your harddrive with no DRM, so you can do whatever you want with them.

Can you export your recordings to portable players (I have a Nokia N800)?

There's a video conversion feature with some presets for many devices, but you can set your own video specs as stuckless mentioned.

Is there any way to burn recordings you made to DVD?

Only through a plugin, but they are just MPEG2 and H264 files, so do whatever you want with them.

How well does Sage handle media located on network shares (Samba or NFS)?

I would say "handles well" since lots of people record directly to network shares, including NAS devices.

Does SageTV do commercial skipping? (my favorite feature of Myth)

They will never support out of the box, but there are several plugins that work quite well.

How often do you have to re-up your license? Major releases only?

The first license was good from version 1 to version 3, then they charge an upgrade fee (half the full price I think) for version 5. There was no version 4, they skipped that number. Version 6 so far is free upgrade.

On another note, I read the reviews of the HD200 extender and I have to say it's looks a pretty sweet device. I currently have a Hauppauge MedMVP that I use as a MythTV frontend and would love to get an HD version that can handle h264 recordings (made by the PVR-1212). There is a very strong case for extenders.

The Extender is so awesome that it is a good enough reason by itself to switch to SageTV. If you need more reason, this forum is the best community on the internet, lots of great people here.

Here's a comparison list of features: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari...tware_packages

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by mayamaniac

The first license was good from version 1 to version 3, then they charge an upgrade fee (half the full price I think) for version 5. There was no version 4, they skipped that number. Version 6 so far is free upgrade.

The details in that quote are not correct, mostly in terms of version numbers.

The license upgrade information is listed at the bottom of the software download page. SageTV Media Center has had one upgrade fee: v4.1 & earlier required a license upgrade to v6. Version 6 was a free upgrade from v5.

Clients & Linux servers had no v6 upgrade fee.

SageTV has made no statements regarding future versions.

- Andy

[Lucas]

Originally Posted by hackmeister

How often do you have to re-up your license? Major releases only?

I 've had SageTV since June 2004 , version 2.2.

Since then I only needed to pay the small upgrade price to V6 and only for the server, more than a year ago.

The total amount that I gladly transferred to SageTV was negligible compared to the time I would have needed to spend in order maintain a "free" software, running in a home production environment and I doubt whether the "free" software can ever reach the stability needed for serious home use where all members of the family rely on the "system".

[mayamaniac]

Originally Posted by Opus4

The details in that quote are not correct, mostly in terms of version numbers.

The license upgrade information is listed at the bottom of the software download page. SageTV Media Center has had one upgrade fee: v4.1 & earlier required a license upgrade to v6. Version 6 was a free upgrade from v5.

Clients & Linux servers had no v6 upgrade fee.

SageTV has made no statements regarding future versions.

- Andy

Oops, I remember it wrong, it was v3 that was skipped, not v4.

[Norm258]

Like you I recently jumped ship from MythTV to Sage.

I love it - it is much more reliable and even looks better. It took me a bit to get things set up but not as long as with mythtv. I'm also not forced to using developer code to use my hardware.

The only problem I have is playing DVD's - linux does a great job on its own with Mplayer, etc. I'm right now working on a way to modify the menu of the Placeshifter to launch mplayer for me. I copied my avi's over and they were recognized right away and play fine.

From a WAF perspective - high marks for sure.

Norm

[ccourtney]

I used mythtv for a year or so before moving to SageTV. For my time it has been very much worth the money. By and large it just works which is the major feature.

In mythtv I never got it set up perfect. There was always some problem. I ran into all kinds of kernel / v4l driver issues. My PVR150s had problems with screeching audio with certain versions of the driver / v4l but my other OTA HD card required that version of v4l. The DVD player in the client would consistently play the wrong audio track. The list goes on and on....

There where two good things about my mythtv:
1) I could setup my client machines to network boot removing hard drive noise
2) I always had something to tweak with

SageTV has been very painless. I started with Linux OEM but continued to have issues with weird V4L driver problems and ended up with problems controlling my DirecTV boxes via serial port. I then moved to a Windows XP pro server.

Bonuses to SageTV
1) Higher Wife Acceptance Factor (WAF) as the UI is just more polished for a non-geek.
2) DVD player just works correctly! There are no weird problems with various DVDs and don't have to guess which audio track is the right one.
3) Driver support straight from vendors which means video capture and playback require much less tweaking (outside codec hell which both platforms suffer from)

I'm sticking with HTPC clients over extenders as I want one media player connected to the TVs for WAF. I don't want DVD player, Blu-Ray player + extender which means constantly switching inputs on TV and stereo.

[mikejaner]

I'm sticking with HTPC clients over extenders as I want one media player connected to the TVs for WAF. I don't want DVD player, Blu-Ray player + extender which means constantly switching inputs on TV and stereo.

I want to warn you about doing this. If you are just going to be tuning QAM and Standard Captures, like with the Hauppauge PVR 1600's and 150's, etc.. you should be fine with HTPC Based clients. You have mentioned the HVPVR (1212) also, which is a tricky beast these days. As you can probably tell if you look in these forums, the playback of files from the HDPVR is difficult at best for some machines, and the decoders for these files, have yet to reach a maturity I would use them at. You would better off getting HD200's for that situation (which play these files flawlessly). Again, just my advice.

[hackmeister]

Thanks everyone for your input. It seems that the consensus to moving to SageTV is the easier setup. I have to be honest the MythTV specific distros have improved the Myth install process from painful to pretty easy. Yes, there are still some specific little things to get worked (like setting up a QAM device) but overall the process is much easier than say 2 or 3 years ago. I'd like to do a head to head of MythTV and SageTV on the same hardware but unfortunately you can't do a try before you buy with the Linux version. I'm going to contact Sage and see if they'd be willing to give me a "reviewer" license key. I'd like to do a very detailed comparison for publication and maybe get some of their Linux developers on my show.

[Peggysis]

I purchased my Linux SageTV license about 4 years ago. The TV schedule guide data for SageTV is free, and that was a big selling point for me.

Since MythTV now uses Schedules Direct at $20/year, I figure the SageTV license has paid for itself, not to mention all the time I did NOT spend trying to figure out how to set up MythTV - and I'm a former UNIX Sys Admin!

I'm glad it is easier to set up now than 4 years ago. I'm NOT glad MythTV now forces you to pay for guide data from a company set up by "several MythTV developers". Yeah, I know, $20/year isn't that much, but over the years, it adds up. They couldn't find a free alternative?


-Judy

[kbyrd]

Originally Posted by Peggysis

. I'm NOT glad MythTV now forces you to pay for guide data from a company set up by "several MythTV developers". Yeah, I know, $20/year isn't that much, but over the years, it adds up. They couldn't find a free alternative?


-Judy

I'm not completely sure, but I believe they actually tried pretty hard and couldn't find a free alternative. Data (especially data that is drawn from a bunch of sources and packaged in a nice format) costs money. I'm pretty sure someone could rig up an HTML scrapper and grab it for free, but that's not reliable and increases the "must fiddle with it" factor of the DVR. Even if the data itself didn't cost money, a setup to serve all those people even sort of reliably would cost something. Maybe it costs them about $20/year per user ;-)

With all that said, the guide data was one of the reasons I came to Sage as well.

[webwalker]

Having jumped from Mythtv, let me weigh in as well:

Unless you are a programmer willing to hack and recompile svn quality code, you'll never miss your 'freedom' from Mythtv in Sage. While Sage isn't 'open' in the legal or license sense, they've spent a lot of effort not to reinvent the wheel: they leverage other people's codecs, hardware, drivers, framework and input. And it shows. It is a reasonable (to me) compromise between the utopia of 'free and open' and the dystopia of 'and you're on your own, sucker.'

This forum is exceptional for providing high quality data, and with the one support call I've put in so far, the experience has been timely, and business like.

I'm originally a Tivo user, which my family fell back to when MythTV crashed on takeoff...So far I have hundreds of dollars of hardware invested in Sage....but I'm finding that I get much better mileage out of it than I did out of Myth, which seemed to backfire out the carburetor whether the hardware was mainstream of niche.

The Tivo guide data cost me $13 per month. In 6 months, I've paid for the license...and the guide data becomes gravy. In terms of software licensing investment, this has been one of my better purchases. (I'm still griefed about their Linux licensing, but that's a different problem.)

The other thing I like about Sage is that they provide a supported application framework, but they don't lock everything down. If you don't like the interface....change it. If you want to extend a feature, do it. If you want to toss out the whole GUI and write your own, they even provide an IDE (Sage Studio) to do just that. And they reasonably stick the mantra of 'we support what we ship, but if you change it, YOU support it' which is the same thing you get out of most F/OSS vendors these days anyway.

I've spent $80 on a nice meal that was only a memory in 24 hours. $80 on software with this much function and flexibility, with the guide data thrown in, is a bargain.

M

[drewg]

Originally Posted by Peggysis

I'm glad it is easier to set up now than 4 years ago. I'm NOT glad MythTV now forces you to pay for guide data from a company set up by "several MythTV developers". Yeah, I know, $20/year isn't that much, but over the years, it adds up. They couldn't find a free alternative?

The SageTV free guide data was also attractive to me, and was the #2 reason (behind the HD100) why I switched a year ago. However, there are more alternatives now than there were at the time of the end of the free Zap2it guide data. Specifically, mce2xml and zap2xml will both download the same TMS based guide data that everybody uses..

Drew

[boojiboy]

Originally Posted by webwalker

Having jumped from Mythtv, let me weigh in as well:

Unless you are a programmer willing to hack and recompile svn quality code, you'll never miss your 'freedom' from Mythtv in Sage. While Sage isn't 'open' in the legal or license sense, they've spent a lot of effort not to reinvent the wheel: they leverage other people's codecs, hardware, drivers, framework and input. And it shows. It is a reasonable (to me) compromise between the utopia of 'free and open' and the dystopia of 'and you're on your own, sucker.'

This forum is exceptional for providing high quality data, and with the one support call I've put in so far, the experience has been timely, and business like.

I'm originally a Tivo user, which my family fell back to when MythTV crashed on takeoff...So far I have hundreds of dollars of hardware invested in Sage....but I'm finding that I get much better mileage out of it than I did out of Myth, which seemed to backfire out the carburetor whether the hardware was mainstream of niche.

The Tivo guide data cost me $13 per month. In 6 months, I've paid for the license...and the guide data becomes gravy. In terms of software licensing investment, this has been one of my better purchases. (I'm still griefed about their Linux licensing, but that's a different problem.)

The other thing I like about Sage is that they provide a supported application framework, but they don't lock everything down. If you don't like the interface....change it. If you want to extend a feature, do it. If you want to toss out the whole GUI and write your own, they even provide an IDE (Sage Studio) to do just that. And they reasonably stick the mantra of 'we support what we ship, but if you change it, YOU support it' which is the same thing you get out of most F/OSS vendors these days anyway.

I've spent $80 on a nice meal that was only a memory in 24 hours. $80 on software with this much function and flexibility, with the guide data thrown in, is a bargain.

M

Wow, excellent write up! Thanks for posting this...