Pre Sales Questions

[jsmar]

I'm considering buying a SageTV HD Theater box, but I have a few questions.

1) Is there a downloadable manual? I've found various FAQ's, but I suspect I can get more answers by reading the manual if I was able to find it online.

2) I think this is fairly obvious, but I wanted to make sure. If I play HD content with the HD Theater box hooked up to a standard TV via the S-video connector, does the box support that, i.e. will it automatically convert 720p and 1080i content to 480i?

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by jsmar

1) Is there a downloadable manual? I've found various FAQ's, but I suspect I can get more answers by reading the manual if I was able to find it online.

The SageTV downloads page has a link to the full SageTV PDF manual, or you can download it from my sig lines. For the extender's basic usage manual, see the SageTV Media Extender FAQ.

2) I think this is fairly obvious, but I wanted to make sure. If I play HD content with the HD Theater box hooked up to a standard TV via the S-video connector, does the box support that, i.e. will it automatically convert 720p and 1080i content to 480i?

Yes.

- Andy

[curtp]

I have an MVP and an older server (1.8ghz, 512mb) running Sage and I have a couple Hauppauge HD tuners. I'm currently transcoding the HD recordings down to stream to the MVP because the server isn't beefy enough to transcode on the fly.

I'm thinking about getting a HD200 because the server takes quite a while to transcode our shows. The problem is, I don't have an HD tv yet. Will I be able to hook an HD200 up to a standard def tv? Also, will the HD200 take the heavy lifting off of the server? I'd rather not buy an HD200 and have to worry about getting a new server.

* merged *

[toricred]

First the HD200 has S-Video and Composite video out so you should be good there. You won't have the server doing the transcoding for the extender. If you're doing any other transcoding such as compressing files or comskipping then you server will still have to do those chores.