Is Sage used much outside of North America?

[wayner]

I get the impression that even though a couple of the active Sage developers are based outside of North America (ie. in the UK, NZ, etc.) that there aren't all that many Sage users from outside of North America. The volume in the international forums is very, very sparse and there don't seem to be that many posts regarding non-North American issues. (A recent poll in the Aus/NZ forum would seem to indicate that there are 8 users in that part of the world )

Is this an accurate assumption, that Sage is not used that extensively outside of North America. If it is then why is that - is it because much of the hardware is different and Sage doesn't support it? Are there other reasons?

Or am I just plain wrong and there are lots of overseas Sage users?

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by wayner

Is this an accurate assumption, that Sage is not used that extensively outside of North America. If it is then why is that - is it because much of the hardware is different and Sage doesn't support it? Are there other reasons?

I don't know how much of an issue this is, but keep in mind Sage doesn't provide guide data outside of the US and Canada. That's not something unique to Sage, but it might help to explain an apparent low number of users outside the US and Canada.

And yes, I know there are still ways to get guide data in other countries. But, as someone that used XMLTV for a few months before Sage offered guide data in the US, I much prefer the ease-of-use (and quality) of built-in guide data.

[maninblack_30]

I'm one of the users in Australia, my thoughts are that HTPC's haven't reall caught on over here, a lot of people have cable tv, and the encryption used means that using internal tuners is not possible.
Another thing is set-top boxes with 2 tuners and an internal hard drive seem to be all the rage. One of our cable companies offers a dual tuner with HDD as well.
And of course the guide data is a pain in the rear too.
Personally I find the abillity to watch any recordings in any room beats a PVR hands down.
Fraser

[Fuzzy]

and for guide data, doesn't sage pull guide info from DVB broadcasts now? Much simpler than the old XMLTV methods, to be sure.

[maninblack_30]

It does, but the stations here are very slack with their data, for example, most of the shows have the same episode id for all episodes of the same show.
Also the naming isn't always consistant, so it mucks up the favorits too.

[wayner]

XMLTV isn't that bad is it? For years I used it to feed my TiVo as TiVo didn't support Canada for a long time so some enterprising folks, including some Aussies, figured out how to get guide data from XMLTV, reformat into the TiVo database standard and then upload it. The whole process was a pain to get running but once it was working it ran rather well, other than the odd hiccup when DST started/stopped or when Zap2it made some changes and/or stopped their Data Direct service.

[jaminben]

I'm with Maninblack, I dont think HTPC's have really caught on outside of the US, sure there's a few geeks around the world like me that look into these things but on the whole most people will stick to an over the counter STB. Setting up an HTPC isn't for your regular Joe and even the most popular HTPC software in Europe isn't all that well known (Media Portal / Windows Media Centre).

I think the whole HTPC thing needs more coverage and the only people that will do that will be Microsoft, once this happens you will start to see more users outside of the US experiment with different solutions as they've had a taste with MS and will then want more.

I also use XMLTV for my guide data as the over the air data isn't all the good in the UK, IMO.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by jaminben

I'm with Maninblack, I dont think HTPC's have really caught on outside of the US, ...

I don't know that they have really caught on in the US as well.

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by wayner

XMLTV isn't that bad is it?

Keep in mind I used it back in 2003. But, I had a moderately hard time getting it set up. I think my first posts on this forum were asking for help with XMLTV. It was also sort of slow. I usually had a scheduled task every night to update XMLTV, and it worked 90% of the time, but it was sort of painful to use when I had dial up (because I couldn't schedule a task because my modem never seemed to hang-up when it was done).

My biggest complaint, after setup, was the quality of the data. I don't think you could go out very many days (that was a long time ago, so I'm not sure), and the accuracy and completeness of the data was not as good as Sage's built-in data.

[cychou]

I am in Sydney, Australia. For my experiences, XMLTV is not the biggest problem. For whatever reasons, Sage just had problems with my DVB-T signal ever since the dvb support was released. It usually caused a application error by TSSplitter.ax during recording, and then sage server will cease responding (cannot even restart the server). I then will have to reboot the whole box to get it working again. This behavior happened 3-4 times a week at its worse, and sometimes I can go through 2 weeks without any. So it is completely random.

I had communication with Sage support for the last 2.5 years, and try numerous fixes but to no avail. I even send my TS dump files (400MB upload through ADSL to US) to Qian (Sage developer) to help further analysis. Eventually Qian concluded that this problem cannot be fixed by patches, and a new implementation is needed.

Back when I was using Sage 2.0 for analog capture (through mpeg encoder card), Sage is rock solid. That is why I jump on Sage 6.0 immediately when they announced the support for digital TV in Australia (DVB-T).

The latest release show a lot of progress in this area. Even though the occasional application error is still there, but Sage is able to recover the recording after some timeout period (thanks to the new system message).

Qian had told me late last year that he will be working on new TSSplitter.ax under a brand new design. And now finally I saw him releasing new beta regarding new native recording patch. Hopefully this will finally solve the problems and put Sage back to a stable track for me.

[HKme]

I think the biggest obstacle to wider adoption is the guide data. For the less-technical user, getting XMLTV working can be pretty challenging. I'm using Sage in Hong Kong and have a "reasonably" stable setup. There are a couple of cable tv providers here and several free to air stations using a variation of DVB-T called DMB-T/H used in China/HK (why do people feel the need to reinvent existing standards? ). For cable TV, I have to resort to screen scraping the websites of the individual channel providers using tvxb and then use LMGestion's excellent XMLTV importing program. This is far from ideal, since whenever one of the websites decides to change their layout, say goodbye to the guide data for that channel until I get a chance to set it up again.

Free to air is better, but still requires workarounds. Although the digital standard is different from DVB-T, the drivers for the capture device seem to have the same BDA interface as normal DVB-T, and so most applications designed for DVB-T (mytheater, dvbguide, windows 7) can grab the guide data directly from the digital stream. Unfortunately, although Sage works perfectly watching/capturing using the device, it comes out with garbage if you try to use it as an EPG source. So I run DVBGuide, which grabs the EPG data from the stream and dumps it to an xmltv file, which again I import via the LMGestion's program. I suspect Sage has problems because the EPG is transmitted in two languages (Traditional Chinese & English).

I also have the same problem mentioned by cychou. I get an application error on TSSplitter.ax once every one or two weeks. I've set the Sage service to restart automatically so it's not too big a deal.

I've tried two different capture devices for free to air, but get the guide and TSSplitter issues with both. Neither are show-stoppers so haven't bothered exploring further. FYI, these are the capture devices I use (not concurrently) for free to air:
- Avermedia A855
- Hauppauge DMB-T/H USB stick (http://www.hauppauge.com.sg/site/pro...ata_dmbth.html)