Starting Fresh and Wanting HD Content

[jasoninva]

Hi Sage Community,

I've been a Sage user since version 3. I've purchased an extender and had a dedicated media center. I even wired my condo and new house with CAT6 to efficiently stream HD video to many rooms at once. The dream fizzled. At some point, I decided to hold on future Sage investments due to what appeared to be only a hobbyists' approach to getting HD video from Cable. I watched as HDPVR came out and decided that stringing up three or four hdpvrs and three or four cable boxes in a closet was not for me. I could do it, but didn't want to maintain it. Then came CETON. I'm still waiting to see how/if I'll ever use that in Sage. Now I'm faced with an aged media center and have gotten comfortable to enjoying HD video but miss my DVR set up.

So my question to the community is where do I go from here.

Do I
A) Switch to Windows 7, buy another 2 or 3 Xbox units and a CETON and call it a day for Sage
B) Consider stringing together HDPVRs because it's not as much of a chore to set up or maintain as I think
C) Wait for Sage to support CETON
D) Try something else entirely?

I don't want to:
A) Spend another dollar on something that works like a DIY solution
B) Have to give up HD
C) Spend a fortune

I'd love to be able to watch Hulu (will / does Sage support?), use Pandora and Rhapsody through an extender. I know there are other devices that do this, just hoping Sage 7 does as well

Also, I had the first extender. It was a good dvr extender, but the stored media features (music, photos) were garbage. They were slow, clunky, and didn't work well. Does the latest extender improve the stored media features a great deal?

[blade]

I think it really depends on your viewing habits. The majority of what I watch is on the major networks such as ABC, NBC, CBS, etc.... for many or maybe all of us on cable those are clear QAM and are often available OTA. I have 2 HDHomeRun's (4 tuners), which take care of probably +90% of my recordings.

I have 1 HD-PVR to take care of everything else. Most shows that I watch on the other channels that aren't in the clear are re-aired so often (often times on the same night as the original airing) that I have very few conflicts. I've only had my HD-PVR for a few weeks and am using an old USB-UIRT for channel changing, but so far haven't missed a recording since switching from the built in IR blaster to the USB-UIRT.

I currently have 2 old analog tuners that capture the few shows that the other tuners can't handle. When I remove my analog tuners on Dec. 7th (Comcast is cuting off the analog feed here on that day) I may end up needing a 2nd HD-PVR to pick up the slack, but I'm going to wait and see because right now there are very few shows being captured by my analog tuners and many of those have future airings that the HD-PVR could have picked up.

[pjpjpjpj]

+1 to blade's comments above.

Hulu, netflix, and pandora are available with the PlayOn plugin, which requires you to buy PlayOn service. I don't know if PlayOn is still offering the "one time ever" price or if it's a monthly or yearly thing now. Pandora is not completely functional (no skip forward or back, etc.) - but you can set up channels online and then access them in the PlayOn plugin and play them on your extender. The only caveat is you need to make sure you have a fairly decent computer to run PlayOn - see their site for specs required. PlayOn does not need to be on the SageTV server, just on a PC within the network.

In case you have not completely read up on v7, the plugins are much easier and smoother and not like you probably remember from the days of it feeling "DIY". You just go to the plugin manager, and all available v7 plugins are listed... you click the one you want to add and hit "install" and it takes care of everything for you.

[JetreL]

HD-PVRs inherently can have issues but when you get them working typically they work really well. I became tired of fighting SageTV and HD-PVRs about a year and a half ago So I ordered a DirecTV DVR. After hooking it up, I turned it on it took me less than a minute to realize that I had made a huge mistake and started thinking of ways to transition back to SageTV. (Had to save face with the wife) $480 to get out of a DirecTV contract later I can tell you I am a happy Sage user.

I am not sure exactly what you use Sage for but waiting on the Ceton wouldn't be an option for me. It's not available and no one is talking about them anytime soon. If I were you I would make use of HD-PVRs on their own USB expansion cards and run Sage on WHS with extenders feeding the TVs in your house.

I would put the Sage recorded Video directory on it's own disk and just let it be. That's my configuration and the only time I have to log into the server is when I want to patch the OS, Sage, Java or add and remove shared disks. I have it stable enough now that it works just like I think a DVR should be.