Need to Move Sage to a new computer

[weeber]

I received my new Comcast box today and the firewire port is disabled . Because they are transitioning metro-Atlanta to MPEG4, keeping my old box is not an option. I'm going to take this opportunity to retire my old WinXP box and put together a whole new build (Win7) with SD Prime. I need some help with:

1. What's the deal with the license keys currently? I understand that trial versions no longer have access to the EPG. I'm hoping I can just plug in my old keys into Sage and have it work, but that's probably wishful thinking.

2. Any advice on transferring my old configuration to my new setup? I plan to transfer my recording drive from my old HTPC to new. I'm hoping to make this transition as painless as possible.

3. What about setting up a SD Prime with Comcast and configuring Sage? I've been using firewire for the past 8 years and don't have much clue where to start with a new capture setup.

4. Any and all miscellaneous words of advice or well wishes are appreciated.

Thanks all.

[SHS]

Originally Posted by weeber

1. What's the deal with the license keys currently? I understand that trial versions no longer have access to the EPG. I'm hoping I can just plug in my old keys into Sage and have it work, but that's probably wishful thinking.

Install SageTV add your Key that all you need to do.

Originally Posted by weeber

2. Any advice on transferring my old configuration to my new setup? I plan to transfer my recording drive from my old HTPC to new. I'm hoping to make this transition as painless as possible.

Frist get it working as new setup then ocen that done close out SageTV and copy over the Sage wiz file database restart SageTV add channel to force epg update let do it thing then later remove that channel all done.

Originally Posted by weeber

3. What about setting up a SD Prime with Comcast and configuring Sage? I've been using firewire for the past 8 years and don't have much clue where to start with a new capture setup.

Look around the forum

Originally Posted by weeber

4. Any and all miscellaneous words of advice or well wishes are appreciated.

Just have fun

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by weeber

2. Any advice on transferring my old configuration to my new setup? I plan to transfer my recording drive from my old HTPC to new. I'm hoping to make this transition as painless as possible.

What do you want to carry over to the new server? If it's just recording/watched metadata, then SHS's advice is good.

Depending on what you want to bring over there's more you can do. It is possible to install SageTV, then copy over your old directory. But if you're changing tuners along the way I wouldn't recommend it. There's just a lot of weird stuff that can happen if you go that route.

3. What about setting up a SD Prime with Comcast and configuring Sage? I've been using firewire for the past 8 years and don't have much clue where to start with a new capture setup.

An HDHR Prime seems like a great alternative to firewire. Firewire recording seemed to be *very* buggy for me. I ended up rebooting my box nightly to keep things relatively stable the rest of the time. The HDHR Prime is great if most of your channels aren't copy-protected (and I use an HD-PVR as a backup to catch the copy-protected channels).

You have two options to get it working. SageDCT or PrimeNetEncoder. I've been using SageDCT for a couple years now without any problems. But, I know that's not true for everyone. PrimeNetEncoder should be a bit more forgiving when it comes to errors in the recording stream, but (as I understand) you pay a penalty in longer times for channel changes.

SageDCT isn't exactly being actively developed anymore, but babgvant keeps it working (he put out a little fix just a month ago). PrimeNetEncoder isn't seeing a lot of development right now either, although I think jvl711 will come back to it at some point.

[weeber]

Thanks guys. Yeah, I just want to transfer over my recordings and metadata. Other than that, I'm trying to keep this install clean.

[SHS]

Things I reuse from the old Sage.properties that I carry over to new Sage.properties are the lines
seeker/archive_directory=
seeker/video_storage=
uptime=

[weeber]

Just a quick update, it was a long day, but I finally got everything together. Actually activating the cable card from Comcast was the easiest part of my day. Getting sage to recognize the Prime was the hard part. I had to give up on PrimeNetEncoder, but SageDCT seems to be working, and I'm recording two shows now

I've only got one problem. Per the advice, after I got everything setup, I copied by wiz.bin over. Now, all my previously recorded shows are listed twice. They don't actually exist twice, but they're shown twice. I haven't found a solution to this, any ideas out there?

EDIT - OK, I just discovered that Sage is listing both local recordings and recordings on my NAS. In my old setup, I ran a file sync program to backup recordings to the NAS about twice per week. I can't figure out why Sage is showing recordings from my NAS, it shouldn't even know it exists. In options to only recordings folder is the local disk, and I currently don't have any imported folders

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by weeber

EDIT - OK, I just discovered that Sage is listing both local recordings and recordings on my NAS. In my old setup, I ran a file sync program to backup recordings to the NAS about twice per week. I can't figure out why Sage is showing recordings from my NAS, it shouldn't even know it exists. In options to only recordings folder is the local disk, and I currently don't have any imported folders

Did you ever have the NAS configured for imported videos or use UNC paths for recordings?

If I remember correctly, Sage basically remembers the path of the recording when it was made. If its a network location, it will continue to look there after a migration. While it doesn't sound like your situation, if the network location isn't available, Sage will continue to show the items until it can see whether or not the file(s) still exist.

While this isn't the typical use case for this, I'd probably using the advanced video file recovery property to see if that clears them out. Before you do that double check that you don't have the NAS set as a recording directory.

[Skirge01]

Originally Posted by reggie14

If I remember correctly, Sage basically remembers the path of the recording when it was made. If its a network location, it will continue to look there after a migration. While it doesn't sound like your situation, if the network location isn't available, Sage will continue to show the items until it can see whether or not the file(s) still exist.

Actually, I think that's precisely what he's seeing.

While this isn't the typical use case for this, I'd probably using the advanced video file recovery property to see if that clears them out. Before you do that double check that you don't have the NAS set as a recording directory.

This is the only thing I've ever used that parameter for. What's it actually for?

As reggie said, go ahead and use this parameter, since it's probably easier than trying to recreate the exact share name (including server name, if applicable) again.

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by Skirge01

Actually, I think that's precisely what he's seeing.

Well, the OP's description makes this sound a little odd. He made it sound like 1) Sage was never configured to directly use the NAS, and 2) the NAS is still online, with the old backed-up recordings.

The main thing I've used advanced video file recovery for is to clear out recordings on permanently unavailable drives or network shares. If the shares are still available, and they still have the recordings, I'm not sure that will actually clear them out.

But, I've had that property help me fix other weird problems during migrations, so I think it's worth a shot.

weeber- before you run set the advanced video file recovery property, open your sage.properties file and look for any line that has your NAS shares.

If the above steps don't work, another relatively simple thing you could do is turn off your NAS before you run through file recovery. Sage won't be able to see the NAS, and should forget about those files.

[weeber]

Sorry for not updating guys, I do appreciate the help. For now, I've just moved the recordings "backup" folder to a different location. That got rid of the duplicate recordings. I'm happy with the way it's working now, so I'll just leave well enough alone. It makes no difference to me where my backup folder is.

Overall, I'm really happy with the new config - Sage is running great and recording all my shows perfectly with the HD Prime. I didn't realize how nice having multiple tuners available could be Now I'm just looking forward to the open source release and new development.