Win 7 to Windows 10?

[NoodleNT]

So my SageTV server has been begging me to upgrade to Windows 10. I was wondering if anyone had any problems with Win10? I have been running 32 bit Windows with 4 colossus v1 capture cards and using Tim's fireware plugin to tune boxes. Would love to go to 64 bit if the FireWire tuning support worked for the cable boxes but will stick with 32 if it can't.

[stanger89]

If it ain't broke, you're not trying. Wait, that's not right.

Unless there's some feature you want in Windows 10, I'd not go around trying to break a perfectly well working SageTV server.

[NoodleNT]

Ha!!!!

[wayner]

There are definitely no firewire drivers for 64 bit and it is unlikely that there ever will be. The reason that I say that is that there has been a need for them for many years but no one ever wrote them and the world seems to be moving away from firewire. Might want to start thinking about alternatives like USB-UIRTs.

[nyplayer]

There is one feature that is undervalued in Windows 10 and that is storage spaces.

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by wayner

There are definitely no firewire drivers for 64 bit and it is unlikely that there ever will be. The reason that I say that is that there has been a need for them for many years but no one ever wrote them and the world seems to be moving away from firewire. Might want to start thinking about alternatives like USB-UIRTs.

I switched away from FireWire a long time ago. My reasons were more related to the tools for channel changing rather than 64-bit. I want to prepend channels with zeros because my STB changes channels faster that way. Well, apparently the channel change utility converts the channel to an integer. That naturally strips the leading zeros. So what ends up being sent to the STB are the numbers without the leading zeros. Probably a simple enough program that could probably be easily decompiled and fixed. However, I've now moved to 64-bit.

As far as the driver is concerned I have no idea how to write a Windows driver. Nor do I know the protocols necessary to create a driver. I suppose it could also be decompiled.

Legality is probably the only other issue I see. Decompiling both driver and tuning tool would be illegal.

[Taddeusz]

Just for curiosity sake I was going to check into this. Anyone have a copy of the ExDeus stb_firewire driver package? I seemed to have deleted my copy and the one on his github.io site is now corrupt.

[wayner]

I am pretty sure that I have them and can send to you them later on.

Apparently the original drivers were reverse engineered from drivers for a Panasonic D-VCR unit. In fact when installing the drivers you may see "Panasonic MPEG2TS Tape Subunit Device". But assuming that we just want to do channel change and not capture the video stream then it might be a much easier task to do these drivers. But I am still of the view that if it didn't happen by now then it won't ever happen. Here is an (almost) 11 year old thread on firewire .

I wonder if Tim M Moore and ExDeus were one and the same as they both had web pages hosted at home.comcast.net that went away at about the same time.

FYI there was something called SageChanger developed by Mikep that adds functionality to the channel changing but it still required the Moore/ExDeus drivers.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by nyplayer

There is one feature that is undervalued in Windows 10 and that is storage spaces.

A feature that was originally in WHS v1 but was dropped for WHS2011.

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by wayner

A feature that was originally in WHS v1 but was dropped for WHS2011.

Works great though ... I setup a nas using a USB3 Dual Hard Drives Docking Station. Better than using a Nas as I can quickly move it to my laptop or any other PC in the event of failure on the PC. Also I am in the process of moving my SageTV recording folders to mirrored drives ... using Storage Mirrored Spaces.

[Denali]

My system was originally built with XP. Upgraded to Win7 then Win8 then Win8.1 then Win10 and finally Win10 Th2. It works as good as it did under Win7 and 8 and 8.1. Seems to be slightly faster under Win10 Th2.

[redman]

I'm running 10.
Main issues I have are:
1) seems every second week updates need installing - and reboot which seems to disable HD-PVR's
2) I have 2 HD-PVRs and every couple of days (unknown why??) they switch. i.e. the hardware linked to the sage source changes and they are trying to record wrong EPG's.
Need to manually go into setup and switch EPG and USB-UIRT back to "other" one.

Apart from that, works as expected.

[Gustovier]

I cloned my HD to try a windows 10 upgrade. Thus far I'm having difficulty with getting the sage tv service up and running. It starts up but it gets stuck accoring to the sagetv_0.txt log file. I've paraphased the last 2 lines of the log. My recording storage harddrive is at 100% active for read operations, so I'm thinking Sage is really actually looking over video directories, but this still doesn't seem right. I'm going to let it go for a few hours and see what happens.

21:09:20.627 Splash: SageTV Core is initializing...
21:09:22.368 Checking video directories for new files



What is also Odd, is that if I do not start the sage service, but I start Sage Client/server guit on same pc, the server process will start correctly, the sage client interface will appear and I can connect HD300s successfully.

[jusjoken]

check the service permissions. in the servicecontrol app in sage, set the user permissions to something that has permission to those folders

k

[MattHelm]

The only issues so far I've had, was 2 older USB 3.0 cards don't work correctly, and neither of these are in SageTV service.

What was a pain, was I didn't know they were broken until I plugged in a certain USB device. Order cards to replace them, and for now, using old W7 USB drivers. (Update, yes, it was the M$ drivers with older cards. I've replaced both, and now the USB is fine! )

So, 6/7 machines updated, 2 with USB issues. (One with weird boot issues, I'm going to do a clean install W10 install on, as it was just an SageTV playback box.)

2nd update - Second server in my list is humming right along after a update. No hardware issues at all, but then all the SageTV hardware is hanging off the ethernet bus, so it's kind of hard to mess up. ;-) Did have my first issue of a Java not wanting to run.

[Gustovier]

Quick update. Looks like my problem with sage taking a long time to start is due to my hard drive going bad and the scan that was happening on start up was moving very slow.

[jimz06]

Can anyone report that there are no issues with a HDHomerun Prime+ SageDCT setup with Windows 10?

[timg11]

I'm also planning to upgrade my Win7 Sage server to Win10.

I'm currently running 32 bit Windows 7. The point about 64 bit is interesting. I'm not using Firewire (was never able to get it to work reliably for channel changing, so I got USB-UIRT)

When I upgrade to Win 10, should I stick with 32 bit? Are there any advantages to 64 bit (that would matter to a SageTV server machine)?

Are there any known issues with Win10 and SageTV + HD-PVR, HD-Homerun, or HD-300?

[wayner]

I am in the same boat - I have Sage running on Win7 32 bit (I use firewire plus a USB-UIRT for channel changing) and I have two HD-PVRs plus an HDHR for OTA.

I have built a new machine that will be my new Sage server and it is running Win10 64 bit.

I would say to go with 64 bit as there is the hope that Sage 9 will eventually use 64 bit Java which will allow you to use a larger Java heap size and run more extenders concurrently.

There is a report that someone has problems with two HD-PVRs where Sage occasionally switches them so that the tuning is done on the wrong STB. But so far that is only one person reporting that.

[FriscoJohn]

Please see my cautionary tale in the OpenDCT thread. I could not get either OpenDCT or SageDCT to work in WIN10 and had to revert to WIN7. By the way, the new OpenDCT works great with SageTV7 under WIN7.