My two tuner system now running - A few comments/suggestions

[Lester Jacobs]

After spending a couple weeks thoroughly testing SageTV, I finally moved it to my "production" HTPC today. Everything works great and I'm very happy with my decision to convert to SageTV.

My system consists of two Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250s. I previously had an ATI AIW and a Creative VCR card where I would use the ATI software for live TV viewing andf the Creative software for recording. Needless to say it was a huge hassle to go from live TV to recorded programs since I would have to keep switching software. Also, I did not have an integrated EPG. SageTV, on the other hand, gives me the ability to manage multiple tuners using one interface with excellent TiVo-like functionality thrown in.

I do have a few observations/comments after going through the testing process and the conversion to my production HTPC:

1) Initially, I inserted both PVR-250s in my computer at the same time, installed the drivers, and then tried to configure the cards in SageTV. For some reason, this did not work. SageTV would give a "Could not detect MPEG II card" everytime it started up. Finally I resolved this by first starting out with one card installed, configuring that with SageTV then inserting the second card and configuring that. Is this a bug with SageTV that you cannot insert both cards at the same time and then attempt to configure them?

2) I still have my ATI AIW card installed in my computer and so I would very much like SageTV to support "regular" tuner cards strictly for Live TV viewing or, even better, eventually support the new ATI Software Encoder. Then I would effectively have a three tuner system!

3) Enable Intelligent recording on a per card basis. I'd like to enable Intelligent recording on my system but with two tuners it records an enormous amount of shows. I'd like to restrict it to one tuner.

4) I would like the "-awake" command line option to start SageTV if it is not already running. Right now, -awake only works if SageTV is running in the task bar. In order to make things as simple as possible for family members, I'd like to assign one remote control button that either wakes SageTV if it is sleeping or starts it up if it is not running. This way, in the rare event that SageTV crashes for some reason, little Johnny would still be able to watch TV without my help.

5) It would be nice if it were possible to configure the wakeup behaviour of SageTV. Currently, waking up SageTV brings you into the Home screen. I'd like SageTV to go directly to Live TV upon waking up. I imagine that not everyone would agree with me so perhaps it might be useful to provide the option to configure which screen SageTv goes to on wakeup. That way everyone can customise it the way they want.

This is a great program and worth every penny I spent on it. It is truly a complete PVR solution implemented for the PC, something I've been looking for for a long time.

Regards
Lester

[pawn]

Originally posted by Lester Jacobs
1) Initially, I inserted both PVR-250s in my computer at the same time, installed the drivers, and then tried to configure the cards in SageTV. For some reason, this did not work. SageTV would give a "Could not detect MPEG II card" everytime it started up. Finally I resolved this by first starting out with one card installed, configuring that with SageTV then inserting the second card and configuring that. Is this a bug with SageTV that you cannot insert both cards at the same time and then attempt to configure them?

I get this error every single time I first run Sage. It was more of a problem with version 1.2.8, because the error window would hide behind the main window....so I had to be quick about getting rid of the error message.


2) I still have my ATI AIW card installed in my computer and so I would very much like SageTV to support "regular" tuner cards strictly for Live TV viewing or, even better, eventually support the new ATI Software Encoder. Then I would effectively have a three tuner system!


But wouldn't this kill the point? I, for one, like knowing I can watch a DVD and not worry about a scheduled recording taking over the entire CPU half way through the movie.



3) Enable Intelligent recording on a per card basis. I'd like to enable Intelligent recording on my system but with two tuners it records an enormous amount of shows. I'd like to restrict it to one tuner.



Agreed, completely.



4) I would like the "-awake" command line option to start SageTV if it is not already running. Right now, -awake only works if SageTV is running in the task bar. In order to make things as simple as possible for family members, I'd like to assign one remote control button that either wakes SageTV if it is sleeping or starts it up if it is not running. This way, in the rare event that SageTV crashes for some reason, little Johnny would still be able to watch TV without my help.



Agreed, completely. I'd add that it would be nice to have a hot key that exits Sage entirely (for times like when the ghosting issue I have mentioned emerges).


5) It would be nice if it were possible to configure the wakeup behaviour of SageTV. Currently, waking up SageTV brings you into the Home screen. I'd like SageTV to go directly to Live TV upon waking up. I imagine that not everyone would agree with me so perhaps it might be useful to provide the option to configure which screen SageTv goes to on wakeup. That way everyone can customise it the way they want.


I do this with a wakeup command, a pause, then a live TV command in my remote software.


This is a great program and worth every penny I spent on it. It is truly a complete PVR solution implemented for the PC, something I've been looking for for a long time.


True enough. However, I will add that I believe there is something more troublesome going on with the "Tuner card not detected..." issue. Twice now my Sage setup has become entirely unusable. This usually emerges after SAge has been running flawlessly for a few days, then a machine reboot or something. The only fis is to uninstall and reinstall the Hauppage drivers.

I've used different clean installs of Sage, with different versions. Three different versions of Java RTE and different Hauppage driver versions.

I's be interested in knowing if you have any trouble like this in the future.

[Lester Jacobs]

Originally posted by pawn
...True enough. However, I will add that I believe there is something more troublesome going on with the "Tuner card not detected..." issue. Twice now my Sage setup has become entirely unusable. This usually emerges after SAge has been running flawlessly for a few days, then a machine reboot or something. The only fis is to uninstall and reinstall the Hauppage drivers.

I've used different clean installs of Sage, with different versions. Three different versions of Java RTE and different Hauppage driver versions.

I's be interested in knowing if you have any trouble like this in the future.

Actually, for the first time ever, I've had SageTV crash on me with much the symptoms you mentioned. I've had it running continuously since yesterday around 6pm and it has been working great. However at around 2:30 pm today the screen suddenly went black. This seemed to coincide with the end of a show I was watching. The system was totally hung, didn't even respond to Ctrl-Alt-Del (and this is under WinXP Pro). Fortunately, before restarting it, I took a look at the Sage install directory. My Wiz.bin was very small compared to the Wiz.bak file. I figured that the Wiz.bin file had become corrupted somehow so I replaced it with the Wiz.bak file. I then started SageTV and was thrown into the Setup screen! I quickly exited and checked the Sage directory again and found that the Sage.properties file had gotten reset to its default values! Since I did not have a backup of this I had to start SageTV and set up my two PVR-250s again. Fortunately, it seemed that all my favourites were remembered and all of my previous recordings showed up under Sage Recordings so not too much damage was done.

However I'd like to avoid a reoccurence of this issue. I looked around the system and did not see any log files at all, so I've got nothing to show Frey Support.

Hopefully I've given enough info to enable someone to track down this problem.

Lester

[justme]

.

However I'd like to avoid a reoccurence of this issue. I looked around the system and did not see any log files at all, so I've got nothing to show Frey Support.

It would be nice if there was an option to enable log files in the properties file. This way a user who has a strange experience could provide logs even if they were using an official release version. I had a similiar lockup back in 1.2.8, but had no logs to show what happened. It hasn't recurred in the newer versions, but I still like having the log files just in case. In an official release you could just limit the max size and number of log files. I would gladly enable such an option on my system.

Also SageTV should have an automatic(I know I do manually backup mine) backup properties file like the wiz.bak.

[olyar15]

Lester, have you tried using Girder to start SageTV. Girder allows you to check if a window exists, then issue different commands based on whether the window exists or not. I don't know if Girder will detect SageTV when it is minimized to the task bar, though. This is what the Theatertek plugin for Girder does. It first checks if theatertek is already running but minimized. If it doesn't detect it running, it will start the app, otherwise it just restores the window.

[Lester Jacobs]

Originally posted by olyar15
Lester, have you tried using Girder to start SageTV. Girder allows you to check if a window exists, then issue different commands based on whether the window exists or not. I don't know if Girder will detect SageTV when it is minimized to the task bar, though. This is what the Theatertek plugin for Girder does. It first checks if theatertek is already running but minimized. If it doesn't detect it running, it will start the app, otherwise it just restores the window.

Can do, I suppose. However it would be a lot cleaner if the -awake command would work in the way I described. Not everyone is running Girder and so modifying the -awake option behaviour provides a more general solution.

Lester

[njchim]

Anyone,

I currently have my SageTV system running beautifully on the specs listed in my signature. I was curious if anyone had any advice for me adding a second PVR-250. As you can see I am not running the faster computer in the west Will the cards be able to do enough of the work to not clobber my cpu?? Any advice is greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!

[salsbst]

Lester, thanks for sharing your comments. It was helpful.

I, too, would like to see discrete codes for Awake/Asleep and Full Screen/Not Full Screen. I've been struggling for two days to be able to go back and forth between SageTV and myHTPC and it has been frustrating.

One stumbling block seems to have been that it seems like SageTV takes a bit longer than I'd like/expect to "get to sleep". So, if I test for the presence of the SageTV window via girder directly after issueing the "Sleep" command, then I tend to get "true/window exists" whether I've just woken up the app (it wakes up faster than it goes to sleep) or whether I've just put it to sleep. Not the end of the world, but it tripped me up for a while and compounded the problem of not having discrete codes.

Regards,
Stuart