Will I be happy replacing Tivo with Sage?

[mohoelx]

Here's the deal - been reading a lot on these boards and seeing a lot of statements that Tivo may not be beatable. I'm a DirecTV customer who started with two receivers, then bought a DUAL receiver Tivo. So now have Tivo with two feeds in the LR, and one each of the orignal receivers in the BR and Den.

The thought would be this;

1. Install Sage server with two inputs (using PVR250's)
2. Add a Sage Client in LR, BR and Den
3. Uninstall (and sell on eBay) Tivo
4. locate both original DirecTV recievers with the Sage server controlling with Serial cables
5. Control Sage server through the Clients for scheduling recording, selecting live viewing, etc.
6. Run the server headless(?)

The main question is am I going to be dissapointed with the picture quality using this vs. using the DirecTV receivers and DirecTV Tivo?

The second question is am I correct in presuming that using the dual-tuner Tivo would be "problematic" at best? (No serial control option; using IR, how to dictate which tuner to select; etc.) I am assuming I would just be best off to get rid of it if I go with Sage, to reduce frustration if nothing else!

Through Direct, the Tivo uplift is only $10 / month ($5 for Tivo service, $5 for "mirroring" junk-fee), so I'm not going to be doing this for the savings (especially after buying a couple PVR-250's!) But, I see the flexibility of Sage with the Clients and all the extra functions to be an attractive alternative to Tivo's "record here, watch here" concept.

Thanks -
MoHoel

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by mohoelx

Here's the deal - been reading a lot on these boards and seeing a lot of statements that Tivo may not be beatable. I'm a DirecTV customer who started with two receivers, then bought a DUAL receiver Tivo. So now have Tivo with two feeds in the LR, and one each of the orignal receivers in the BR and Den.

The thought would be this;

1. Install Sage server with two inputs (using PVR250's)
2. Add a Sage Client in LR, BR and Den
3. Uninstall (and sell on eBay) Tivo
4. locate both original DirecTV recievers with the Sage server controlling with Serial cables
5. Control Sage server through the Clients for scheduling recording, selecting live viewing, etc.
6. Run the server headless(?)

Definitely doable.

The main question is am I going to be dissapointed with the picture quality using this vs. using the DirecTV receivers and DirecTV Tivo?

That's going to depend on how picky you are. There will be some loss since the video will be decoded by your recievers, converted to analog, and converted back to digital MPEG2 in the 250.

If you want an idea, SHS has a few captures from a Dishnetwork with PVR 250 on his site:
http://www.shspvr.com/reviews/pvr2_250/testing.html

The second question is am I correct in presuming that using the dual-tuner Tivo would be "problematic" at best? (No serial control option; using IR, how to dictate which tuner to select; etc.) I am assuming I would just be best off to get rid of it if I go with Sage, to reduce frustration if nothing else!

Yeah, AFIAK the DirecTivo (I assume that's the Tivo you have) can only ouput one channel at a time, therefore you'd only be able to record one channel from it, so it would be kind of pointless to use it.

[SHS]

You need a pair reg DirecTV recievers
You need a pair serial control "DirecTV Cable Pack (RCA Receivers)" like from this http://store.snapstream.com/dicaparre.html note make the motherboard will need to have has two serial port.
There are other option and with USB-UIRT IR Blaster but setup this going be little more work to do.

[kny3twalker]

That's going to depend on how picky you are. There will be some loss since the video will be decoded by your recievers, converted to analog, and converted back to digital MPEG2 in the 250.

what he means by this is that the quality will be not as good as the DirecTiVo cause direcTiVo captures the digital broadcast and SageTV does not

also SageTV mostly supports software decoding so the quality may not be as good as what most hardware decoders are capable of

but this should definitely work