SageTV 2.1 Questions/Issues

[ziflin]

So I've been trying to get the Sage demo to the point where I'm willing to spend money on paying for the real thing, but there are still a few problems I'm having with it. I'm wondering if anyone else has similar issues/gripes:

1. Every so many seconds (30s+) live TV video-only stutters for a few frames (frames dropped or out of order), but it's super annoying. I've seen a few other posts about this, but none seem to resolve it.

2. Every time a show ends while watching live TV it pauses for 3-4 seconds (I'm guessing to switch to a new file). This is super annoying since I rarely care about keeping the show I just watched (and have usually changed channels during it anyway so there's only a fraction of it).

3. I have a few channels that appear to tune 'correctly' for 2-3 seconds the very first time I start sage and change to that channel. After that they get 'noisy' and look terrible. Is there some adjustment for this as it seems odd they'd come in nice for 2-3seconds and then get worse.

4. Along the lines of #2, is there any way to have Sage NOT record live tv, but rather run it straight back to the TV the same way WinTV2k does it? This could possibly eliminate both #1 & #2 as well as reduce the 3s lag when changing channels. ie: Pressing 'pause' would THEN start the recording... In the year I had a cable co. DVR I rewound live TV once (not worth the other issues really). I'm not saying ditch the way it is, but if there's an option for this I'd buy Sage right now .

5. I planned on being able to customize Sage, so the recent post about Studio are quite annoying. If I wanted a HTPC that I couldn't customize, I would have stuck w/ the Cable Co's. Not trying to start another Studio bashing thread, but I wanted to at least voice my desired in having a way to customize/extend Sage the way I wanted it.

Here's my current setup:

AMD 2.2ghz
160g ATA133 Maxtor HD (8mb buffer)
nVidia FX5200 -> TV out
Win XP Prof (no crazy services running that I've seen)
512MB ram
PVR250 & PVR250MCE (only using the non-MCE one for right now)
Using latest drivers
Intervideo Codec / VMR9 / Bob&Weave / DXVA+HWMC=1

I'm not getting any tearring (finally) and the interlacing looks fine (finally).

Sage+LiveTV is around 13-15% cpu usage. I'm not seeing any spikes (during #1s), so I don't know what's causing it other than video getting out of sync w/ audio perhaps? I know there are other "better" codecs, but people appear to have problems with them also -- and spending another $20 on top of the $80($65) for sage is starting to add up.

-thanks!