New House Set-Up

[akenis]

Greetings,

I'm trying to figure out how to wire/set-up my new house and am interested in using Sage and MVP across the a LAN as the backbone. I've been a user of Ultimate TV at my current house, but just one room. Here's my fist set of questions:

1. Is this stuff ready for primetime as the sole A/V system in the house? I love the flexibility, but see a lot of threads about crashes and/or poor picture.

2. Wirring: Is it better to have all equipment in a dedicated media closet or will some of it have to be in the main viewing room? I'll want at least two rooms wirred for surround sound. Is there a way to have this come from a central location, or do these rooms need dedicated client PC's with an A/V receiver?

3. Can MVP clients watch DVD's recorded on the server or from the drive?

4. When using SAGE, how do you access a DirecTV menu pages, set-up, tuning, PPV channels etc.

5. Does anyone have any experience with a combo mini LCD w/ powered speakers + MVP client? This could be used in lieu of an expensive whole house audio system. Use in Kitchen, Garage, Deck etc.

6. Any way to get FM and/or internet radio running/distributed through Sage?

7. Should I stick with Direc-TV or is cable easier to integrate (analog or digital?)

More to follow?

[Lester Jacobs]

Originally Posted by akenis

Greetings,

I'm trying to figure out how to wire/set-up my new house and am interested in using Sage and MVP across the a LAN as the backbone. I've been a user of Ultimate TV at my current house, but just one room. Here's my fist set of questions:

1. Is this stuff ready for primetime as the sole A/V system in the house? I love the flexibility, but see a lot of threads about crashes and/or poor picture.

...

Definitely yes. I run SageTV as the sole A/V system in my condo (except for the music part for which I use another app). I currently distribute SageTV to multiple rooms using the SageTV client running on client PCs. I will be moving to a new house shortly and intend to distribute SageTV using both client PCs and MVPs as applicable.

Been running SageTV since version 1.4.10 with virtually no crashes (ok I did have two crashes but they were not Sage's fault) on my production system. My wife would stand for nothing less!

Cheers
Lester

[mdmint]

Originally Posted by akenis

Greetings,

I'm trying to figure out how to wire/set-up my new house and am interested in using Sage and MVP across the a LAN as the backbone. I've been a user of Ultimate TV at my current house, but just one room. Here's my fist set of questions:

1. Is this stuff ready for primetime as the sole A/V system in the house? I love the flexibility, but see a lot of threads about crashes and/or poor picture.

I agree with Lester. Sage is our primary and I don't experience any crash issues on either Sage Server or multiple Sage Clients. In 8 months use, sometimes recording up to 5 DVD quality at once while playing back pre-recorded, Sage Server crashed once a couple months ago. Don't know why and could never replicate it. This was before Sage 2.1.10 and running SageServer in service mode BTW so didn't automatically recover from the crash.
Picture quality wise is tough to answer. Sage & PVR250s (4 in Server, 1 in main Client network mode) recording in DVD Standard 3.25GB/hr does a great job encoding, output quality is the tough part. My main Sage Client feeds a 55" Toshiba 55HX70 rear projection HDTV ready via ATI 9600 w/vga to component adapter. Only been using Sage since April and still playing with various decoders etc. (Intervideo, Nvidia, Sonic, ATI) While WAF is good, I see things Debi doesn't. Don't get me wrong, the output is very good and superior to our previous method of using 4 VCRs for concurrent recording and playback, just I'm tend to be a perfectionist! The problem isn't Sage but outputing from PC to HDTV. Playback on any of the other Clients to PC monitor is outstanding. I'm considering trying a different video card (GE Force) in my main Client instead of ATI 9600 to see if I can improve good output even more.

2. Wirring: Is it better to have all equipment in a dedicated media closet or will some of it have to be in the main viewing room? I'll want at least two rooms wirred for surround sound. Is there a way to have this come from a central location, or do these rooms need dedicated client PC's with an A/V receiver?

Likely depends to a point on budget. I looked at various options and opted for quiet PC Client in main room. Problems of remotely controlling in another room plus long output cable feeds made using seperate Clients a better solution for me. Plus my main AV equipment cabinet stack was already in the main viewing room. Also, if you'll want different locations to be able to view different program would require separate Clients I believe.

4. When using SAGE, how do you access a DirecTV menu pages, set-up, tuning, PPV channels etc.

I don't have the techinical how to answer since not using DirectTV but know it's doable.

5. Does anyone have any experience with a combo mini LCD w/ powered speakers + MVP client? This could be used in lieu of an expensive whole house audio system. Use in Kitchen, Garage, Deck etc.

No experience, all my clients are PC based.

6. Any way to get FM and/or internet radio running/distributed through Sage?

FM I don't think so, don't believe Sage supports FM tuners. However, I havent' playing with the new multi-media features much. Sage for me is primarily multi tuner PVR system. Internet radio yes and no. Sage doesn't support it directly IIRC but I can launched a browser from within SageClient and play internet radio. The browers doesn't run inside SageClient but runs concurrently fine. (use wireless KB/mouse combo unit with main Client in addition to remote) Can be weird, with internet radio playing if you start watching something in Sage both audio is output!

7. Should I stick with Direc-TV or is cable easier to integrate (analog or digital?)

While analog cable likely much easier to setup (what I'm currently running) I know lots of people are using various combos of sources at the same time. So with Sage it doesn't really matter whether you go Satelite, digital cable or analog cable or all three at once, Sage can handle it!