SageTV, HD300

T

Trepidati0n

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Oct 26, 2004
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Looks like it is on the way (at least pre-order). Just when I thought I was going to have to give sage the boot, they do something smart again (like HDMI 1.3 finally)


http://www.sagetv.com/
 
valve1138 said:
Why were you considering dumping sage?
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1. I bought the extenders so I didn't need a $400 PC in every room. However, HDMI 1.2 and the audio issues that came with it made me have to do more work than I wanted to. Re-encoding all my MKV's to AC3 is not something I have should have to do in this modern era. The new boxes are 1.3 and only $150...best part, you can Velcro them to the back of the TV they are so small.

2. The monkey in the middle. As long as we had the standard suite of analog channel and the major channels in clear QAM, my wife was "happy". However, a lot of providers were dumping analog at the speed of light (including where we used to live). However, Time warner in the Milwaukee area appears to staying stable in the analog market for the time being. This then inhibits me from having to rent both the STB's and buy capture boxes (at least for the current time).

3. The UI was really starting to piss her off. Sage 7 fixed a lot of that issue. It still doesn't handle large video libraries well, but it is better and she is happier.

In short, we were pretty close to dropping sage and getting one cablecard based win7 system for the main TV and put WD live boxes everywhere else. My wife would have hated losing the ability to watch her shows in any room...but the heavy rental (STB) and sunk costs to keep doing what are cheap 2250 was doing was just not worth it. They are back to tolerable levels...but time marches on. We still don't have netflix/hulu...but modern TV's seem to be building that in natively which sorta mitigates that issue.
 
sage pulled out some of the same wins for me too. I had a lot of the same issues, but I am fine with OTA TV.
 
It seems like Sage is working harder than we think...picked this up from "missing remote"

The other bit of speculation is around full support for Cable Card. Sage has licensed PlayReady DRM, which is the DRM used for CableCard on PCs. The new HD300 also uses a processor that supports PlayReady DRM.

Netflix has also moved to PlayReady, so maybe that's the target. We won't know until Sage formally releases something. But some of the pieces are coming into place.
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In short...that rumor of Sage working with the Windows 7 recording API and cablecards might not be a hack but rather full blown support. The only thing we give up is the freely copy/burn ability of recorded shows. But honestly, I don't do that anymore.
 
gah....sweet. if sage could pull in netflix and cable card I wouldnt care to look anywhere else for a long time.
 
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So, there is already an app that works with SageMC and PlayOn to get Netflix into Sage. That part at least is easily accomplished. The addition of support for the Ceton tuner though? That would be huge. I'm delaying my switch from Sage to WMC7 just to see how it shakes out.
 
i dont want the add on app and playon, I want actual integrated, out of the box support.
 
Same as ID...I don't want a hack; at least not anymore. The main reason I keep on hanging onto sage is I am willing to deal with non-elegant solutions on the backend since I have time to do so. What I do know is my "free time" is becoming more and more scarce. I don't mind Sage being a bit behind the curve....but if they don't get this soon, it will appear as if they showed up to the race but never started. Sage users have been waiting for over 3 years some pretty important features....and MS seems to have all of them already.

At least I don't have to re-encode all my MKV's to AC3 sound anymore.
 
I'm with you on tired of waiting on Sage to move on some issues. I can't blame them for the CableCard support though since it has been a licensing issue. I was completely ready to jump to WMC7 and dump Sage, just haven't scraped up enough time to get it done. Now I'll give the dev team at Sage a few weeks to see if they have an announcement re: the Ceton tuner since I already have Netflix working just fine through the PlayOn integration. If not, I'll probably go ahead and jump to WMC7.
 
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