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#SAGETV SKINS SERIAL#
Both Directv receivers are controlled with serial tuning cables, null modem cables with Iogear Guc232A usb to serial adaptors.
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I have four OTA HD inputs all together, each fed from a roof mounted antenna feeding an electroline 8 port amplifier. The 1600 uses one tuner for OTA HD and the other for s-video from a Directv H20 locked at SD. The HD PVR is connected to a Directv H21 HD receiver via spdif (dolby 5.1) and component, the receiver is locked at 1080i. My capture cards are a Hauppauge HVR1600 with remote, HVR950 USB, HVR2250 dual tuner, and HD PVR. I have just over 2TB of hard drive space and an NEC DVD burner. My Setup: I built my HTPC server on a Foxconn NF4UK8AA-8EKRS motherboard with AMD 4200-x2 processor, 2gb Corsair memory, Asus Earthmate 430 power supply, and PNY 8500 GT video card. Unfortunately that compares to over a thousand hours of BTV and MP experience, so take this as a familiarity biased comparison, honest as I will try to be. It encompasses about 40 hours of direct SageTV tweaking and research. This article covers my notes and impressions of SageTV vs BeyondTV/Media Portal. For this comparison I did some research first, and followed the Geek Tonic guide for SageMC installation. I was however seeing some signal quality issues with over the air recordings so I wanted a second opinion. I have BeyondTV 4.9.2 working as good as it is capable and Media Portal 1.0 tweaked out to my liking. Now I felt the time was right for a head to head comparison. For that test I only tested the default skin, never installing the SageMC STV. Feature wise, I preferred the combination of those two programs over SageTV and its interface the last time I tested it. Recently Snapstream discontinued Beyond Media so my current system uses BeyondTV and Media Portal exclusively. I find the other components of Media Portal meet all my needs, music, pictures, video library, weather etc.
#SAGETV SKINS TV#
The main issue with free HTPC programs in my opinion is the ability to set up the TV channels and obtain reliable guide data. Media Portal is an open source HTPC program, and although it has its own PVR, I disable that and use it as a companion to BeyondTV. In addition to BeyondTV I was also using Snapstream's Beyond Media as well as Media Portal for my other HTPC components. At the time I did not feel comfortable with Sage and did not see any advantage to switching. Unlike SageTV, which offers music, pictures, and other applications integrated in their product, BeyondTV had a separate program called Beyond Media that handled media other than TV and video. About a year ago I tried Sage out when I became annoyed that Snapstream was reneging on their promise to integrate Beyond Media into BeyondTV. As a result, I am heavily biased towards BeyondTV both from familiarity and preferences.
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I have been using Snapstream's BeyondTV since 2005, started with version 3.4 and have invested time and energy in the beta programs for every build since. This is my third attempt at SageTV, even though it is my first review on the matter. Basic guidelines for writing and submitting a guest post at GeekTonic can be found here. NOTE: This is a guest post by ZetaVu, a GeekTonic reader and frequent guest-blogger on GeekTonic. It’s a long one so I’m breaking it out into two parts – one for Thursday and the second one you can read here. I’ve noted a few corrections or “clarifying notes” where I thought they would be helpful to other readers, but otherwise I’m posting this review verbatim as provided to me by ZetaVu. ZetaVu is a pretty hard-core user with some pretty specific needs, but you can’t argue that he put some serious time into trying things out. So after posting a how-to on switching from BeyondTV to SageTV I thought I’d share with you a counter-point guest-post by a long-time BeyondTV user who tried to switch to SageTV, but couldn’t make the move in the long run.
#SAGETV SKINS PC#
I still have BeyondTV installed on a test PC but have since switched to SageTV for my whole-home HTPC needs. As many GeekTonic readers know, I was a long-time user of BeyondTV.