With Beyond TV software and two HDTV tuners should have been a Give me a "baseline hardware configuration" that they KNEW would work Worst technical support of any software company I have ever worked Hardware encoder for the analog capture mode. Needed a PCI or PCIe HDTV+analog TV tuner which included a This is really a hardware problem (3 above) but I was not able to overcome it at the time. I Still, it suffers from stuttering and pixelation when recording two analog programs while watching an HDTV program. Such as an easy way to tell the software to pick HDTV channels instead of non-HDTV channels that are presenting the same program.ĥ) BTV has a pretty good GUI and good remote controls. Tuner as a starting point for any future PVR build efforts.Ĥ) SageTv has lots of features for "geeks" but is missing lots of features. Theater 650 chipset based tuners which ARE reported to have a Note: Recently, ATI has introduced the ATI This with a dual core 4200+ghz cpu and this was better than two other MBs I tried. This causes excessive CPU utilization and can result in stuttering video when recording two analog channels and watching a HDTV channel.
I now consider this THE major unresoled limitation in trying to build a PC version PVR to compete with a Tivo Series 3.ģ) Don't buy Tuner cards without a hardware encoder on analog channels.
Problems with the Beyond TV and Sage TV approaches?ġ) Tuner cards with drivers not compatible with running two cards together (Dvico).Ģ) Tuner cards that cannot accept cable cards and so limit you to OTA HDTV and analog cable channels. I have done so and, to make a long story short, I just bought a Tivo Series 3. But when it came time for HDTV, I decided to try a "build your own" PVR using SageTV or Beyond TV. similar setups, such as iTunes integration with Apple TV boxes.I have used a Tivo model 1 for years and love it. SageTV is also friendly with a bevy of video file formats commonly used online (especially on bittorrent services), so a service like this rolled up with Google's burgeoning media cloud could have a major edge among media geeks vs.
With that type of software installed on PCs and Google TVs, customers could watch video stored on their computers or DVRs connected to a Google TV on any other Google TV-enabled device in the world. Instead, Google is more likely to focus on the Slingbox-like abilities of the SageTV platform, which can "place-shift" both live and stored video content from a DVR or PC to either a local or remote playback location. But Google TV can already integrate with and automate existing DVRs, leading GigaOM to counter that making DVRs that run Google TV software would be redundant. Rakesh Agrawal, SnapStream Media founder, speculates that Google bought SageTV in order to add native DVR capabilities to Google TV. Now that Google has scooped it up, there are a number of SageTV's services Google might be after. In our own guide, we called it a device that could turn "any networked machine with UPnP support into an HDMI-enabled HTPC." SageTV's products have filled a niche as just-works media extenders for a couple of years now, allowing customers to serve media over LAN, stream YouTube videos, and stream from PVRs running SageTV's DVR software to a home theater setup. Google is speculated to want SageTV for its DVR and Slingbox-like capabilities for possible integration with Google TV and Google's cloud services. SageTV, a company that makes products with streaming and media center-type services, announced on Saturday that it had been acquired by Google.