I've been a little confused on were I would use Sage.
I have 1 hr250 and 1 Hr21 that go in to component video amps. It shoots them to multiple tvs in the house. I also have an ota, standard directv box and cctv cameras modulated and sent to all the tvs via coax. We watch most everything in HD with the most being the networks, ESPN, Food network,USA,TBS,TNT,FX. My local ABC is still not HD so that I have to get through Directv. How and why would I want Sage? How did you get your 3 Directv units into your pc? I'm always looking to improve my set up but I'm not sure how or why I would integrate Sage.
Thanks
Lance
Lance I am with you! I just dont get the Sage. Their website is even extremely poor in demo'ing what they do. Just dont see the need. Would be nice if it could replace a video matrix .
I feel silly just not "gettin' it."
Okay in that instance you are limited to 3 HD feeds at any one time, with SageTV you can watch unlimited recorded HD streams in HD or transcoded SD or transcoded remotely. This is limited by harddrive access, network bandwidth and in the case of the SD extender CPU cycles for transcoding.
Of course thats also only HD video, I have like 10k MP3s and 1500 family photos. All of which can also be randomly accessed from any client on the system.
I also have mine connected to a 400 Disk DVD changer, however it has the limitations of the hr250 and hr21 in your case. As many clients can watch the same DVD as you like but it's the same disk at the same time.
Same goes for my CCTV multiplex but I just leave that running. You should with some quweaking be able to setup a DVR as a network encoder then each CCTV channel can be randomly accessed.
The logic in dealing with the recording schedule is also impressive, you basically setup "favorites" and give them priorities and other parameters. The recording engine is smart enough to deal with most recording conflicts. Sometimes although rare it's unavoidable and something must be sacrificed to record something else, however it will have used it's EPG data to best determine what will be reaired to be caught in the future.
It is much more then just a matrix switch, maxtrixs don't deal with time. As you learn more about SageTV you see how well it allows you to manage your TV watching time. Once you get well aquainted you'll rarely watch live TV anymore.
SageTV offers you a Windows, Linux or Mac server to allow for breaking of DRM or decrypting content on the fly.
Once Netflix watch now is integrated the whole scene will change, as Netflix provides a bunch of content on the cheap with 24/7 availablity.
Also SageTV provides me my automation interfaces, any TV in my house no matter how inexpensive or antiquated allows for use of my lighting, controls my audio input/outputs and volumes. All from a remote rather then touchscreen, starting from scratch the SD client cost is about $400 with wall mounted LCD. HD steps it up another $150 with HD extender or the sky with a PC for gaming and x. You may launch games directly from the SageTV menus as well.
Also all this stuff is readily available off the shelf parts, if my power supply were to fail I can get another in no time. If that happens to a dedicated PVR like a Tivo it's not so simple.
SageTV makes more sence when you are starting out before you have invested in a component matrix and mutichannel modulator. However as HDCP, DRM and all the other limitations grow being based on a Windows platform ensures you will have hackability not present in dedicated units.