SageTV HD Theater extender now available!

[electron]

SageTV has just announced that their next generation HD extender is now available. While adding support for 1080p, it also no longer requires a SageTV server if you are only interested in playing media from a USB drive or network based drive. On top of that, the footprint has been significantly reduced, almost matching the foot print of the small Hauppage MediaMVP SD extender. Price is still $199.95!

SageTV HD Theater lets you play your home network media in FullHD on your HDTV. Easily play your media from PC, Mac, network storage or any USB storage. The SageTV HD Theater also allows you to watch live or recorded HDTV*. Enjoy your favorite YouTube and other online videos with a press of a remote with no PC required! Also enjoy music, photos and your home video library with your SageTV HD Theater on your HDTV. With the SageTV HD Theater you get playback support for MPEG1/2/4, H.264, WMV9, VC1, MKV, MOV, AVI, FLV, AAC, MP3, WMA, FLAC, JPEG, PNG and GIF files. Setup is simple and easy; just connect the SageTV HD Theater to your TV, plug it into your home network connected to the internet and you are good to go.

SageTV store

 

[markipowell]

Hi Dan,

I am new to this site and indeed home automation in general. I have been wondering the best way to get HD 1080P from
my SKY-HD box; PC Tranquil (WHS) and a Blue-Ray drive to multiple HD TV's. This new sage looks like the answer. I have a
couple of questions maybe you would know the answers (You appear to be a very senior member here !) although of course
I welcome comments from anybody else on this site.

First a little background info :

- 2 story apartment in Belgium.
- I intend to run cable to the 3 rooms I want the Video and indeed sound to for stability reasons(A question on that in a mo).
- I already have some slimserver stuff for music so was gonna build on that.
- I intend to use wireless for the less intensive / critical stuff.
- I intend to build a automation setup based on a combination of H/W and S/W but the software will preferbly run on my WHS.
- Now is the best time to do the messy stuff.

- Would I preferably need one of these boxes per HD TV (as there only appears to be 1 hdmi out)
- What is the best cable('s) on the market to push thru is it still CAt6 or is there a fiber-optic option for future proofing ?
The maximum run would not be more than 10M as ther server lives right in the centre of the apartment in a closet (off the
lounge)
- Any other suggestions ?

Thanks..

 

[sic0048]

Sold out already!

 

[markipowell]

I had noticed that.. People must think its good.. I can put in an order and wait...Hopefully for me
a certain number get allocated for Europe and not all for the US...But I still wish to know if this
looks the best HD extender... and If I need one per TV...
On the side I see you voted in DANS award for 2 items..

 

[electron]

hi markipowell,

Welcome to CT! I think you will like the SageTV HD extenders. You do need 1 per TV, but that's a small price to pay for that kind of functionality (in my opinion). How are you planning on capturing the audio/video from the SKY-HD box? As for Blu-Ray, there has been some success playing Blu-Ray movies on the extenders, but there are some restrictions. I suggest you check out the SageTV forums for the Blu-Ray question.

 

[sic0048]

Welcome to the forum. I'll go ahead and answer some of your questions now too. I use SageTV and their HD extenders to distribute my media. First, you mentioned needing to get HD signals from several devices. I'm not sure what type of broadcasts they use in Belgium, but it it is like the US, most of the signals are encrypted and require a STB to watch the material (the STB is the only way to decrypt the broadcast material). If this is the case, then you will need to use a Hauppauge HD-PVR for each device you want to distribute. It is really the only tuner capable of recording HD quality material directly from the STB (there are some other options, but few and far between and generally more expensive and none of them work universally like the HD-PVR - they are specific for one device usually).

Then you can use SageTV to record these broadcast streams on your WHS machine. The Sage HD extenders simply hook into a regular network cable (you mentioned Cat6, but it can even be Cat5e if you want). These can be located anywhere - as long as they hook into the network. The extenders then connect to the WHS machine and pull the media from that machine. It can obviously be the recordings from the HD-PVR, but Sage can also distribute other videos (like ripped BlueRay movies), music, and pictures over the network and play them on the extender.

So the overall system would look something like this:
[STB ==> Hauppauge HD-PVR ==> WHS computer] == connection over the network == [Sage HD extenders located around the house]

The easiest thing to do is to have 1 extender located at each HD TV around the house. The other option is to put the HD extenders in a central location and distribute them using a HD matrix switcher. But that is much more complicated and also is expensive because it requres the switcher and more wiring pulled to each TV (or HD baluns if you want to use the cat5e/cat6 wire) and also some type of software to control everything.

Re - voting twice - I've deleted the extra vote

 

[Waynedb]

Hi Dan,

I am new to this site and indeed home automation in general. I have been wondering the best way to get HD 1080P from
my SKY-HD box; PC Tranquil (WHS) and a Blue-Ray drive to multiple HD TV's. This new sage looks like the answer. I have a
couple of questions maybe you would know the answers (You appear to be a very senior member here !) although of course
I welcome comments from anybody else on this site.

First a little background info :

- 2 story apartment in Belgium.
- I intend to run cable to the 3 rooms I want the Video and indeed sound to for stability reasons(A question on that in a mo).
- I already have some slimserver stuff for music so was gonna build on that.
- I intend to use wireless for the less intensive / critical stuff.
- I intend to build a automation setup based on a combination of H/W and S/W but the software will preferbly run on my WHS.
- Now is the best time to do the messy stuff.

- Would I preferably need one of these boxes per HD TV (as there only appears to be 1 hdmi out)
- What is the best cable('s) on the market to push thru is it still CAt6 or is there a fiber-optic option for future proofing ?
The maximum run would not be more than 10M as ther server lives right in the centre of the apartment in a closet (off the
lounge)
- Any other suggestions ?

Thanks..

Sage has an international forum where you can probably find out everything you need to know about using SKY HD with Sage.
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=19

 

[Helheim]

It doesn't sound like it supports HDMI 1.3

 

[IVB]

Some very interesting quotes on the SageTV forums. They're buried, so i'lll replicate the cool ones:

I hope you don't mind me correcting you here stanger but the HD200 CAN playback DVD ISO files with full menu, chapter, subtitle and audio support. Nothing special needs to be done. It only works in standalone mode currently though.

We're also working on being able to handle BD ISO files and also BD folder structures as well in order to support detection of the main movie files and then playing those streams with some limited chapter support. (I'm not referring to BD menus and the interactive features; that's a whole other thing)

We're also investigating TrueHD/DTS-HD decoding on the HD Theater. Nothing official to announce there; but we are looking into decoding it and then passing the 6/8 channel PCM over the HDMI connection.

if you check the sigma specs, no one current hardware players has no 1.3a.
both chips 863x and 862x is not 1.3a.

http://www.sigmadesigns.com/public/Product...tion_guide.html

That's probably the biggest myth in the entire Blu-ray/HD DVD world. You don't need HDMI 1.3 to get "HD audio". HDMI 1.1 or 1.2 with multichannel PCM will get you the same quality as bitstreamed audio. I have a suspision that the HD100 doesn't support multichannel PCM over HDMI, but I think the HD200 can (if not initially, hopefully via a firmware update)



The only niggle with lack of bitstream on the HD100 would be that you'd have to convert the TrueHD/DTS-HD to PCM (or hopefully FLAC). No quality loss. So yeah, may be worth holding out to see if multichannel PCM/FLAC ends up being supported. But lack of HBR bitsreaming isn't that big of a deal IMO. HBR bitstreaming is BS IMO.

 

[electron]

Alright, I read somewhere that it was 1.3, that's why I included it. I will edit my previous post.