SageTV competitor,

[LocalHolgi]

Hi,

 

i'm normally not a person who feels angered about things i read from persons i do not know and about content i'm probably not qualified enough to argue about. Anyway the sagetv thing did not let me loose. I read some threads there and the more i read and the more i tested the demo i felt mucked. To cut a long story short, i'm aware that long term users will probably react a bit overstrung if some people try to list alternatives, but the way they argue about the DVBViewer is one thing which make me mad. Sure listing q.e. DVBViewer in a board from SageTV, is like eating meat in a group of vegans.

I know, i should not, but somehow i feel a bit patriotic (to the software in general and to europe in common). I have absolutely no idea why some stereotypes of americans simply ignore software made outside the united states. Something like "only american software can display american television". Maybe the community here could be happy, not to have people like this sticking around...

Looking at the software i also got a bit scared, because it is/was expensive, slow and looks quite half baked. To be fair, some of the features are nice. Even if i doubt that downloading and saving a high quality video from youtube is legal - it is nice to get some music videos in hdtv.

But one of the most arrant rip-off is their hardware media extender. If you have a look into the specs you see that the chip equals to the one in the popcorn hour, which costs 4x less than their solution. Even a Playstation 3 is cheaper that that, but well some people are happy to get duped. For example 1x Media Extender+1x SageRecorder,1x SageTVClient, 1x SageTV vs. 1x DVBViewer/Recording Service+Popcorn Hour. Even if you replace the popcorn hour with a PS3+2 Games the last alternative is cheaper and you do not have to license more than one DVBViewer for multiple DVB/ATSC/ISDB or whatever devices. I just thought this text is better placed here, than on their board

Just for the record, Christian Hackbart published some cool videos on youtube. One of my favourites is:

 

Holger

[hackbart]

Hi, sorry for the late reply. Thanks for your words, but there is one thing the DVBViewer can not and will not offer. Even if all US Cable providers transmit digital tv which is supported by the DVBViewer you wont have the chance to receive it on a pc. You have to capture the digital transmission on an analog output, reencode it and display/record it.

Besides that the DVBViewer is at least equal with the other features

 

Christian

[hackbart]

Just one more thing: Please, please i know that a lot of you readers love the software, like we do. I'm also aware about discussions related to the software quality, as well as i'm aware about the fact that we all use the software on a daily base and it is also a certainty that many TV broadcasters, public libraries, universities and even military facilities use software based on the DVBViewer resp. the recording service. There is really no need to defend the product on third party boards overly. Those who wrote against the software are often unconvincible and it might be not the worst thing that "those" people are not using the DVBViewer

So even if i fully understand the anger, just ignore their rubbish, written under the cloak of anonymity.

 

Christian

[bogdan1980]

unfortunely sagetv is dead, bought by google.

All of us that have an v6 licence we receive an free update to v7, but, dvb-c not working in sage, you need a tweak and is not working very good.

ChrisTV and SageTV was perfect on analog tv, but their time is gone.

[hackbart]

I remember when i started creating the first version of the DVBViewer in 2002 i used MoreTV as reference. Unluckily the pictures are no longer available on archive.org (http://web.archive.org/web/20050212032044/http://www.stud.tu-ilmenau.de/~hackbart/archive.htm), so you wont see the similarities between what is now and what was almost 10 years ago. As far as i remember it (MoreTV) was the best TV application for analog cards based on BTTV chipsets.

 

Christian

[LocalHolgi]

Yes time went by so fast, i stopped counting my gray hair since a while I tested SageTV and BeyondTV a while ago and i honestly did not liked it. Especially when you look inside the program folder to fiddle out how to set things up you realize that especially SageTV was constructed like SceneoTV and several other apps. Parts are written in C, some in Java, a few in C# plus a pinch of Html/CSS mixed by a mixer in order to assemble a unit. It works somehow, but you should not take a look behind... I also never got it working sucessfully, but to be honest i did not spent that much time to do so. A few ideas where lovely - especially playing a video on place x and continue watching on place y. And it was bloody unstable, something i do not want to intrust my recordings to.

For example, i love the way to work with the recording service. Often (especially on weekends) when interesting movies or shows are broadcasted i'm simply not at home, same for vacations. I like the fact that i can program the service via internet and sent my machine back after a complete recording. I never missed a movie which simply was not on the hdd after i was back and almost never my machine was still awake afterwards. The only reason for this was caused by some lousy microsoft update. Could it be that MS partially changes the updating policy?

 

Holger

Edited October 12, 2011 by LocalHolgi

[PeterF]

As far as i remember it (MoreTV) was the best TV application for analog cards based on BTTV chipsets.

 

Yes, you are right, i loved it.

 

PeterF