I'm deciding whether to set my Mom up with BTV or SageTV. She doesn't want a PC in her room, so I picked out a MediaMVP to deliver the TV content from the downstairs PVR.
I've been comparing both BeyondTV and SageTV. I see pluses and minuses to both products, but given that, for a limited time, I can get Beyond Media free with Beyond TV, I'm very tempted to go with BeyondTV, as Beyond Media covers most of Beyond TVs shortcomings.
However, there is one area I'm very concerned with about BeyondTV, and that's MediaMVP support. I'm having trouble digging up information on this, so I'm going to start with my questions -
* Does Snapstream officially support the MVP, or is it just the independent project on Sourceforge? Does Snapstream plan on supporting it soon? I mean, I like indepedent projects as much as anyone else, but this is for my Mom. It needs to work, and it needs to work now. I'm willing to pay for it to work, but I don't have time to wait on slow releases when certain other products are already in their finished state for the MVP.
* Does the MediaMVP currently support SmartSkip? Will it support SmartSkip in the future? This is another critical feature, and the reason why personally, I like BeyondTV better than SageTV. SageTV refuses to integrate this essential feature. That being said, if it doesn't work on Mom's MVP, there isn't much point in calling it a 'killer feature', is there? Especially when, given the way SageTV uses the MVP, all of their features will work with the MVP. Including commercial skipping. Sure, you have to do it separately, but it would still work.
Not try to be too harsh here, but I'm a picky user. I've already laid into the SageTV people for their lack of builtin SmartSkip and automatic show compression, along with no universal show buffer settings.
