BeyondTV or SageTV?

[amb]

Hello,

Does anyone have extensive experience with both BeyondTV and SageTV? If so, can you give a rundown on your experiences? Thanks.

amb

[ClamsTheCat]

I would not say I have load with either, but in my experimentation with both I believe that BTV is clearly the better and more mature product. It has loads of features and they update it fairly often. The only thing I am chomping at the bit for is HDTV capture from a cable box, but that is not really their fault. Until someone makes the hardware with composite capture capability, we will be stuck with non-HD digital cable.

You should download the BTV demo and check it out for yourself. I used demos of each and clearly saw that BTV was better. It has a really neat interface.

[btvfreak]

I wonder which product people in these forums will recommend more?

[PBMax]

More importantly I wonder which one btvfreak would suggest?

http://blogs.snapstream.com/2006/08/...eyond-tv-home/

[btvfreak]

Yeah, I saw that post last night, which I thought was pretty funny since a lot of people (including you PBMax) have better BTV setups than me. Either way very flattering to have a post on the Snapstream blog.

P.S. - Sorry to hijack this thread a bit.

Back on track...I've tried both BTV and Sage. I think both are very good PVR apps, but I've stuck with BTV since it's much easier to setup since it has all the features I want out of the box. I could get those features into Sage (comskip, web admin, better UI, etc), but it requires "tinkering" and time. I like to keep that down to a minimum, so I can spend more time enjoying my system.

[amb]

Thanks for your input guys and/or gals.

How about buginess? Is there a clear winner in the bugs department? I'm thinking about moving away from ATI MMC, not because of features, but because of bugs. Ordered a Hauppage for starters.

Rather than spend hours (days?) finding bugs in the BTV or Sage trial versions, maybe I could avoid them to start...

amb

[Grasshopper]

I've used both extensively and each has strengths and weaknesses. IMHO:

1. BTV is the more intuitive of the two.

2. Sage is the more extendible.

3. Sage is more complicated, mostly because of item 2.

4. Sage handles multiple drives better. You tell Sage which drives to use and it manages the rest. (And Sage supports NAS drives.)

5. BTV handles detecting and skipping commercials better. In Sage you have to use third party "add ins".

6. BTV handles recompression (ShowSqueeze) better. In Sage you have to use third party "add ins".

7. Sage supports the MediaMVP natively, BTV does not.

8. Both have good technical support and active forums.

9. Sage supports "placeshifting" which allows you to view your recordings anywhere where a high speed internet is available.

10. Sage has "intelligent recording" which learns what you like and records things it thinks you may like to watch.

11. Sage stores all information about shows, their status (watched or not,) etc. in one file. If that file gets corrupted all the show information is lost.

12. Sage has a linux version.

There are many other differences as well, PM me if you have specific questions. Both are fine products but I prefer BTV for enjoying TV.

[amb]

Thanks to everyone for the input. I'll start with BTV and hope it works better than ATI MMC.

I don't want to transmit my recordings to Pluto or watch them at my neighbors house, I just want reliable recording and playback using a, EPG and a handheld remote....

[bnflaherty]

Originally Posted by amb

Thanks to everyone for the input. I'll start with BTV and hope it works better than ATI MMC.

*That* shouldn't be too hard to do...