The most interesting feature Sage has over Beyond TV is Intelligent Recording. As in, it will record programs it thinks you'll like based on what you already watch. I encountered a problem early on: it wasn't very intelligent. I had it set to automatically record House, Scrubs, Grey's Anatomy, My Name is Earl, and The Office. It came back with Intelligent Recordings of 24 (not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's not my taste) and a half hour of paid programming (there's a lot wrong with that) before I turned off the feature.
I'm sure it would have become smarter as it had more exposure to my viewing habits. It's possible it monitored what I watched live, and randomly changing channels while I tested the system threw it off. But for me there is a larger issue. Each program takes up space on my hard drive, and I don't make time for all the TV shows I know I'd like to watch. Now that I've gotten cozy with my chosen system, I've added Battlestar Galactica and Slings & Arrows to my list of automatic recordings, but all that means is I now have even more shows languishing unwatched in my folder for too long. I really don't need my computer taunting me with the knowledge that there's a lot of quality TV out there I'm not keeping up with.
But Is It For You?
A computer-based PVR won't be for everyone, but it's been a near-ideal solution for me, since I don't mind watching TV on my desktop or burning to a re-recordable DVD in order to get comfier in my living room.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have some TV to catch up on.
Article comments
1 - Bliffle
I must say that I admire your courage for diving into this stuff. I've worked with computers for many years, many decades, and I've been active in multimedia, audio and video, even earning money at it, and I'm still intimidated by some of the hardware/software frailties. Although I have 2 computers setup for my experiments in multimedia, for everyday TV (HDTV) watching I use Set Top Boxes (STBs) instead of PCs. Even my PVR is a STB (LG 3410A) which works flawlessly and uses the free TV Guide on the PBS OTA signal.
2 - Stu
Great little article; I am a techie, but I must confess I'm not much of a videophile. I've been using BeyondTV for over a year now, and I love it. In fact, I love it so much that I bought a DVD player with network capabilities (Avel LinkPlayer2) in order to stream my recorded tv shows to my real tv.
It would have probably been easier to just buy a Tivo, but the nice thing is I can watch my recorded TV shows in my office, on my TV, or even over the Internet (using ORB). I'm currently in Canada, watching a show I recorded last night off my home PC (located in Atlanta, GA, USA).
3 - Diane Kristine
Biffle, I'm not sure if it was courage or obliviousness, but it was more intimidating to think about setting up than to actually set it up. There were some challenges but it wasn't all that difficult once I decided to avoid the open source/free versions that didn't have dummy-proof documentation.
Stu, I didn't know such a thing existed (DVD with network capabilities). I don't need one, though. I don't. Really. Hmm, let me go Google them ...
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5 - pvrmaster
Personally I use SageTV and it's by far the best PVR/Media Center software out there. It's the only one with Placeshifting that lets you access your content from anywhere you want. I also love the media extenders, they're a nice low-cost way to get my SageTV on the 3 different TVs in my house. I tried SnapStream, but it was too unstable and they also heavily censor their forums which made me uncomfortable with them as a company. And SageTV also supports Linux. :)