| Is SageTV the perfect Linux media center? |
Aug. 08, 2006
As long-time readers know, I've long been looking for the perfect Linux-based media center program for quite a while. Now, it looks like SageTV is on to something.
I say "looks like," because I haven't been able to get my hands on a copy, yet. My colleagues over at PC Magazine liked the Windows version though, so I'm planning on giving it a try real soon now.
Why?
Well, first there's the feature-set.
With it, you can show most, if not all, the formats I want to see: - Video -- MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, VOB
- Audio -- MP3, WAV, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC
- Image -- JPEG, GIF, BMP, PNG
Equally important, it supports many Hauppauge TV tuner cards. This includes the PVR150, PVR250, PVR350 (encoder only), and PVR500 card lines. Yes, there are other TV tuner cards -- ATI eHome Wonder, ATI TV Wonder Elite, etc. But, as far as I'm concerned, the Hauppauge boards deliver the best value for your money.
Better still, there's a fair amount of Linux support for them.
In theory, all you need to run this is an Intel Pentium 3 or AMD Athlon or faster processor.
Cough. Cough.
OK, if you read closely you'll see that what you really need is an Intel P4 or AMD Athlon XP or faster. Based on my personal experience with media centers of all kinds, I vote for the fastest processor you can find.
The RAM recommendation is also on the scanty side. They say you can run it on 256MB of RAM. From what I know about these kinds of systems, I wouldn't try any media center on any PC with less than a gigabyte of RAM.
I'm picky about this kind of thing, because if I'm going to watch TV either on a computer display or on a TV powered by a PC, I want to see something at least as good as what my TiVo HDTV HR-250 can deliver -- or what's the point?
Installing Sage on an existing Linux system looks to be a bit of work. On the other hand, it appears to be easier than installing, say MythTV. Either way you go, installing any media center software on an existing Linux system isn't easy.
If you'd rather skip that, Sage also gives instructions on how to build a dedicated Gentoo/SageTV box. So far, to the best of my knowledge, no one is selling pre-setup Sage media center boxes. That, however, is exactly the use that Sage intends for its Linux software.
The company, however, will be happy to sell you some hardware of its own. The Sage Media Extender lets you watch videos stored on your Sage media server on any TV with a composite or S-Video connection. The Media Extender, which is a Hauppauge MediaMVP box in disguise, comes in two versions: one for wired networks, and one for 802.11b/g WiFi LANs.
A nice touch, here, is that the Media Extender is based on Linux.
Since I don't like having a computer sitting next to my main TV -- I prefer to keep them squirreled away in the office and the server room -- I've always tended to like media extenders. I say "tended," because I've found that media extenders like the D-Link MediaLounge DSM-320 Wireless Media Player are often cranky devices that require constant babying to get decent performance out of them.
Still, the idea of a media extender that's not tied to Microsoft's mis-named PlaysForSure semi-standard is a very attractive one. In addition, since its is Linux-based, the odds are excellent that even if it didn't work perfectly when I got it, it could be tweaked into behaving properly.
In addition, SageTV supports a Windows-only "place-shifting" client that will enable you to watch your recorded shows from other computers across your LAN or the Internet. I realize Network congestion can play havoc with this, but I know enough people who swear by this feature in Slingbox, that I'm willing to give it a try... well, let my friends who still use Windows laptops give it a try, anyway.
The real question, of course, is whether all this will work as promised. When I get one, I'll let you know.
Finally, SageTV does have one glaring problem: it's proprietary software. I'm not crazy about that, but if I can get it to work properly, I'll live with that until Freevo or MythTV advances to the same level.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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