Considering GPVR : XP or 7 and SageTV migration

[robb]

I have been a long time SageTV fan (and a ReplayTV before that). But lately I have become disillusioned with the SageTV system. The community is awesome, but the company seems to be making little progress towards the features I want (stability and interface issues). When I last evaluated PVRs a few years ago SageTV was the best choice for me and my hardware. But GBPVR appears to have made outstanding progress and my needs have changed such that GBPVR may be a much better match for me. (or MythTV - but that is a whole other conversation and evaluation - although I do run multiple Linux boxes).

I have 3 valid XP PRO 32 bit licenses (full and legal - left over from various installs for clients) and 2 Windows 7 HOME 64 Bit licenses available. I would prefer to use XP just because they are not allocated, whereas the Windows 7 I will probably be used over the next couple of months. Essentially my XP licenses are FREE. I am not sure what results (PRO/CON) GBPVR users are having, although the forums seem generally positive about Windows 7.

Would GBPVR be better under XP or should I bite the bullet and use my Windows 7 license right of the bat?

My hardware is Silicon Dust dual tuner and some Hauppager boards (which I do not really use and could drop). I have a spare AMD Athalon 64 4600+ with 4 GB of RAM and an ATI HD4670 available for this experiment. I use an 8 TB UNRaid server for storage over GB Ethernet.

My AV collection consists of: multiple CDs in MP3 format, organized by Album, artist, track name. Many VIDEO_TS directories each within a directory titled after the Video in various directory hierarchies, tons of MPG-2 recordings from both ReplayTV and SageTV over many years.

If anyone has imported SageTV recordings could you refer me to those posts? I searched but the proper keyword phrase eludes me. I was able to code up a conversion to import my old ReplayTV recordings into SageTV (yea Perl) and I am pretty sure I could do the same thing for GBPVR if I understood the import mechanism. I may get away with just using the file name titles but not sure how GBPVR will index/search on that? With as many AV elements I have a search function is rather critical.

The system will replace the SageTV in a cabinet in the living room and utilize a remote and Plasma TV for the primary interface. I have a Logitech Harmony (RC) and MCE remote available. A keyboard and mouse are available but I really want to avoid using that for 99% of my activities, they clutter up the living room and even the Logitech DeNovo is a pain to use for long.

There are two users me (very experienced) and my lady (best to keep it VERY simple - AV is for relaxing not calculating).

See anything that would nix GBPVR?

WOW, that was a lot more detail and questions than I thought I had when I began this post.

Thank you

[sub]

I have 3 valid XP PRO 32 bit licenses (full and legal - left over from various installs for clients) and 2 Windows 7 HOME 64 Bit licenses available. I would prefer to use XP just because they are not allocated, whereas the Windows 7 I will probably be used over the next couple of months. Essentially my XP licenses are FREE. I am not sure what results (PRO/CON) GBPVR users are having, although the forums seem generally positive about Windows 7.

Would GBPVR be better under XP or should I bite the bullet and use my Windows 7 license right of the bat?

At the end of the day, you could use either. I do think Microsoft have made big improvements in video capabilities in Vista and Win7 though, so given the choice of either XP or Win7, I'd choose Win7.

If anyone has imported SageTV recordings could you refer me to those posts? I searched but the proper keyword phrase eludes me. I was able to code up a conversion to import my old ReplayTV recordings into SageTV (yea Perl) and I am pretty sure I could do the same thing for GBPVR if I understood the import mechanism. I may get away with just using the file name titles but not sure how GBPVR will index/search on that? With as many AV elements I have a search function is rather critical.

If you do a couple of test recordings, then click the 'export recordings' button in the config app, and take a look at the recordings-dump.xml, you'll see the general format of the of the import file. If you can get your Sage recordings in that format, then hit the 'import recordings' and it'll get your recordings in the database.

[stustunz]

if that doesnt work for importing there is "vidimport" to get your recording into the database

http://gbpvr.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Utility/VidImport

[mikeh49]

+1 for Win7, but see below.

Compared to XP on my mid-range hardware (see sig), it definitely is superior for playback, especially with the EVR renderer. However, you can't remove letterboxing (to fill the screen) in EVR, so if you have old letterboxed recordings, that may disappoint you. With VMR9, in my experience, the gap between Win7 and XP narrows considerably. Win7 still has more robust playback of TS files.

Win7 is more complicated, but if you are already used to it (UAC, etc) then that's probably not an issue. It was for me.

[mvallevand]

My two cents is that SageTV and GBPVR are pretty much on-par and I think if you've paid the price stick with SageTV. Digital transition has been tough for a lot of people and I think too many people are making the mistake of changing from their PVR software for the wrong reason. You are lucky though because GBPVR is free to try, a bigger mistake would be for a GBPVR users to buy SageTV only to experience many of the frustrations they thought they were avoiding.

Win 7 all the way.

Martin

[robb]

Thanks to all who responded.

Sounds like Win 7 is the better choice.

SageTV is a fine product, but I am having some stability issues and lingering issues with the interface. For example:

* Green bars now appear above/below every movie - since last update
* Movies no longer fill the screen
* Crashes every few nights
* DVD player has issues with UOP flags (which I usually remove but occasionally forget) that casue a dialog box to appear and it cannot be removed.
* Interface needs to be a bit simpler
** I end up counting on user add-ons for an interface upgrade. This works very well, but adds another layer of complexity.

All of the above are fixable, and SageTV community are always willing to help. Just getting tired of the having to fix stuff. I suspect GBPVR will have its issues as well, but the goal is to find something that has issues I am more compatible with .

Thanks for the import hints. That was what I was looking for.

I will load Win 7 and try it out this weekend.

[luttrell1962]

I'm pretty much a newby to pb-pvr. It took me 2 weeks to get things configured to my liking. I worked on it several nites with no sleep. Most of the time was working to fix over the antenna ts files that had lost a few frames and converting them to avi smaller files.

Learning the procedure on configuring channels with multiple channels sources. If you change your channel line up and use schedules direct like I do they get enabled automatically. So you need to go into config and disable them for each source that is not associated with them. Not that bad once you understand it. I'll eventually learn to use direct import from xml files though.

GB-PVR has been running completely stable now on 7 x64 for several days. But take note that if you change something in config or config.xml files it is best to reboot. I've had things lock up and have to reboot anyway. Codecs are sometimes an issue with windows 7 x64

[martint123]

If you change your channel line up and use schedules direct like I do they get enabled automatically. So you need to go into config and disable them for each source that is not associated with them.

I'd asked on the wishlist some time ago that the default be changed to new channels not being enabled because I was suffering the same - enabled on all sources, including those incapable of receiving them. Very tedious going through three or four sources unticking a lot of boxes.

Although it doesn't have to be done all that often, inly when new channels become available (or renamed!).

[robb]

Thanks for the heads up. SageTV channel stuff is pretty easy, they got that right. I have some tuners set for OTA and others for Cable. But I dropped most of my Cable channels in exchange for more bandwidth and Netflix! I do not watch much TV and my cable company seems to think they can charge insane amounts and force me to use their digital tuners.

They were wrong.

[robb]

Got an early start: Windows 7 64 Bit home, GBPVR installed. All media played except for DVD (physical or VideoTS). The video was OK but no sound. MS Player played physical DVD fine, audio and all.

After some research I decided to install SAF - Installed latest DirectX per recommendation, installed all defaults. Sound working!

Playing with plugins now to reproduce desired function: Starting with MusicLibrary3 - Genre support for MP3.

Biggest issue so far is learning curve from XP to Windows 7. UAC and so on is confusing, I need to read up on what is happening including those Denvz directories.