The Colors of the Real World Only Seem Really Real When You Viddy Them On the Screen

I’ve long been having issues with BeyondTV (my DVR application of choice up until now). It hasn’t been updated in ages, since SnapStream apparently decided to cede the market to Microsoft and concentrate on their enterprise products. Since taking the plunge and upgrading all of my systems to Windows 7 64-bit (back in the RC days), I’ve had issues with the BeyondTV Link application, and with the reliability of recordings. And lately, I’ve been having issues with my Hauppauge HD-PVR, which up-till-now has been rock solid (unlike the seemingly painful experiences of others out there). So I’ve decided to make a switch…

I started the current “all-in” phase of my HTPC experience way back in 2005. I’ve had a HTPC of sorts for quite a long time (basically since 1999), but for much of this time the machine wasn’t “fully dedicated” to theater usage, and I still used my TV in a more traditional way for regular television programming. The “HTPC” in those early days consisted of my primary desktop machine, in another room, with a long run of S-Video cable connecting the video output on my fancy video cards to the TV and a wireless keyboard and mouse. The video was blurry and text was nearly impossible to read on my old-school CRT standard def TV, but it worked well for watching movies and listening to music with J River Media Center in the living room. I’ve actually never owned a set-top DVD player. Why should I? DVD-Rom drives were cheaper, after all, and this system worked well. You couldn’t really game on the system (mostly because the mouse and keyboard response latency was way too high), but for music and video content it worked great. This system evolved to the point where I actually had a second dedicated system, hobbled together out of left-over parts with a high-end video card. It was still off in another room though, which led to all kinds of problems (mostly from the long cable runs and issues with the wireless keyboards).

So, in 2005 I made the decision to build an “real” HTPC, station it in the living room, and run the TV off of it full-time. The plan was to go all-in, with a full-fledged DVR application, using the TV itself only as a glorified “computer monitor”. I actually started this project with only an old SDTV (though a big one), so the first HTPC actually still had a small computer monitor in the room (for configuration and other use where you needed to read small text).

At the time, my DVR application requirements were:

1. Windows-based, because I also wanted to be able to game using the system.
2. It needed a built-in program guide, and to generally work like a TiVO.
3. It needed to be able to use and control my DirecTV tuner.
4. It couldn’t have DRM locking the recordings to the box used to record them (because I’ve long been a multiple PC household).

Those requirements ruled out Microsoft’s Media Center edition of Windows, and other Linux-based systems like MythTV, and basically left me with two major options: SageTV and BeyondTV.

I actually chose SageTV first (version 2.2.8 was my first download). At the time, it was a bit cheaper than BeyondTV, and seemed to have a more active and friendly community of users. However, my experiences with SageTV early on weren’t great. The UI was terrible and clunky. It looked like something straight out of a mid-1990′s Slackware Linux distro. And worse, it was having a lot of trouble using my ATI Theater Pro 550 PCI tuner card (there were regular crashes and other issues with the ATI chips back then). So, after suffering with it for about a month, I decided to bite the bullet and try out a copy of BeyondTV.

BeyondTV was, back then, dramatically better. The UI was clean and polished, and very comparable to what you’d expect from a real set-top device. Most importantly, it was able to use my ATI tuner card and control my DirecTV box perfectly via a serial cable.

So, that’s what I’ve been using for almost exactly five years (my original purchase of BeyondTV was in October, 2005). Since then, the HTPC has gone through a number of complete overhauls. It is now running a Q9550 quad-core CPU, an AMD Radeon HD 4870 GPU, and is hooked directly to a 42″ LCD HDTV. I’ve also switched from DirecTV to cable, and I’ve moved all of the “tuner” equipment down to the basement office. Down in the basement I have a “server” system that has two separate “analog” tuner PCI cards, a Hauppauge HD-PVR connected to my Motorola HD digital cable box, and has around 4 TB of redundant storage for all of my media content. The HTPC in the living room connects to this server using both J River Media Center (for most of my media content), and BeyondTV Link for my “regular” daily TV recordings. For most of this time it has worked quite well. BeyondTV has been mostly reliable, though there have been a few “bad” periods here and there. However, the last update for BTV was released way back in November of 2008. It was a nice incremental update, but it still didn’t fully support Vista 64-bit, and the HD-PVR support was still beta. It worked, but I was looking forward to BeyondTV 5′s promised updates.

Unfortunately, later never came, and Snapstream decided to switch focus. I eventually took the bold step of upgrading to Windows 7 64-bit on all of my systems, despite dire warnings from the Snapstream user forums. For a while, most things worked okay. The server seemed to stay reliable, and my recordings were okay, but I did have trouble getting my analog tuners set up properly. The BeyondTV Link application on the HTPC was another story entirely though. It will periodically completely freeze when you try to start playback of a recording or live show, forcing you to kill the task in Process Explorer. Even when it “works” the expeirence has been less than ideal. Occasionally you’ll be watching a show and it will “freeze” for a few seconds, and then suddenly it “unsticks” and kicks you to the end of the file. This is not only jarring when you’re trying to watch the latest episode of Treme on HBO, but it means you have to re-open the recording and manually fast forward all the way through and find your spot again. I was able to mitigate this somewhat by keeping a close eye on the available space and fragmentation of on my recording drive, but the problem hasn’t been entirely solved.

And more recently, I’ve been having serious trouble with the reliability of my HD-PVR and analog tuners. I suspect I could solve the problem by running through the BeyondTV setup wizard again (I’ve solved issues before this way), but I decided that I’ve had enough.

Luckily, Sage finally released their much-anticipated version 7 update in Beta a few months back, and it has been maturing well. With this new major version, SageTV completely overhauled their antiquated UI, and the result is quite impressive. So, this week when I had a particularly bad bout of insomnia, I decided to take the plunge and install the trial on my server downstairs. I didn’t expect to actually USE SageTV at this early phase, but I just wanted to get an idea of how difficult the setup was going to be, and to try to look for any major “dealbreakers” before I fully committed to the switch.

And, wow, have I been impressed! First of all, the setup with my system was an absolute breeze. Compared to setting up BeyondTV, it was a real revelation (and miles away from what I expected with my previous SageTV experience). For example, on BeyondTV, setting up my HD-PVR and external cable box (a quite-common Motorola 6200 digital box) involved manually “teaching” the system how to transmit the IR codes using the cable box’s remote control, usually a few crashes, and hours of frustration. Setting up SageTV 7? I literally just chose the HD-PVR from a list, chose my cable provider from a list, tweaked the channel list (to enable HBO and my other premium channels), and bingo, it worked. In fact, even the steps that were similar on SageTV 7, such as tweaking that channel listing, were much less painful than they ever were with BeyondTV.

All in all, it took me less than 30 minutes to get SageTV fully set and working, and probably half of that time was spent wandering around in the options and learning the UI.

Now, I have absolutely not fully completed my investigation of the system, so don’t consider this a full review. However, I will say this… The UI of SageTV 7 is a dramatic improvement over older versions. The look and feel has been greatly improved throughout. It is now essentially competitive with Windows 7′s Media Center and I would say generally superior to BeyondTV in most ways. There are still a few rough edges, the OSD during playback and the mouse-friendly buttons throughout the UI are still a bit old-fashioned, but most of it is slick and modern and fits in well with the Windows 7 UI polish. Unfortunately, it isn’t perfect…

To start with, the navigation system and keyboard commands are still quite poorly designed. I remember this issue from back in the 2.2 days, and it continues to be an issue all these years later. For example, throughout the entire experience (menus and during playback), pressing the ESC key does not do what any normal person would expect (take you “back” to the previous page or menu, or exit the current page). Instead, ESC is used to bring up a variety of different Options menus, which differ depending on where you are currently. Seriously. Someone actually decided that a key called “escape” would be good to use to display an options menu. Note: Yes, I know, back in terminal days the ESC key was traditionally used to generate an escape sequence that allowed you to change the state of the computer and its attached peripheral devices, but that use has long since been deprecated. Standard Windows behavior is that ESC is used to mean Stop, No, Exit, Cancel, and Abort. It does not mean “options” at all, even if that might have once made a tiny bit of sense. Welcome to 2010.

There are other examples of poor keyboard navigation design. For example, once you are watching video, unless you use special keyboard shortcuts that you have to look up in the manual, it takes three distinct keypresses to stop playback and get back to the “info page” for that recording! Plus, the keyboard shortcuts during playback are not very obvious, and some things seem oddly chosen. For example, playback is controlled using the A, S, D, and F keys with the Control key. First of all, why do you need to hold control at all? When you are in playback, are you going to be typing with SageTV in the foreground? No, of course not (maybe the number keys, but not letters)! So, why do we need to hold control then? Pressing just “S” doesn’t do anything.

But, lots of programs use the Control+Letter shortcut motif, so I guess I can accept that, even if it is silly. And, I can even see the reasoning behind using the those particular keys for playback controls. I’m sure they were chosen based on the old standby WASD control scheme for first-person computer games. But even the way it was implemented is odd. For example, Control-D is the Play command. Not Play/Pause, just Play. If playback is already in progress, pressing Control-D does nothing. Similarly, Control-S is Stop (which behaves like a “pause” command). If you press it while playback is already paused, it advances one frame. That’s a nice feature, but I really would prefer a simple “tap the spacebar” Play/Pause command. No such luck, though, the Play/Pause shortcut is the convoluted three-finger Control-Shift-S command.

Now, part of the beauty of SageTV is that all of this can be customized. But seriously, just try doing Control-Shift-S on your keyboard right now with one hand. Go ahead, I’ll wait (if you use XMarks, that happens to do the Synchronize Now command, by the way). It isn’t impossible to do, but it certainly isn’t the most comfortable keyboard shortcut ever. This is what SageTV expects you to use to emulate the Play/Pause behavior of literally every other computer media player application for Windows in existence, the vast majority of which use the spacebar as the shortcut.

Now think about why you would ever design an application where you use this odd and uncomfortable combo as the most important shortcut out of the box. It is baffling. I understand that some users (particularly those using remote control mapping software) will prefer separate Play and Pause commands, but most regular users do not! So a good designer would map those “specialty” commands using multi-key combos, and keep the “standard” ones to simple single-key presses whenever possible. The mentality behind some of the choices in this design just completely escape me. Yes, I can remap these keyboard commands to something that makes more rational sense. But this is just one more step that I’ll have to do over and over whenever I install it on a different system or reinstall or whatever. All of these little “tweaks” add up and complicate upgrades to future major versions, and it fragments the experience. I really prefer to evaluate products based on their experience out of the box, and the keyboard navigation on SageTV out of the box is just plain bad.

Likewise, the menu navigation system is similarly baffling at times. For most menus, you navigate through easily with just the arrow keys and enter. Left and Right arrow keys take you forward and backwards through the menu system. That’s great, you might think, and probably explains why they re-purposed the ESC key for its Options function. That would be fine if the Forward and Back arrows were consistent and could always return you to the previous screen, but no such luck. For example, once you start playback, the Left and Right arrow keys stop functioning. To get “back” you must either use the altogether different “browser-style back” keyboard shortcut (which is Alt-Left Arrow) or you must bring up that menu using that ESC key, and navigate to and choose “Stop” from the menu (minimum of three keypresses). That’s something I do pretty often! Start a show, watch a bit, change my mind and want to go back and choose something else. The left arrow doesn’t seem to do anything here, so why couldn’t it be used to “go back”?!? Really, the ESC key should do this too, but since you’ve taught the user to expect to “go back” with the left arrow throughout the rest of the UI, it would make sense to continue using it.

Navigation on a proper 10-foot UI needs to be so intuitive that you can do it with absolutely no training at all, and SageTV 7 is close, but not quite there yet. Thoughout my first couple of days of testing, I often got “stuck” on subpages with no idea of how to go “back” a page without either digging out the manual or picking up a mouse. This isn’t acceptable, frankly. Hopefully we see additional changes before it comes out of beta.

Other than this, though, I’ve been entirely impressed with the experience. As I already mentioned, the setup was a breeze, and I’ve been very impressed with the recording quality and options. In just my basic exploration I can already see that the metadata provided by the SageTV system is miles ahead of what BeyondTV offered. Most importantly, so far the playback and recording has been absolutely flawless, even when using SageTV Client up on the HTPC. Plus, despite being concerned about increasing complexity, I’m excited about the possibilities afforded by the rich plugin community, active development, and plentiful customization options available. I’m sure I’ll be able to overcome the flawed keyboard navigation system once I program my RF remote with Girder, so I’m not that worried about that shortcoming. Plus, I may decide to use SageTV only as a recording engine and occasional (quite rare) live TV watching, and use J River Media Center for literally all of my non-live video playback. If I go this route, I will need to come up with a way to convert the recording metadata into JRSidecar.xml files, but with a plugin I found for SageTV and some scripting magic, I think this is probably going to be possible.

All in all, I think I’ve decided on a new system for my DVR, and I’m going to finally leave BeyondTV behind. It has worked well for me over the past five years, but it is really starting to show its age. Now, I just need to order the Denon AVR-1911 or 971 to replace my amp (which has developed a terribly loud hum, and is getting worse) and we’ll really have something. Until, of course, the next cool toy comes along…