After trying TV in MC17 for a few months we have gone back to SageTV for Recording only (We rarely watch Live TV.). I was asked to post the reasons why in this thread. It should be borne in mind that we use the Hauppauge HDPVR as a tuner. In MC it is considered an 'Analog' tuner and I would expect the Hauppauge Colossus would also be. Being an Analog tuner it can only record in .jtv format, not .ts as we use in Sage. Some of the problems below are a function of the files being .jtv so will not apply to those with a 'Digital' tuner.
1. The biggest killer for us is not being able to use Comskip since it wont work on .jtv files. After a few years of using Sage we were very spoiled by not having to watch commercials. We watch mostly movies so having to skip commercials is a big break in the mood. What we are doing now is to have Sage generate the .edl files for Comskip using the tmiranda 'Commercial Detector' plugin. Then when we watch in MC it does a good job of skipping based on those .edl files.
2. We were not automatically getting art for our .jtv files recorded by the HDPVR. All we would get is a screen shot taken at some time early in the program. It's explained in this thread:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=69580.0 When I record in Sage the .ts files are automatically imported into MC. We then have art without doing anything extra.
3. And if I recall we were also not getting descriptions of the shows. My wife also remembers the same issue. Again when recording .ts files in Sage we automatically get full descriptions without doing anything when the program is imported into MC.
4. I also recall that Movies were somehow picked up with the Media Sub Type of 'TV Show' instead of Movie. Thus in the main theater View listings they were not under Movies, but Shows instead.
5. The bulk of the recordings we make are Movies. In Theater View, but not that I can see in Standard View, the selections can be filtered by Genre. We need it filtered by Movies first, then the Genre of the Movie. So to select the movies to record in MC we have to wade through all the Shows under a particular Genre to find the movie we want to record. In Sage there is a plugin called 'Upcoming Movies'. It has incredible filtering power and of course only lists Movies.
6. In MC we could only schedule Movies in Theater View if we wanted any kind of Genre filtering. Again I don't see a way to get that filtering in Standard View. With SageTV my wife does all the scheduling from her desktop computer. There is a powerful plugin called 'SageTV Web Interface' that 'Upcoming Movies' integrates with. I also use it to monitor Sage on my Desktop. It also shows 'System Messages' so if there should be an HDPVR hiccup for instance I can see that, as well as monitoring disc space availability and any other system problems.
To be fair to MC I think it has something similar called Web Remote or Web Gizmo. Have never tried them, but wonder if we could do the kind of scheduling we need with them: ie filter by Movies, then Genre?
7. What recordings are scheduled? This information is only available in Standard View in MC. (Yet Genre's are only available in Theater View.) In Sage this is available in the User Interface as well as on the SageTV Web Interface that my wife schedules recordings with on her Desktop.
8. At the time we switched back to Sage for recording we were getting a lot of crashes in MC. At the same time we were getting a lot of missed and partial recordings. I thought these might have been cause by the crashes. Now I'm wondering if TV recording is run by the MC service so although the MC user interface crashed perhaps the Service was still running and the crash did not affect the recording. Would appreciate it if someone could comment on this. Sage has been rock solid for us and we don't seem to have any missed or partial recordings since switching back.
Again to be fair to MC a lot of the reasons for our crashes have been solved by JRiver. They have been very diligent in trying to fix those problems!
There may some other things that we presently prefer in Sage but I think I've listed the major ones.
At the time we switched to MC for TV I had hoped that many of the above issues would be taken care of by JRiver, and possibly some have been since we switched back to SageTV. I really do want to use MC for everything and not have this dual program setup. And of course we have no idea how long Sage will be usable since they have sold to Google and are no longer supporting the product. I look forward to the day when we can switch back to MC for TV recording.
Rod
