Thank you for the lengthy

Thank you for the lengthy post George.  I didn’t post much about my system beacuse I wasn’t really looking for advice on my problems.  I was looking for feedback on the DirectTV whole house DVR system and whether or not it could fit my needs.

 

I have comcast cable.

My system is a AMD athlon X2 4800+ at 2.5 ghz on an Nvidia 6100 Gigabyte full ATX motherboard.  it’s 2 years old on quality parts.  I’m running an Intel Nic and I’ve experimented with the onboard firewire and an external card.   It runs WHS with 6 drives.  A mix of 1TB and 2TB drives.  4 are dedicated to WHS duties and the other 2 are dedicated recording drives not added to the drive pool.  One recording drive recently died after about 2 years of constant use and I lost half my shows.  It wasn’t a big deal because I tend to watch my favorite shows right away. All I lost was a bunch of junk and maybe an episode of Big Bang Theory.

 

Playback is via 2 HD200s and 1 dead HD100 I have yet to fix the PSU on.

 

 I’ve done extensive  work on trying to get the HD-PVRs stable.  All cables are 3 feet.  It doesn’t happen on certain channels. It isn’t a heat issue since it happens in winter.  I’ve returned one and got a new one that acted exactly the same.  I bought a new one and it’s the same as the old 2.  I have 3, only run 2.  My first HD-PVR is one of the first ones they made and it lacked a heatsink, so it has been taken appart and I couldn’t RMA it.  It’s the most stable.  It fails once every 2 months or so vs the newer boxes every 2 weeks.  It is not dependant on which cable box they are attached to.  They run 1080i AC3 audio.  Stereo audio didn’t help much but I really didn’t give it that much time because after it failed in stereo a few times I switched back to AC3.  I really really want 5.1.  I gave up on them about a year ago after everything I did simply made them worse. 

 

When one fails, it’s normally at night or when I am at work, so I lose all content the HD-PVR was supposed to record.  The HD-PVRs only record encrypted cable channels like history channel, CNN, Discovery, etc and those networks normally repeat their shows frequently so it isn’t a big deal if a HD-PVR goes down.  SageTV also seems to be smart enough to try and record the higher priority shows on the other, working, HD-PVR and I don’t usuallly miss anything that important.  All local networks are unencrypted and are recorded using a HDhomerun.  Shows like Big Bang Thoery, and the MOST important for WAF, the Bachelor, never fail because the HDhomerun is rock solid.

 

The server will occationally fail to start after a power outage, or the firewire channel changing will fail, or I’ve actually had some random crashes of sageTV server when I was skiing in Tahoe which caused me to lose some key network shows.

 

I used to watch a fair amount of TV and I could find a lot of shows I wanted to record.  Now, I feel like I’ve watched most shows I wanted to see, and I can’t find that many shows to record anymore.  I now preffer to rent a drama series such as Dexter on BD or DVD and watch it in marathon because I get into the show more.  That takes away even more shows that I wish to record.  Also, I recently got my PS3 back from my brother, and it’s working well as a Netflix streamer and more and more shows are available on Netflix.  I’m definately not at the point that I want to ditch cable TV, but maybe my needs are simple enough to just switch to a rented whole house DirectTV system.

 

I don’t use customizations that I care about

I don’t comskip, but I DO really really like my 2 minute skip and 10 second skip feature.  I’m not a fan of fast forward through commercials because it is slow and you have to pay attention.

I like the quick UI of sageTV

I’m not a UI snob.  If it works reasonably well it’s fine with me.

I don’t take shows with me on travel and I don’t use Placeshifter anymore

I DO occasionally watch TV on my computer in my office, so I would be giving that up.