media pc, part 8: drawbacks

Remote Buttons
The Streamzap remote does many things very well, and is very responsive, but there aren't enough buttons to accomodate every function of a multi-purpose media PC. In practical use, though, I haven't found it to be much of an issue. Because of the button limitation, watching DVDs is a bit different. DVD main menus work well through SageTV, but most DVD sub-menus (such as scene selection) don't work at all. Luckily, you can skip through movies in up to 10-minute increments. If I ever cared to watch anything aside from the main movie, this would bother me. I could map the correct Sage commands to the remote, but I don't have spare buttons. It's worth noting that, for DVDs, SageTV provides its own menu for subtitles, audio settings, and aspect ratio. This menu consists of a slim line across the top of the screen, and can be accessed while watching a movie. It's cleanly integrated, and very convenient.

Rather than running on about the obvious inconvenience, I say only that the Streamzap remote doesn't control anything outside of your PC.

Sage Itself
SageTV doesn't support closed-captioning. If captioning is important to you, don't use SageTV. The default SageTV interface is functional, but ugly. I installed an additional .stv (SageTV), called SageMCE. It's available for free through SageTV.com's forums, and as the name indicates, it mimics the MCE interface. It's a much more elegant approach, and it alone increased WAF by 30%. The additional package also provides commercial skipping, which I haven't tried. Advertising is an important part of my bubble, though I do watch only about 3 seconds of each ad. SageTV has an overly complex command layout. For example, instead of requiring one button for each aspect ratio, you should be able to cycle through aspect ratios using a single button. There exists third-party software (e.g. Girder) which allows you to overcome this obstacle, for around $60 USD.

SageTV crashes when new Windows updates are advertised. Thankfully, this doesn't happen too often. The media PC is rebooted every week or so, but it's always on otherwise. When I forget to reboot it for a few weeks, the remote might stop responding, but nothing else happens.PatienceBecause TV files are so large (1GB per 30 minutes), SageTV can temporarily freeze if you delete files too quickly. By this, I mean faster than the on-screen image refreshes. If you wait even a few seconds between files, SageTV will be able to keep up with the deleting.

Monitor
As I noted in an earlier post, standard-definition TVs (SDTVs) aren't the best choice if you want to browse the web, or read substantial amounts of text. Their viewable resolution is limited to 720x480 pixels, and standard cable TV is broadcast at that resolution, so it works well for that purpose. However, 720x480 doesn't give you much on-screen space, and everything becomes enormous. Text on most web sites line-wraps, and tends to be a bit blurry. The text can be sharpened so that it becomes legible, but that adjustment can detract from the picture quality of TV and DVDs. In my video card settings, I created separate presets for web/text and TV, but it's too much trouble to access that menu to switch back and forth. Once again, a button on the remote could make the difference here. MaintenanceYou don't have to maintain component A/V equipment, but you have to maintain a computer; especially one that runs Windows. After the first few months of heavy use, we began to experience audio and visual stuttering while watching TV shows. Coinciding with this, the hard drive's seek noises were growing louder each day, and at one point, the hard drive actually failed (it recovered after a reboot). DVD playback was unaffected, so I checked the file fragmentation on the TV drive. It was ugly; the files on the TV partition were 90% fragmented. Defragmenting took over 12 hours, and created permanent video and audio stutters in some of the files. Since then, I have defragmented the TV partitions every month or so. It now takes only as long as one might expect, and the files have not been compromised.