TV tuners for PCs have been around for quite some time, but I never really felt a need for one. Then, earlier this year, a gal from Xceive, which makes silicon tuners, sent me a USB-stick TV tuner from one of the companies they deal with. It worked surprisingly well, and after using it for a while, I thought better of TV on the PC. Even though my computer sits in a room with a TV, I found it very convenient to have a program—usually a baseball game—playing in a small window in the upper right corner of the display while I continued working in the remaining space, checking e-mail, surfing the web, and so forth. But after a couple of weeks, I had to return that item.
Enthused about this new convenience, I went searching through a pile of boxes I have from companies who on occasion send me hardware or software to review. I found what I was looking for: Instant TV from ADS Tech (Cerritos, CA). This is not a USB stick type tuner, but a device about the size of a pack of 3” x 5” index cards that connects to a USB port by wire. It even comes with a remote control. I used this gadget with the interface software that comes with it and it worked quite well.
A few months later I got an e-mail from a gal who works with a company called SageTV (Inglewood, CA). She wanted to know if I would be interested in trying their product of the same name—SageTV. If you have ever seen the Slingbox from Sling Media, this software does essentially the same thing. Not only can you play TV on your PC, but you can add “placeshifter” software to any other PC, such as a notebook computer, and get TV—your own TV—from anywhere you happen to be. I agreed to try the product, which is simply a software download from the SageTV site.
In order to use the software, you need to have appropriate hardware already installed on your PC. This is where the fun started for me. SageTV software does not support the ADS Tech tuner I was using. The only TV cards it supports are those listed on its site. I checked with ADS Tech, and they told me that Instant TV uses the Xceive tuner. I’m fairly certain that any product that uses this tuner will not work with SageTV.
Undaunted, I checked the listing compatible tuners on the SageTV site and went looking for one of them on eBay. Since I already had a tuner, I was not looking to spend very much on another one, just for the sake of trying out SageTV. As with most products, eBay had just what I was searching for, a TV tuner for $25 plus $7 shipping. It was an ATI E-HOME WONDER VE MPEG2 card that someone pulled out of a Media Center PC. Unlike the ADS Tech USB model, this was a PCI card. And that’s all I got for my money, just the card, no drivers or other software. I noticed a large Philips chip on the card, which I assume is the Philips (now NXP Semiconductors) tuner. This tuner is compatible with SageTV.
Since the ATI E-HOME WONDER is a PCI card, I was forced to open up my PC for the first time since I bought it over a year ago. I have an HP a1120n, and I found it surprisingly easy to open and install the card. This exercise even gave me a chance to clean up some of the dust that had accumulated inside the PC over the year.
Once installed, I had to find drivers for the card, which I found and downloaded from the ATI /AMD site. I hooked the cable TV cable to the card, launched the Media Center app on my PC and everything worked fine. Now, it was time to install SageTV.
I downloaded SageTV Media Center V5 to my desktop, which becomes the SageTV “server” when you install the software. I had to answer a bunch of questions during installation, but all went smoothly. When I tried to run the program, though, it balked and gave me an error message. I found out that SageTV replaces Windows Media Center, so both can’t be running at the same time. Here are the instructions I got from George at SageTV to fix the problem:
To run SageTV under MCE 2005 you need to disable MCE or a process called "ehrecvr.exe". To just disable this process go to CONTROL PANEL > ADMINISTRATIVE TOOLS > SERVICES. Look for the "Media Center Receiver
Service" and disable it from starting up. Now restart the computer and go back in there and make sure that it says it's disabled and not running.
I did all this and SageTV worked as expected. I was able to view and record TV just as I was able to do with InstantTV. The extra added attraction, though, with SageTV is the placeshifter option. I downloaded this to my notebook computer and connected to the Internet through my wireless network. Soon enough I was watching TV on the notebook. SageTV brings the resolution up slowly until it finds the correct resolution for the speed of the connection. My desktop PC, which is directly connected to my Verizon FiOS fiber-to-the-home cable, got a better picture than my notebook connected to an 802.11g wireless connection due to the speed difference between the connections. Of course, the “server” PC has to be running in order for the placeshifting software to operate. You can put SageTV into Standby Mode to keep it running on the server PC.
My final check of the system was to watch TV from my office rather than from another part of my home. When I tried to do this, I received an error message that essentially said, no TV today. I wasn’t sure what the problem was, but figured it had something to do with the corporate firewall. I was wrong. When I got home, I realized what had happened. I have my computer set to do automatic updates for XP. The computer picked this particular day to do updates and then automatically re-booted. Once this happened, SageTV was closed down and did not restart. By the way, during the SageTV installation I decided not to have it start upon bootup, not thinking of this particular scenario. I guess I’ll have to change this option.
All in all, I am pleased with SageTV and InstantTV. As I mentioned, I didn’t see a reason for TV on my PC at first, but have grown fond of it. SageTV, of course, gives the added dimension of placeshifting, which I see as a benefit, especially when I’m on the road during the baseball season. I never did like the idea of paying MLB to watch games over the Internet. So this solves that problem and lets me watch local news as well.
Why would you consider SageTV instead of investing in a product like the Slingbox? Essentially, you can save some money if you have already made an investment in a TV tuner that’s compatible with SageTV. However, if you only have one computer, say a notebook that you use at home and then take with you wherever you go, you would not be able to use SageTV, which demands a “server” PC. You would have to fork up the dough for the Slingbox or a comparable product if you wanted this functionality.
By the way, SageTV with the Placeshifter option costs $99.95. As mentioned, besides the software a compatible TV-tuner card is needed. As for Instant TV, I don’t think ADS Tech sells this version on their site anymore. But you can still get it on Amazon.com for $69.99. ADS Tech’s latest version is MiniTV USB, which is a USB stick version of the product. MiniTV USB sells for $79.99.
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