I Am. When?

I have had my SageTV PVR computer setup and running smoothly for a little over two and a half years now. Aside from swapping out and adding a few different recording devices, the box has remained the same throughout this entire time and I could not have been happier with it. A Pentium 4 3GHz processor, 1 GB of RAM, a 300GB SATA drive, and an eVGA 6600GT video card are the guts that comprised this system; nothing flashy, but it made for an excellent entertainment system.

On various posts in the SageTV forums I have read of problems people have had with Sage, or other PVR software products, ranging from blue screening to playback stuttering to system hang ups, but have experienced none of these problems myself (except when I tinker too much). As a matter of fact, with my basic system using the nVidia PureVideo decoder I have had remarkable image quality playing back SD TV content, DVDs, and even HDTV content. Given all this, why would I decide to upgrade my system?

The first reason is the release of Hauppauge's new HD PVR tuner. This little USB device allows for the recording of HDTV using component video feeds. What that means is it will allow recording of high definition television from the cable company's set top box (STB), allowing me to record all of my HD channels as HD, instead of only those broadcast in an unencrypted format (more or less the local network channels). Discovery HD here I come! The only problem is the listed minimum requirements for the HD PVR sights both a dual core processor and a graphic card with 256 MB of memory; neither of which my Sage box had. Granted, given my Sage box already played back HD content recorded with the HDHomeRun, I am still a little skeptical at the Hauppauge requirement.

The second reason for the system overhaul is BluRay. Now that the battle between HDDVD and BluRay is at an end with BluRay emerging the victor, I thought I might give the high definition movie arena a shot. Again, my existing Sage box played back HD recordings without a problem so I imagine it could tackle BluRay content, except for the industriy's lovely little catch: HDCP. HDCP is the movie industry's latest means of preventing copyright violations and movie piracy (which, mind you, as a software developer I am all for copyright protection). Unfortunately, every piece of the BluRay puzzle has to be HDCP compliant, and my poor eVGA 6600GT video card missed the boat. Considering this is an AGP card, I figured if I was going to have to replace the card, I should upgrade to the PCIe standard in the process.

The last reason, and most important, is that I finished my Six-Sigma paper and the Operations Management course with an A- (transfers over to a 4.0 back at Excelsior). So, damn it, I deserved a new toy. And what a toy I built. The new system uses a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L motherboard, an Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 2.53GHz processor, a Maxtor 500GB drive, 2 GB of RAM, a Gigabyte 8600GT video card, and ASUS BluRay SATA drive (I really need a Tim Allen sound bite here). You're jealous, I can tell.

I spent the better part of this weekend getting the system put together, software installed, and migrating all of the files over. When all was said and done...pretty much the same as my old system. The big improvements were in upgrading SageTV to the newest beta version (6.4.3), which held a few nice items I have been waiting on. Mostly convenience sake kind of things, but Sage also added some nice techie improvements such as H.264 support (for the Hauppauge HD PVR among other H.264 devices). The best part of this new Sage version is that despite it being a Beta release, everything I have tried has worked without a flaw. Impressive.

Once I had Sage running, I still found myself wanting to be "WOWed" with my new rig, so I went out and purchased a couple of BluRay movies and watched them using CyberLink PowerDVD Ultra 7.3 (SageTV does not currently have support for the BluRay menu stuff). Instead of being wowed, I found BluRay to be very disappointing. I guess SageTV and the nVidia PureVideo decoders were too far ahead of their time when it comes to video playback and up scaling, because DVDs on my old Sage box looked just as good as either of the BluRay movie I watched on the new.

All and all, the upgrade has been a mixed bag, the pluses of finally getting away from AGP, meeting the requirements of future enhancements, and the improvements with Sage; the minuses of no visible improvement in video playback and the disappointment of BluRay versus my old system and DVDs. So much for being "In with the new".