eepmatt
03-10-08, 02:21 PM
I just recently installed SageTV's new HD Media extender in an all mac environment and wanted to jot down a few notes since mac info seems so scarce on it. Here's the headline: "THE UNIT ROCKS; TECH SUPPORT SUCKS."
Now the details: I'm coming off Sage's SD media extender, the Happenhauge or however you spell it. My experience with this unit made me very wary of Sage's products: I never got it working right, even to this day. A couple times I've been ready to throw it against the wall.
I got the HD unit about a week ago; I plugged it in and updated the firmware without any problems. When it rebooted however, it froze up and nothing I did would fix the problem. So I emailed tech support (they have no phone number) and waited a day and a half for a response. When it came, I learned that that the documentation on the product contains an error: though it says the extender requires ver. 6.X of the server to be running, it actually requires ver 6.3 or higher. Sage told me to upgrade to 6.3 and the problem would be fixed. But on their website the Mac version is only at 6.2, the PC version is at 6.3.
So I emailed tech support again, waited another day and a half, and the tech apologized for not reading my full request and seeing that I had already told him I was on Mac. Mac users have to download the beta version of 6.3, which is on a different link. Once I did that, everything seemed to start working really well.
When connected through HDMI, the picture quality is excellent. For a while I had my Mini connected directly to my Sony Bravia LCD flatscreen (via it's PC input) but eventually removed it because the picture quality of DVD playback was terrible. To me it looked like OS X was not only not playing both fields of the video, but not even combining them... it looked like it was throwing one of them away. This seems to be a known issue with the DVD playback framework on OS X, and it was a deal killer for me. The Sage extender happily does not suffer from this problem.
My main use of the unit to to play back a library of VIDEO_TS folders, which the extender does flawlessly. Likewise, my amp recognizes dolby digital from the unit's optical audio output. Haven't tried DTS yet.
We also have a handful of movies encoded H.264 and they look phenominal at around 1100kbps. One thing I really like about the unit is that it seems to be very accurate in adjusting it's aspect ratio to my TV. Again this was not the case with the SD hardware from Sage.
I have the server running on a Mac Mini (the first revision of the Intel chipset, not the Core 2 Duo) running 10.5.2. I have not had a single issue with the extender communicating with the server (which was the big problem with Sage's SD device).
The one downside I've found but not fully explored yet is that the system seems to hiccup a lot if I'm doing something on the Mini (ie encoding files) while trying to watch something on the extender.
So other than the annoyingly difficult to use an uncommunicative technical support, I'm pretty happy.
Now the details: I'm coming off Sage's SD media extender, the Happenhauge or however you spell it. My experience with this unit made me very wary of Sage's products: I never got it working right, even to this day. A couple times I've been ready to throw it against the wall.
I got the HD unit about a week ago; I plugged it in and updated the firmware without any problems. When it rebooted however, it froze up and nothing I did would fix the problem. So I emailed tech support (they have no phone number) and waited a day and a half for a response. When it came, I learned that that the documentation on the product contains an error: though it says the extender requires ver. 6.X of the server to be running, it actually requires ver 6.3 or higher. Sage told me to upgrade to 6.3 and the problem would be fixed. But on their website the Mac version is only at 6.2, the PC version is at 6.3.
So I emailed tech support again, waited another day and a half, and the tech apologized for not reading my full request and seeing that I had already told him I was on Mac. Mac users have to download the beta version of 6.3, which is on a different link. Once I did that, everything seemed to start working really well.
When connected through HDMI, the picture quality is excellent. For a while I had my Mini connected directly to my Sony Bravia LCD flatscreen (via it's PC input) but eventually removed it because the picture quality of DVD playback was terrible. To me it looked like OS X was not only not playing both fields of the video, but not even combining them... it looked like it was throwing one of them away. This seems to be a known issue with the DVD playback framework on OS X, and it was a deal killer for me. The Sage extender happily does not suffer from this problem.
My main use of the unit to to play back a library of VIDEO_TS folders, which the extender does flawlessly. Likewise, my amp recognizes dolby digital from the unit's optical audio output. Haven't tried DTS yet.
We also have a handful of movies encoded H.264 and they look phenominal at around 1100kbps. One thing I really like about the unit is that it seems to be very accurate in adjusting it's aspect ratio to my TV. Again this was not the case with the SD hardware from Sage.
I have the server running on a Mac Mini (the first revision of the Intel chipset, not the Core 2 Duo) running 10.5.2. I have not had a single issue with the extender communicating with the server (which was the big problem with Sage's SD device).
The one downside I've found but not fully explored yet is that the system seems to hiccup a lot if I'm doing something on the Mini (ie encoding files) while trying to watch something on the extender.
So other than the annoyingly difficult to use an uncommunicative technical support, I'm pretty happy.