SageTV – Up and running

UPS delivered SageTV in the evening. I was surprised to see how small it is compared to HTPC I’m currently running!. It is actually tiny bit bigger than iPhone 4, as the accompanying photo shows. For the last few years I’ve come to the realization that I don’t watch any of the cable channels. The only programs I watch are “Office”, “Outsource”, “Chase”, “The Middle” and sometimes “America Got Talent”. My current dish network subscription has been local channels only for this reason. HTPC was supposed to replace my Dish Receiver, but the maintenance and power consumption was a big concern for me. My efforts to switch to HTPC with network based OTA tuner (HDHomeRun) ran into several issues, HTPC hardware fails (HDD failed, graphic card died, Windows 7 corruption etc). It was a constant battle to keep this setup running.

I was looking at SageTV HD200 and SageMC setup for sometime, it looked like a good option. but I wasn’t sold on HD200 it looked ugly both hardware and software. Then recently Sage released souped up HD 300 with more capabilities, new hardware design and SageTV MC 7.0. There was no reason not to get this puppy now.