And The Winner Is......

Yesterday, I just received 3 brand new SageTV HD Theater media extenders. I will also be installing the SageTV Media Center server software.

Here is how I selected Sage:

First, it took me a while to find what I was looking for, simply because I didn't even know the generic name for it. How do you Google something when you don't know it's name. "Thingy that I connect to my TV that allows me to watch stuff from my computer over a network" didn't turn up many hits.

Eventually I learned that what I was looking for was called a "Media Extender". Once I knew the term, I had no problem finding plenty of companies that made them.

Unfortunately, almost all of them are designed to work exclusively with the Microsoft Vista Media Server. I had already excluded this product because of it's excessive use of DRM, severely restricting it's ability to meet my requirements.

That narrowed the field down substantially. I looked at solutions such a Buffalo LinkTheater HD Digital Media Player. This appears to be entirely standalone with no server component other than storage. There also didn't seem to be a direction this solution is going in. Ditto the Linksys Media Extender.

Popcorn Hour makes a product that they call a media streamer, but it didn't seem to operate in conjunction with a server other than a shared network drive. It is difficult to tell exactly what it does from their website, and I just didn't get the feeling that I would be happy with this product.

MythTV is a popular, open source, media server, but it seems like it lacks an extender. I believe the idea is that you put a computer at each TV. I ruled this out as for reasons of cost, noise, space, complexity, and power consumption. Frankly, these concerns ruled out a number of media server options that were dependent on a PC for every TV.

That left Sage, with it's HD-100 Media Extender and it's Media Center Software. I actually reached this conclusion a couple months ago, yet Sage had sold out of it's media extender. That left me plenty of time to browse it's forums, to determine it's strengths and weaknesses.

It met all my requirements, yet it had a few weeknesses:

1. The HD-100 model seemed to require a lot of server resources. It is doubtful that I could have ran the server on my exisiting PC. Even if I could, I think it would have needed so much of it's memory and processor, it would have been useless for other tasks.

2. The SageTV media extender's remote control has been panned by many.

3. The HD-100 model extender had been sold out since August.

Fortunately, Sage released their new extender the HD-200 on December 1st. It addressed the performance problem by moving most of the processing from the server to the extender. Essentially, it is just reading the server like network attached storage, I believe. As for the remote, I found a deal on Ebay for three Logitech Harmony 880 universal remotes. This fixes the remote issue, as well as addressing the fact that I would have been adding a fifth or sixth remote control to each of my rooms.

I have already received the HD-200s and hope to be setting them up tonight. They are extremely simple, small boxes, about the size of a hardcover book. Ethernet cable comes in, TV picture goes out, there is not much more to it than that.

Tune in tomorrow for some initial observations.