Frey Technologies' SageTV 2.0 - A SnapStream Alternative

Installation and Setup

Frey Technologies is a smaller company compared to SnapStream and is more community driven than the latter, which is why SageTV is only available via download. There are three components to the SageTV software suite: SageTV 2.0 - $79.95, SageTV Client 2.0 - $29.95, and SageTV Recorder 2.0 - $19.95. Incidentally, they are all sold as separate components and there isn't a three-for-one price option available from Frey's online store. We were sent the SageTV Multi-Tuner "Blackbird" Bundle w/ Remote, which did come with all three components on the included CD, but the SageTV Client and Recorder 2.0 were both trial versions.

Before you jump ahead and buy the software, we would strongly recommend that you read up on the requirements. In all, Frey's product requires a Pentium III 600MHz/Athlon 600MHz/VIA 800MHz or faster, 128MB system memory (256MB minimum), graphics card with overlay support, and a TV tuner/MPEG-2 encoding card. Because the TV tuner needs to have a MPEG-2 encoding support, Frey takes a very different approach in software support, since SageTV 2.0 is supposedly ready for non-hardware encoding capture cards, but Frey essentially turns off this feature, with no plans to turn it on soon. This means that NVIDIA's Personal Cinema, ATI's All-in-Wonder/TV Wonder cards, and a plethora of other TV tuner cards can't be used with SageTV. At first we thought that Frey was not using Windows Driver Model support (aka WDM), due to our scrubbing around in the driver files, but Jeff Kardatzke (the coder of Frey) tells us this may be due to the implementation of newer driver model that Frey might be using.

Since the MPEG-2 encoding is done via the encoding chip on the TV tuner, it relieves the CPU of the burden, which is why Frey's CPU requirement seems so low. Personally, we would feel more comfortable raising the requirement of the CPU to a low speed 1.XGHz Pentium 4 or Athlon XP with 256MB of system memory, if the system built is also intended to function as a personal PC. If it is supposed to function as a dedicated system next to your projector or TV, Frey's requirements probably will suite your purposes just fine, but a Pentium III and Athlon right in the sub-1GHz range is probably going to fit the bill better than a 600MHz one. Even though the MPEG-2 chip takes care of encoding, the amount of operations performed on a HTPC that are needed to load software and timeshift are still numerous, and if you plan to watch Divx encoded media (SageTV only records in MPEG-2), our original P4 or XP recommendation is a must.

Broadband internet access isn't a requirement nor is it a major necessity for SageTV. The only time that SageTV 2 uses an internet connection is when it connects to the Zap2It service to download EPG listings, which coincidentally is the same service used by Microsoft for their Windows XP MCE 2004 OS. While Beyond TV 3 and SageTV 2 are both designed to function as a TV server, SageTV 2 is not designed to be accessed outside the local network, though hypothetically, VPN should work, but the throughput consistency of the streamed content will be severely limited by download/upload bandwidth of the ISP and the ISP's routing capabilities.