I am an avid SageTV user and am sad about the takeover by Google and the associated halting of all hardware & software sales. In conjunction with SageTV, I've used Nextcom's R5000-HD and I really like what this system has to offer. However, I've had many crashes, failed recordings, recordings with glitches and gaps and reported overruns with the supplied recording app, so I felt the need to write my own.

Due to time constraints, it is a bare-bones command-line implementation. It uses very little memory, only a few megabytes when recording. This software has been tested extensively and works very reliably in my setup and the recordings are flawless. The implementation is very robust and recordings will be good even if the PC is doing other tasks simultaneously. Of course the old adage of garbage in, garbage out holds as in certain cases the cable feed is imperfect.

To start, download SageTVR5000HDRecorder and unzip it. This contains the binary and a sample channel mapping file.

Here is how I run it:

--device is sequence number, --serverport is port number to listen for SageTV commands If you have multiple R5000-HDs, you run multiple instances each with successive device numbers (starting from 0) and different port numbers (use the same port numbers as in the Nextcom recording app so you do not need to edit sage.properties). --delaypower is milliseconds of delay between turning on the STB and the start of channel changing. --programlist reads the current stream from the stb and prints what programs are found. This is necessary to set up the mapping file.

I use this with Motorola QIP2500s and FIOS TV. I did not program in any other type of STB compatibility. I had one person on Comcast try this with no luck. For now, only download this if you are on FIOS with Motorola cable boxes. Use cmdow once you get it all working in order to hide the command processor windows. I've had to turn off Norton's firewall and intrusion heuristics to get my recorder to work. If you have the time you can set up exclusions so Norton won't disable the communication between sagetv and this recorder. You can run R5000HDRecorder.exe --help to get a listing of args

The ChannelToProgramMap.txt is necessary to deal with multiple channels on the same stream and should be in the current directory for the recorder to find it. I only get this for the network-type channels. All premium cable channels work right away without requiring a mapping. If you see the cable box changing to the right channel but still recording a different show you must set up a mapping. Nextcom's recording app has a nice UI to perform this mapping; I did not reimplement this. It would be great to one day hook up vlc for a nice channel mosaic of all programs on a given transport stream so you could pick out the correct one.