Another lack-of progress report.

Quote:

The only OTA channel missing from the program guide seems to be OMNI.2

Which is quite odd, since it *is* in the DataDirect listings from zap2it, where one can also find the HD channel listings as well.

SageTV is totally clueless about OTA HD in Canada -- no listings, and no way to even add the channels to the local Antenna line-up. Ugh.. frustratingly close to being a good product, and then they fsck up on the very thing that's triggered me to "go PVR" in the first place!!

Heck, even my HD tuner, the hdhomerun gizmo, "almost works" in SageTV. It does tune channels after some coercing, but the volume is heavily attenuated, and the on-screen images have a pronounced green tint compared with the analog channels. No obvious way to fix any of that, either.

SageTV is also missing built-in commercial-skip, which is 30% of the value of a PVR. Duh. It does seem to be available as a Windows-only add-in, but I tried that out and it didn't seem to do anything other than chew up a lot of CPU/disk bandwidth for no noticeable result.

SageTV half-works with power management -- it turns on the machine to do a scheduled recording (good), but doesn't turn it off again afterwards (duh). And the GUI just seems to lock up entirely after such an event.

* * *

So back to the other half-baked solution, MythTV. At least the OTA listings work for both analog and digital here in Canada, and the hdhomerun HD tuner works fine. Apparently commercial skipping is semi-integrated with Myth, but again doesn't do anything out of the box. Gotta dig into that eventually.

No support I can see for auto-power on/off in Myth, but Sage didn't really have it either, so nothing lost. Now that I'm back on Linux, I can probably script something up that will do the job ... eventually.

Cheers