While I agree that the HD-PVR & Sage solution isn't the equivalent of a dedicated DirecTV or Dish tuner, I think some other reasons people are switching are:
VMC has flagged OTA or ClearQAM recordings as DRM encumbered, MS has abandoned its v2 extenders, TV Pack was a joke/nightmare, you need to come up with workaround after workaround to do things, because MS has to keep the content providers happy, and now there is all this tuner delay/cancellation news, etc... I don't use VMC, so I'm sure the faithful could come up with a few more. A former MCE/VMC developer or two have switched as well in the recent past. OTOH, Sage has pretty much delivered on every rumor that has come down the pike. It's v1 extenders still work fine (and will continue to), and the HD200 is one of the best extender/media players made (Blu-ray from a folder anyone?). About the only thing you can complain about is the UI (and that's only about 50% for the Sage community). Sage/Serial Changing of an STB/HDPVR...while *slightly* more complicated, it's a perfect solution (and lets face it, VMC isn't plug & play either...you've got to configure CableCard or the phantom satellite tuners as well)...and at the risk of being called a blasphemer, DirecTV HD channels recorded by a PVR500 S-Video connection look better than you would think they would...if you have more HD STB's than HD-PVR's.
The phone has 256MB of RAM and a 1GHz processor, which do the job reasonably well, though the Anna interface will likely leave something to be desired for many smartphone users.
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While I agree that the HD-PVR & Sage solution isn't the equivalent of a dedicated DirecTV or Dish tuner, I think some other reasons people are switching are:
VMC has flagged OTA or ClearQAM recordings as DRM encumbered, MS has abandoned its v2 extenders, TV Pack was a joke/nightmare, you need to come up with workaround after workaround to do things, because MS has to keep the content providers happy, and now there is all this tuner delay/cancellation news, etc... I don't use VMC, so I'm sure the faithful could come up with a few more. A former MCE/VMC developer or two have switched as well in the recent past.
OTOH, Sage has pretty much delivered on every rumor that has come down the pike. It's v1 extenders still work fine (and will continue to), and the HD200 is one of the best extender/media players made (Blu-ray from a folder anyone?). About the only thing you can complain about is the UI (and that's only about 50% for the Sage community).
Sage/Serial Changing of an STB/HDPVR...while *slightly* more complicated, it's a perfect solution (and lets face it, VMC isn't plug & play either...you've got to configure CableCard or the phantom satellite tuners as well)...and at the risk of being called a blasphemer, DirecTV HD channels recorded by a PVR500 S-Video connection look better than you would think they would...if you have more HD STB's than HD-PVR's.
PF