SageTV Client / Server
I record all of my shows on my desktop computer in my office. However, it's not always convenient to sit in my office to watch them. I might want to sit in the family room and watch or I might want to watch a movie lying in bed before I go to sleep. SageTV Client (available separately) gives me that flexibility.
 I am able to watch live TV and recorded shows full-screen over my wireless connection.
The SageTV Client software works just like the media center software except that it isn't connected to a PVR card. Instead, it is connected to the SageTV media center running on the SageTV "server" computer. From the SageTV Client computer, you can watch live TV, schedule recordings, watch recordings . . . anything that you can do from the server computer. Best of all, I am able to watch live TV and recorded shows full-screen over my wireless connection. You'll need 802.11g (54 mbps) and a pretty good signal (no lower than 36 mbps actual speed) to avoid skipping.
Customizations
SageTV has an active community of people working to customize it and the results are impressive. There are essentially two types of customizations; STV files and STV imports or STVi files. STV files replace the entire SageTV interface while STVi files add particular functionality to the existing interface.
I tested many of the customized STVs over the course of this review, and the one I stuck with was the Cayars Ultimate STV, an STV actually developed for SageTV 2 but is equally effective in SageTV 4. Cayars adds some pretty cool features. One of my favorites is the colored bar in the Recordings screen that shows you how much a particular recording you've viewed. Figure 5 illustrates this and is a reshoot of figure 4 with the Cayars STV applied. Notice that there is an amber-colored bar halfway through The Investigators indicating that I have viewed almost half of that recording.
Figure 5 - SageTV with the Cayars Ultimate STV applied.
Notice the icons above the list of recorded shows? These show you particular aspects of a selected recording. In figure 5, I can tell that the House of Secrets recording has been processed for commercial skipping (CS), is closed-captioned (CC), and was manually recorded (M).
Commercial Skipping
Speaking of commercial skipping, SageTV has the ability to automatically skip commercials for you with the addition of add-ons. There are actually many methods of doing this, but after quite a bit of testing, I found that the best solution was a great little utility called ShowAnalyzer from a company called Dragon Global. ShowAnalyzer is able to analyze recorded video files and detect the start and end point of commercial breaks. It can then generate files that can be read by any of the common utilities used to skip commercials. In fact, the Cayars Ultimate STV has the ability to automatically skip commercials based upon files created by ShowAnalyzer.
Dragon Global also offers a free utility called DirMon that will monitor a directory for files and run a specified command when new files are added. Use DirMon and ShowAnalyzer together and you've got a powerful capability to process all of your recorded shows for commercial-skipping in SageTV (and in other software as well.)
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