5. Remote Setup And More Options

SageTV offers four preconfigured remote control options, involving two Hauppauge remotes and two generic selections for Urit and Evation. Since I didn't have one of the supported remotes, I had been using the ATI RF Remote Wonder Plus. Unfortunately, it was not fully compatible with SageTV and some of the commands were not functioning. So I dug up an Imon IR remote to see if I would have any better success and found that it didn't work perfectly either.

I actually could navigate within SageTV fairly well using both remotes simultaneously, but it was clearly not an ideal solution. Sure, I enjoyed the surge of testosterone as I sat in my favorite chair firing off commands with two remotes, but I knew that the novelty would wear off eventually, and I would need to try something else.

After a little experimentation, I found that SageTV has a remote control configuration function in its detailed setup menu. You can use it to map different SageTV functions to remote control buttons on any remote. But in order to map buttons correctly you need to know the keystroke combinations that each button on the remote is sending to the computer. (A quick Google search can provide this information fairly easily.) For example, the default keystroke combination in SageTV for the "Back" command is Alt+Left arrow. If your remote's back button is mapped to Control+Down Arrow you'll can change the SageTV "Back" command accordingly.

After further experimentation, I finally settled on using a Microsoft Media Center remote. It was also not perfect, but offered the best compatibility of the three.

SageTV offers a TiVo-like feature called "intelligent recording", which makes predictions about programming that a user might want to watch based on data gathered from past use, and automatically records it. Intelligent recording was not perfect, but it came up with a few shows that I enjoyed watching. Additionally, undesired programs can be flagged as "not liked" to refine the selection process.

Intelligent recording option

SageTV contains a configurable, password-protected parental control system. Since I'm not a parent, I decided to keep myself from watching shows with mild violence, but unfortunately I was the one who set the password - Walker, Texas Ranger, here I come!

SageTV parental controls configuration screen