8. In Use - Media Center Functions

When I initially set up my personal home theater, I spent several months converting my DVD collection into high-quality compressed video files. These are stored in another room on a file server, so that they can all be accessed by the media center. I pointed SageTV to the appropriate network path and was pleased to see that the software recognized the cover images that I created for each video file, and displayed them without any additional work on my part. The video library content can be displayed in either "list" or "folder" view. Folder view did not handle long titles well, so I stuck with list view.

The video library looks nice if you take the time to create your own DVD cover images.

DVD playback functioned well, but I experienced a small glitch - I had to disable the autorun feature so it would not interrupt SageTV with the usual popup.

The autorun feature in Windows interrupted DVD playback at first.

I was pleased with the video library feature; the videos were easy to access and play, and the imported cover art that I made gave it a nice look. The only problem that I had with video playback was that after I started each video, the mouse pointer would appear by itself in the middle of the screen and wouldn't go away - I had to move it to the side of the screen each time. Since I used a remote to control SageTV, it was a bother to get up and move the mouse every time I wanted to watch a movie.