“Why you can trust Digital Trends – We have a 20-year history of testing, reviewing, and rating products, services and apps to help you make a sound buying decision. Find out more about how we test and score products.“

The SageTV HD Theater is akin to Western Digital’s WD TV HD Media Player in that it can stream music and video to your television independent of a computer—that means you don’t need a computer at all. Like that device, it’s outfitted with HDMI, composite, component, and S-video outputs, and analog and S/PDIF audio outputs. Also similar to the WD TV, the HD Theater delivers video resolution up to 1080p. But if you’re the type who expects to plug something in and have it just work, the SageTV HD Theater probably isn’t the right media extender for you. That’s not to say that the device is extremely buggy or poorly designed; it’s just most appropriate for people who like to tinker and share their experience on online forums.

Features and Design

SageTV’s box is twice as expensive as Western Digital’s, but it offers more than twice the functionality. And if you do connect it to a PC or a server (over a hard-wired Ethernet network only—it doesn’t support Wi-Fi) and add optional hardware and software to the mix, you can assemble a media system with all the features of a TiVO and a Slingbox rolled into one.

Considering the SageTV HD Theater’s plethora of options, especially when used in conjunction with SageTV Media Center, it’s unfortunate that the manufacturer provides only a skimpy 12-page user manual to help users figure out how to use it. If you buy one, expect to not only encounter a learning curve, but plan to spend some time perusing SageTV’s online user forms in order to take full advantage of all that it’s capable of.

Setup

We first tested the SageTV HD Theater as a standalone device, since that’s what you get for its $199.95 purchase price. The small enclosure is manufactured from heavy-gauge steel, a nice departure from the more typical plastic box. Despite the welcome absence of a fan (which enables the box to operate in complete silence), the device remained surprisingly cool; it shouldn’t have any issues with being tucked into an entertainment center cabinet. We connected it via HDMI to a 42-inch ViewSonic N4290p HDTV and via S/PDIF to an Onkyo TX-SR701 A/V receiver.

Connect the HD Theater to your home-entertainment system, plug a portable hard drive into the front or rear USB port and you can play your own media (e.g. music and movies ripped from disc, or digital movies or photographs captured with your own camera). Incorporate it into your home network and you can use your broadband Internet connection to pipe all sorts of free Internet video into your TV.

Image and Audio Quality

The SageTV HD Theater delivers excellent video quality and it has a very good onboard audio DAC (although most people will likely use one of its digital audio outputs). But crappy, low-res Internet video doesn’t look much better when it’s scaled up on a big screen—the box can’t put back what’s not there in the first place.

The device won’t function as a Windows Media Center extender either, so we also tested it in conjunction the company’s own SageTV Media Center for Windows running on an HP TouchSmart IQ506 PC, which has an integrated AVerMedia A327 TV tuner. And just to be thorough, we tested the SageTV Media Center add-in for Windows Home Server, too. We did not, however, test the Macintosh version of the software (all three versions sell for $79.95 each). Pairing the HD Theater with any version of SageTV Media Center and a TV tuner in a PC or server on your network creates a very powerful personal video recorder; adding SageTV’s Placeshifter software to the mix ($29.95 per client PC) lets you watch live or prerecorded TV on any PC anywhere you have Internet access. Placeshifter supports the Windows, Macintosh, and Linux operating systems. Unlike the similar Slingbox and Hava devices, however, SageTV doesn’t offer streaming clients for any handheld devices.

Using the SageTV HD Theater in conjunction with SageTV Media Center should have enabled us to watch QuickTime files encoded with MJEPG (which we’d created using a digital still camera). The server software is capable of harnessing a host PC’s processing power to convert files that the HD Theater can’t handle on its own, transcoding them in real time into a format that the HD Theater can deal with. All we got was a black scree, though. A representative from SageTV tells us the audio in our QuickTime files was encoded at a very low bit rate (8 Kb/sec), and that the current version of their software can’t work with it. They also tell us this is the first time they’ve encountered the problem and that a fix is in the works (unverified as of press time).

Conclusion

The SageTV HD Theater is a solid value if you’re the type of person who likes to do things for yourself, doesn’t mind dealing with a few rough edges and keeps an eye peeled for firmware updates, patches and upgrades. SageTV’s user forums offer a mother lode of useful information, but mining for the particular nugget you need can be an arduous experience—forums are certainly no substitute for thorough “official” documentation, even if it’s in the form of an online PDF. We’re also disappointed by the lack of support for Hollywood-backed online video services such as Hulu, and the absence of support for image file formats such as RAW and TIF.

If you don’t enjoy figuring things out on your own, you might find this device frustrating to set up. On the other hand, when you combine the HD Theater with SageTV’s other software products, you wind up with a very complete PC-based, networked entertainment ecosystem at a very reasonable cost. Add a few features, put on a couple coats of polish, and SageTV will have a killer product.

Pros:

Cons: