Development Confusion

[jimbruskalski]

Hi, I have never developed a plugin or anything for SageTV before and am a little confused on how to do it.

Do I have to own SageTV to develop for it? Right now I have a trial version and being able to create a customized solution for myself will be the deciding factor whether or not I buy SageTV. Neither SageTV or the other solutions I have looked at (mainly GB-PVR) seem to have exactly what I want, so I will have to develop something for myself. The ease of developing and using the API's will therefore be a big determining factor on what I end up using and ultimately end up purchasing. I dont want to spend money on SageTV to only find out that I have a hard time developing for it and end up not being able to accomplish what I need and, thus, waste my money.

Thanks,
Andrew

[Opus4]

Studio, the tool used to modify the SageTV UI, is not available w/o entering a license for SageTV. You can check out the topics stuck at the top of this forum for links to the Studio and API documentation.

- Andy

[GKusnick]

Theoretically you could edit the STV directly using any text editor (it's just XML text), but that really would be doing it the hard way.

I second Andy's suggestion of reading through the API docs and Studio tutorials to get a sense of what STV development is like.

You might also want to look at some of the customizations that other people have developed to get a feel for the range of what's possible.

There is a certain leap of faith involved, but Studio is a very powerful tool with few limits on what you can do with it (and you can always drop into Java for the really hard stuff). The learning curve is fairly steep, but not insurmountable for someone with a reasonable degree of programming skill.