STV: SageMC 16x9 Version 6.x (latest dev build)

[snoopy]

MAN this thing is getting good.

Dirk - After our last email transaction I completely re-did my SageTV and properties from scratch. The only thing I re-used was wiz.bin and the conflict issues I was having have vanished. SageMC now behaves identical to the default STV giving me the control I was seeking. Thanks for your help with that.

I love SageMC! It is truely outstanding! Even the Movies view is even more expanded. Coupled with all the great graphical improvements by meinmaui, SageMC has truely become an impressive work of art with all the funtions neccessary for the most bonified media addict.

Tell me about this '.my files' thing I keep hearing about.

Can I now download movies in other formats and have SageTV play them? If so, what is the best player to use and how do I get SageMC to use it?

[snoopy]

Originally Posted by gplasky

Do you have 2 providers defined? Or a basic and a digital lineup?

Gerry

I have two tuners and so I configured one basic lineup for tuner one and one for tuner two. So I am heading down the right road with that? They should not be different though so I'll just set-up the channels again.

[Kirby]

Originally Posted by flachbar

I think I finally found the 'problem'. Did you do a "Rescan Import Directories" lately ? If not, try it ... I found that some of my imported videos didn't show the IMDB cover art on the OSD either, but after I did a rescan they suddenly showed up ... It seems that Sage updates the "HasIcon" property only after a rescan.

Hope this will solve it for you too

Dirk

Nope, I havent done that lately, I will go search for that feature, but I remember looking for it before and couldnt find it in MC's menus. Where is it? Just looked again, I just am not seeing the option to rescan import directories. Do I need to switch back to the default STV to do it?

[Kirby]

And dumb question time, but I understand whats in a .MY file, but whats the purpose of them? And why isnt my system automatically generating them, even though the option is enabled?

[technazz]

You have to hit options button or (esc) in the My Video screens then you can select Rescan Import directories

technazz

[Kirby]

Ahh thanks, still took a bit to find it, until I hit options while the cursor was on the left row of icons.. I was trying before to do it with a movie highlighted.

Dirk, the rescan fixed them. It also fixed some of my files that were showing a run time of say 10 minutes, now they show properly, to something like 2 hours 15 minutes.

One more thing Dirk, what size are you resizing the cover art to on the OSD? Is there any way that you can set it a bit bigger? It looks like its about 25% of the size of the cover art on the video info screen, and at least on a 55" HD set, most all the cover arts are way too small on the OSD. Looks like there is plenty of height for the image to be nearly full size (140 pixels or so) but I'm sure there is a reason why you are shrinking it, right?

[Franc]

Just upgraded to 6.12a
Anyone have this problem? : whil watching a recorded show or even 'live' every other minute, the system skips to the 'search' screen and I have to go 'back' to go bak to whatever I was watching.

Could this be a glitch or am I having a different problem?

[Alfiegerner]

Sorry if this covered elsewhere in this thread - I've had a search but I may have missed it.

We currently only use sage for its TV / PVR facility, Is there a way that I can make sage start up on the MyTV section of the stv so I can ignore the home menu?

[dflachbart]

Originally Posted by ellweber

Hi Dirk,

I've been out of town for a few weeks and am exited about all the great improvements you have made. Thanks for implementing the configurable commercial auto-skip mode.

I am seeing some unexplained behavior in the Photo Viewer now and am wondering if you might have an explanation. When I use the up button to advance to the next photo in a folder it will sometimes only advance through three photos and then cease responding to the button. It will do this regardless of which photo I select as the first to be viewed.

The only things I have been able to correlate it to, so far, is the size of the .jpg files I am viewing and the file naming convention (two different cameras). The folders that have large jpegs (> 2.5 MB) seem to fail in this way while folders with smaller files appear to work as expected. One camera is a Nikon and names the files "DSCNxxxx.JPG" and the other is a Canon and uses "IMG_xxxx.JPG." The Nikon files are larger and they are the ones that fail to advance. Some other, smaller files wich have been renamed with simpler generic names also advance correctly. Seems more likely the size or something else I am missing here!

Any ideas?

Lynn

Hi Lynn,

not really ...

What happens if you display a slide show for those folders, does it also get stuck at one point ? I dont think it has to do with the picture size, my Canon pictures are 2 - 2.5 MB on average, and I haven't seen this problem yet ...

Dirk

[dflachbart]

Originally Posted by Kirby

And dumb question time, but I understand whats in a .MY file, but whats the purpose of them? And why isnt my system automatically generating them, even though the option is enabled?

Hi Kirby,

the purpose of .my files is to display more detailed information for a video in the "program Info" screen in case there is no info available in the Sage database (e.g. updated by an IMDB lookup). For TV files, the generated .my files contain almost all of the show data fields, which is useful if you e.g. recompress your recordings as they usually loose all their detailed info once they are moved into the import library.

The automatic .my file generation only works for TV recordings, so you are not seeing any generated .my files in your recording directories ?

Dirk

[dflachbart]

Originally Posted by Kirby

One more thing Dirk, what size are you resizing the cover art to on the OSD? Is there any way that you can set it a bit bigger? It looks like its about 25% of the size of the cover art on the video info screen, and at least on a 55" HD set, most all the cover arts are way too small on the OSD. Looks like there is plenty of height for the image to be nearly full size (140 pixels or so) but I'm sure there is a reason why you are shrinking it, right?

Weird, I actually don't shrink the cover art at all on the OSD info ... I just did a test and manually replaced a cover pic with a pic of 300x400 size, and it displays full size on the OSD, see attached pics

Dirk

[Alfiegerner]

Originally Posted by jds23

I know this can be accomplished with the windows sendmessage utility (it is one of the "customX params, just can't remember exactly which one), would that work for you? The sendmessage usage is documented in the Sage manual, and it will give you each of the Sage variables to get to each screen. You can even program a programmable remote to go directly to the MyTV screen, if you so chose, which I have done so myself.

Maybe there are other ways, but that is the only one I know of at this time.

Thanks for the response. We're using SageMC on an MVP so I don't think that this utility can be used for that. Its not a biggie, I'll just re-program the home key to go to MyTV.

[Kirby]

Originally Posted by flachbar

Hi Kirby,

the purpose of .my files is to display more detailed information for a video in the "program Info" screen in case there is no info available in the Sage database (e.g. updated by an IMDB lookup). For TV files, the generated .my files contain almost all of the show data fields, which is useful if you e.g. recompress your recordings as they usually loose all their detailed info once they are moved into the import library.

The automatic .my file generation only works for TV recordings, so you are not seeing any generated .my files in your recording directories ?

Dirk

I was looking in the import directories, which I can manually create .my files. But just looking in my 2 recording directories, there are no .my files at all.

[dflachbart]

Originally Posted by Alfiegerner

Thanks for the response. We're using SageMC on an MVP so I don't think that this utility can be used for that. Its not a biggie, I'll just re-program the home key to go to MyTV.

If you feel comfortable with Studio:

- select the 'My TV' widget and copy it with ctrl-c
- select the "BeforeMenuLoad" hook under the "Main Menu" widget and paste a reference (ctrl-shift-v)
- save the STV file

Now any call to the Main Menu will get re-directed to the 'My TV' menu.


Dirk

[Kirby]

Originally Posted by flachbar

Weird, I actually don't shrink the cover art at all on the OSD info ... I just did a test and manually replaced a cover pic with a pic of 300x400 size, and it displays full size on the OSD, see attached pics

Dirk

Weird, let me see if I can get some screen caps from my HTPC and show you what mine does.

*edit* ok, it appears the icon resize happens only in full screen mode. I tried it in window mode and the icon was normal sized as it should be. but look at the pic for full screen attached. too small. OSD1.jpg is the full screen view, OSD2.jpg is a windowed view (shaped to a 1.78 AR). Notice how large the icon is in the second picture in comparison to the overall height of the top OSD bar? My guess is that this is a result of having 1080 vertical lines of display, versus the window which is roughly 470-500 lines tall. So based on that, is it possible to "grow" the icon to height to fill the top OSD bar (whatever number of lines of resolution it is)?

[dflachbart]

Originally Posted by Kirby

I was looking in the import directories, which I can manually create .my files. But just looking in my 2 recording directories, there are no .my files at all.

Did you enable this setting on the server, and restart it ? The generation wont be triggered by a client.

Edit: crap, I just noticed that a client sets this property in the client property file, so unless you are running the GUI on the server in non-service mode it will never get set in the server property file ...

Workaround for now: add the setting sagemc/generate_my_files=true manually to your server file and restart


Dirk

[ellweber]

Originally Posted by flachbar

Hi Lynn,

not really ...

What happens if you display a slide show for those folders, does it also get stuck at one point ? I don't think it has to do with the picture size, my Canon pictures are 2 - 2.5 MB on average, and I haven't seen this problem yet ...

Dirk

Sorry I left out this info. Yes, the slideshow behaves the same way and no pictures after the first three will display at all unless I first sleep Sage and start over. Once I run the slide show from any starting point then only that picture and the following two will display and the slide show will not restart. Also, when manually advancing it will go back with the down button but only through the same three files.

My daughter's Canon is producing jpegs in the 1.5-2.5 GB range too but a few are larger. I created a new folder with a mix of jpegs from the two cameras and the behavior became even more bizarre!

Now it seems that there is something about the Nikon files that is causing this. When I mix the two sources the large Canon files advance but when it comes to a sequence of more than three large Nikon files it halts after the third. I created some smaller files with the Nikon by setting the jpeg quality to "Basic" and the problem remains so I guess it has to do with the Nikon files and, perhaps, their embedded data.

Duh, and for the most important experiment; it does the same thing (or worse) with the stock STV! Sorry to have troubled you with this.

I do have another problem that does not occur with the stock STV. Once I have played a DVD on the CD/DVD drive and subsequently removed it I always get the Windows Auto-Play dialog about "There is no disk in the drive…" every time I return to the main menu. This never goes away until I reboot the system. But does not occur with the stock Sage STV. However, it only seems to happen when I use a “Back to Main Menu” menu item to return, a left arrow button based return does not bring up the dialog. Since the Back to Main Menu actionMenuItem just seems to create a left arrow command perhaps it is somehow related to the dynamic menu system?

[dflachbart]

Originally Posted by ellweber

Duh, and for the most important experiment; it does the same thing (or worse) with the stock STV! Sorry to have troubled you with this.

No problem

I do have another problem that does not occur with the stock STV. Once I have played a DVD on the CD/DVD drive and subsequently removed it I always get the Windows Auto-Play dialog about "There is no disk in the drive…" every time I return to the main menu. This never goes away until I reboot the system. But does not occur with the stock Sage STV. However, it only seems to happen when I use a “Back to Main Menu” menu item to return, a left arrow button based return does not bring up the dialog. Since the Back to Main Menu actionMenuItem just seems to create a left arrow command perhaps it is somehow related to the dynamic menu system?

Is your CD/DVD drive on "D:" ? I found that there are several references to D:\temp in the STV code, maybe this is related to the problem you are seeing.

Dirk

[Morgan111]

OK, I got tired of always bringing up weather on my PC, and the Weather Suite is not really what I want. So I created a new page, accessed from the main weather page, that allows you to view up to 7 (that could be expanded) weather images from the internet. The image titles and URL's can be modified by selecting the options on the My Weather Maps page or editing the values in the sage.properties or sageclient.properties file. Example:
sagemc/wximage_title_1=National Conditions
sagemc/wximage_title_2=Morning Forecast
sagemc/wximage_title_3=Evening Forecast
sagemc/wximage_title_4=Atlantic Surface Analysis
sagemc/wximage_title_5=Precipitation Forecast
sagemc/wximage_title_6=WBIR Forecast
sagemc/wximage_title_7=WBIR Radar
sagemc/wximage_url_1=http://image.weather.com/images/maps/current/curwx_600x405.jpg
sagemc/wximage_url_2=http://image.weather.com/images/maps/forecast/amfcst_600x405.jpg
sagemc/wximage_url_3=http://image.weather.com/images/maps/forecast/pmfcst_600x405.jpg
sagemc/wximage_url_4=http://images.intellicast.com/WeatherImg/CustomGraphic/tgsfc1.gif
sagemc/wximage_url_5=http://image.weather.com/images/maps/forecast/precfcst_600x405.jpg
sagemc/wximage_url_6=http://www.wbir.com/images/weather/fiveday.jpg
sagemc/wximage_url_7=http://wbir.com/images/doppler/tys_radar.jpg

Only links to image files will work, with extensions like, jpg, gif, png...
Unfortunately animated images are not supported. Would really be nice if that was included in the upcomming Sage release. If you specify an animated gif, you will only see the first or last frame I believe.

This page list many sites for local radars and weather sites in the US.

It could be set up to handle more images. That may be of more interest when animated images are supported...

Dirk, you are welcome to merge it into the standard release if you think it makes sense, otherwise I can make a seperate download page for it.

Instructions

• Download zip file from this page
• Extract the zip file in the root folder of your sageTV installation
• Import the SageMC_Weathermaps_1a.xml in the detailed setup screen to install the plugin
• Update the map titles and URL paths to your favorite weather images.

On the My Weather page, you should now see a new button called "View Maps" thatwill take you to the new page.

Again, to customize the weather image name and URL, follow the customization menus when selecting the options button on the remote or right mouse button. Or edit the sagemc/wximage_title_x= and sagemc/wximage_url_x= lines in the sage(client).properties file when Sage is not running. Be warned that if you use the customize menu, you cannot paste text (like long URLs) into the entry field from the clipboard. Maybe in Sage 5.1??

UPDATES
9/25/06 - 1a: Correct image refresh problem.

[geogecko]

Nice. Animated maps would be even better.

Throwing that iTV theme in our face again, huh???