questions from a prospective buyer

[perry59]

I have been looking for the "perfect" htpc software for awhile now and have narrowed it down to just a few choices:

1. Mediaportal - free, very customizable
2. SageTV - $80-130, fairly customizable
3. Snapstream $80-130, not so customizable

I have been pretty happy with mediaportal and have customized it with new plugins to behave EXACTLY the way I want it to. However its latest release has been buggy and video playback has become horrible. At least its free.

Looked at Snapstream but am not that impressed by it.

Been playing with the trial of Sage and it seems to work pretty well, I went over the studio manual and it looks like Sage is pretty customizable, at least as far as the UI is concerned. Not so sure about being able to create process plugins for it though. For example, if anyone is familiar with Mediaportal, there is one pluggin that I just gotta have, and would not mind porting it to Sage if its possible. It is called MesFilms and basically is a movie player interface that rather than using its parents internal database, or IMBD lookups, instead uses an Ant movie database file (xml) for displaying its info. If it would be possible to port this C# code to a Sage plugin, I'd probably be sold.
Can such plugins be done for Sage?
On the other hand, however, I am already having some issues with Sage. Particularly with its music import. I have serveral cd's I ripped to lossless wma and Sage is not finding the tags. They are all listed as "unknown". I know the tags are there. I have painstakingly manicured all my music files.
Windows media player 11 shows them just fine, as does maniacs mp3tag program (which I prefer because of the many taggers I've tried, this is the only one that does a decent job with wma files).
Perusing this forum I see that this is an ongoing issue for quite a few people and has not yet been fixed. As I am very picky about my music the question then becomes, why should I pay for buggy software when I can get buggy software for free??

So, can any established users, preferably some with some experience in customizing Sage, shed some light on these issues for me.
I'd sure appreciate it, Thanks.

[perry59]

PS
I also read in the forum somewhere that Sage will not allow user customizations to parse tag info?
I dont see how this could be possible. If I write code to read/write tag info from a file, how could the host program prevent me from doing so??

[Addict]

I too was looking at your three listed and landed on Sage.

I tried like crazy to make Media Portal work the way I wanted it too (because it's free!)...but it was just too clunky in too many areas and I finally gave up on it.

Snapstream, well, I just don't understand all the hype with that product. I wasn't even remotely impressed.

I installed Sage and was almost immediately sold. It doesn't have FM-radio functionality, which I am somewhat bummed about, but it's got everything else. If you install the SageMC STV, I think you'll recognize the interface! <grin> I have the Foofaraw theme on it and I'm good to go.

Now, as far as your issues...I'll outline my own. I am a developer, but have never done development on Sage (and probably won't due to time constraints).

I have also had issues with the Music interface. Mine are mostly due to music going on mute for no apparent reason...this is currently being researched by support, and I believe there's a work-around for it by using a WMP plugin.

On the standard STV, the music menu was incredibly slooooow for me (but not others). It got slower the more playlists and songs I had in it. SageMC, however, is quite snappy on the music side...

As far as coding and plugins, I can't imagine why you couldn't build a plug-in for Ant...and I do remember reading some posts a while back about it, but am not familiar with any current status. There's a Sage Development Studio built in to every copy of Sage to do direct modifications to the STV's, and I think they have a code example of incorporating a .NET application into Sage somewhere on the site.

Good luck...hope you choose Sage. It's always good to have developers on-board.

[perry59]

Thanks for the input Addict. I'd like to hear from as many users as possible, especially X-mp users!
The fact that Sage doesnt support FM is a real bummer for me. Only reason I bought in Hauppage was to get FM on my pc (nothing good on tv anyway). This seems like a huge oversight to me. Any htpc worth its salt will have FM capability, mediaportal has it. How am I going to listen to Dr. Demento on sunday night !?!
Also a bit leary on hardware support. I just bought a very nifty remote (keyspan RF remote) and it may not work with Sage. Thats another benefit of mediaportal, it supports a HUGE amount of hardware. Theres even a remote plugin which will let you use basically any remote there is.
Would Sage allow me to write a plugin to support my remote???
More questions !!!

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by perry59

Been playing with the trial of Sage and it seems to work pretty well, I went over the studio manual and it looks like Sage is pretty customizable, at least as far as the UI is concerned.

The UI is completely customizable. The stock UI is written entirely in Studio. So if you like you can use Studio to create a whole new UI from the ground up, completely replacing the stock UI. You can also write importable UI mods ("STVIs" in Studio jargon) that alter the function of the stock UI.

You're not confined to Studio when writing UI code; you can call arbitrary Java code from Studio code (although the parts that actually generate the visible UI must be written in Studio).

Originally Posted by perry59

Not so sure about being able to create process plugins for it though.

I'm not sure what you mean by "process plugins", but it's possible to write runnable Java classes that get loaded into Sage at startup time and run in the background without interacting with the UI. Nielm's web server is an example of such a plugin.

Originally Posted by perry59

For example, if anyone is familiar with Mediaportal, there is one pluggin that I just gotta have, and would not mind porting it to Sage if its possible. It is called MesFilms and basically is a movie player interface that rather than using its parents internal database, or IMBD lookups, instead uses an Ant movie database file (xml) for displaying its info.

Again, I'm not sure what makes this a "process plugin" as opposed to a UI mod. Certainly it's possible to write UI code in Studio that takes data from any source and displays it in a Sage menu, or plays arbitrary media files from any accessible file system (not just from the the Sage media DB).

You can also write code, either in Studio or in Java, to import media files and metadata from any source into the Sage DB.

Originally Posted by perry59

If it would be possible to port this C# code to a Sage plugin, I'd probably be sold.

It's certainly possible to write new code in Java and/or Studio to emulate an existing plugin from some other system. If you're talking about reusing the existing C# code without rewriting it, that's possible too, if you're willing to jump through some hoops. There's a way of using JNI to call into .Net assemblies, but I haven't experimented with that. I have used Jacob to wrap COM objects for use with Java, and I don't see any reason in principle why that couldn't also work for .Net COM interops. So that might be another way to reuse some of your existing C# code.

Bottom line is that to execute code in Sage, you need to interface with Java somehow. Depending on how much code you're talking about, you may find it simpler to just rewrite in Java from the ground up.

Originally Posted by perry59

I also read in the forum somewhere that Sage will not allow user customizations to parse tag info?
I dont see how this could be possible. If I write code to read/write tag info from a file, how could the host program prevent me from doing so??

I'm not sure where you got this idea. As you say, nothing stops you from reading data out of files and passing it to the Sage API for storage in the Sage DB or storing it in some custom database of your own.

When Sage is scanning your import folders for media files to add to its DB, it uses its own internal tag parser for that purpose. If for any given media file foo.whatever you create a foo.whatever.properties, Sage will also parse that (as a Java .properties file) for metadata about foo.whatever.

[perry59]

Thanks for the input GKusnick.
By "process" plugin, I just mean a plugin that is not just a UI mod. For example, one that reads/writes tags, reads/writes external databases (or xml), one that say, enables currently unsupported hardware (remotes!) or an FM tuner, etc.
I read somewhere in this forum that you could not create a tag reader/writer plugin for Sage, seemed pretty odd to me. Like I said, how could Sage prevent me from doing so? And if I wanted to make my own custom music plugin I'd obviously need to read tags!
I gotta learn Java now !?!
sheesh, I sure would like to use some of that C# I've been accumulating.
Anyone familiar with TagLibSharp....
kindofa bummer to take perfectly good C code and translate it to java.
Oh well

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by perry59

By "process" plugin, I just mean a plugin that is not just a UI mod. For example, one that reads/writes tags, reads/writes external databases (or xml), one that say, enables currently unsupported hardware (remotes!) or an FM tuner, etc.

Well, since UI mods written in Studio can call into arbitrary Java code, nothing stops you from doing file I/O, database queries, and so forth in a UI mod.

Just to be clear, by "UI mod" I mean code that adds features to the UI, not just a cosmetic skin replacement. (Sage has those too; they're called "themes", and all they do is change the look of the UI.)

Regarding hardware support, there's an existing FM radio plugin, but I don't use it myself and am not familiar with the details. For offbeat remotes, you can use something like Hip or Girder to receive the commands and forward them to Sage via SendMessage. Or write your own device handler app and call SendMessage directly.

Originally Posted by perry59

I read somewhere in this forum that you could not create a tag reader/writer plugin for Sage, seemed pretty odd to me. Like I said, how could Sage prevent me from doing so?

Again, when Sage builds its media DB, it uses its own internal tag parser for that. There's no way to interpolate custom code into that process, if that's what you're asking, other than via the .properties file mechanism mentioned earlier.

If you're talking about creating a tag-editing UI in Sage for operating directly on the files, then sure, you can do that, just as you could create a UI for reading email, browsing your Netflix queue, filing tax returns, or what have you.

Originally Posted by perry59

And if I wanted to make my own custom music plugin I'd obviously need to read tags!

I guess it depends on what you want the plugin to do. I've written code to browse the Windows Media Player database from within Sage, and I didn't need to write any tag-reading code for that, since WMP provides an API for that.

Originally Posted by perry59

I gotta learn Java now !?!
sheesh, I sure would like to use some of that C# I've been accumulating.
Anyone familiar with TagLibSharp....
kindofa bummer to take perfectly good C code and translate it to java.

Given that Sage is written in Java, you have to have some point of contact with Java in order to get your code called. But as I said, there are ways of linking Java to other languages via JNI, Jacob, and the like, if that's what you want to do. I didn't know any Java when I started tinkering with Sage, and it didn't take me more than a week or two to start doing productive work. Conceptually, C# and Java are not that far apart.

[cncb]

Originally Posted by Addict

On the standard STV, the music menu was incredibly slooooow for me (but not others). It got slower the more playlists and songs I had in it. SageMC, however, is quite snappy on the music side...

I am having all kinds of problem with the music library too. If you can offer any help, please do: http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=28115

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by perry59

Been playing with the trial of Sage and it seems to work pretty well, I went over the studio manual and it looks like Sage is pretty customizable, at least as far as the UI is concerned.

"Fairly" would be about the understatement of the century. Studio is the SDK that SageTV uses to create the UI, if it's in the UI, you can change it.

Not so sure about being able to create process plugins for it though. For example, if anyone is familiar with Mediaportal, there is one pluggin that I just gotta have, and would not mind porting it to Sage if its possible. It is called MesFilms and basically is a movie player interface that rather than using its parents internal database, or IMBD lookups, instead uses an Ant movie database file (xml) for displaying its info. If it would be possible to port this C# code to a Sage plugin, I'd probably be sold.
Can such plugins be done for Sage?

Search the forum for DVDPro2Sage. The trick is, do you import or do you read externally on the fly. I think several of us have struggled with that question ourselves.

On the other hand, however, I am already having some issues with Sage. Particularly with its music import. I have serveral cd's I ripped to lossless wma and Sage is not finding the tags. They are all listed as "unknown". I know the tags are there. I have painstakingly manicured all my music files.
Windows media player 11 shows them just fine, as does maniacs mp3tag program (which I prefer because of the many taggers I've tried, this is the only one that does a decent job with wma files).
Perusing this forum I see that this is an ongoing issue for quite a few people and has not yet been fixed. As I am very picky about my music the question then becomes, why should I pay for buggy software when I can get buggy software for free??

So, can any established users, preferably some with some experience in customizing Sage, shed some light on these issues for me.
I'd sure appreciate it, Thanks.

You might want to look into (I forget the name) the "tag reader" plugin.

Greg, I'm surprised you didn't jump on the music thing since you wrote the plugin
http://forums.sage.tv/forums/showthread.php?t=17620

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Greg, I'm surprised you didn't jump on the music thing since you wrote the plugin
http://forums.sage.tv/forums/showthread.php?t=17620

In its current (Sage V6-compatible) incarnation, my plugin does not participate in tag parsing during media import, since Sage V6 does all that natively. My plugin does use WMP to implement a CD player UI that reads CD track metadata from the Internet, on the fly, without storing it anywhere (although I expect WMP caches it locally). The same WMP APIs can be used to read tag data from local media files, but again, Sage V6 no longer provides an import-time hook where that would be useful.

So it all comes down to what perry59 is trying to accomplish. If it's to provide a Sage UI to some other media database, that can be done fairly easily (once you've climbed the Studio learning curve). If that other database happens to be WMP, then my existing code might be useful.

On the other hand if the goal is to intervene in the media import process by which Sage builds it own DB, you're probably going to be dealing with offline .properties file generators rather than tag-reading plugins.

[perry59]

Thanks everyone for all the response. All of my questions have been well answered. As I hoped and suspected, anyone willing to get their hands dirty with a little coding can get Sage to do just about anything.
I probably will go ahead and purchase it soon, still a bit irked though that I'm paying for commercial software that I know right off the bat has some bugs in the area I most use...music. This is something I think the Sage devs should fix immediately! How long will I have over a hundred "unknown" songs in my library?
Anyway, thanks again all. Looking forward to diving into studio so I'll probably be posting more questions!