Sage 7.0 Wishlist

[mattdcknsn]

What I would like is an option for OTA signals. If this option is enabled 5 minutes prior to a scheduled recording it would check the signal strength and if its below a set amount the recording would go to the next tuner in line.

I sometimes have problems (especially in high wind) where my OTA recordings get messed up. If it could check the signal strength first it would alleviate some problems.

[Ryokurin]

speaking of wiz.bin I would just like a way to easily clean it out. Mines is about two years old now and as a result it takes the program around two minutes to start. Granted its on a dedicated machine but when you do have to reboot it gets old.

[Skiier__Dude]

Hey all,

Maybe there is such a feature already, but I'd like to be able to sync and/or download files to a remote PC for offline playing when a network connection is not available for Placeshifter and/or the client. For example, it would be great to set a couple of my favourite shows up to sync with my laptop when I am in the office, and then when I fly, be able to watch these shows using Placeshifter/Client as the player (with the associated benefits of commercial skipping, setting shows watched, deleting watched shows from the server and client etc...).

Would also be good to be able to set high or low bitrate to sync the files depending on the urgency of when they are needed (e.g. I am in the airport now and have 1 hour on WiFi vs. I have overnight), or schedule the sync for off-hours.

Anyhow, just a rambling thought. Maybe this can already be done or others would like to see this feature as well. Interested in shared thoughts.

[briands]

Originally Posted by Skiier__Dude

Hey all,

Maybe there is such a feature already, but I'd like to be able to sync and/or download files to a remote PC for offline playing when a network connection is not available for Placeshifter and/or the client. For example, it would be great to set a couple of my favourite shows up to sync with my laptop when I am in the office, and then when I fly, be able to watch these shows using Placeshifter/Client as the player (with the associated benefits of commercial skipping, setting shows watched, deleting watched shows from the server and client etc...).

Would also be good to be able to set high or low bitrate to sync the files depending on the urgency of when they are needed (e.g. I am in the airport now and have 1 hour on WiFi vs. I have overnight), or schedule the sync for off-hours.

Anyhow, just a rambling thought. Maybe this can already be done or others would like to see this feature as well. Interested in shared thoughts.

this would be sweet for a carputer... with wifi... just think, it could sinc up while it is sitting in the garage.

[jsonnabend]

Originally Posted by briands

this would be sweet for a carputer... with wifi... just think, it could sinc up while it is sitting in the garage.

Oh, you're such a geek (and I've been fantasizing about the same thing ).

- Jeff

[Skiier__Dude]

If i keep spending all this money on sage, the car will be the only place I am allowed to watch it

[pez]

Originally Posted by Skiier__Dude

Hey all,

Maybe there is such a feature already, but I'd like to be able to sync and/or download files to a remote PC for offline playing when a network connection is not available for Placeshifter and/or the client.

Yes this would be great. I ask for this a little while ago. Here is what I do until they add it.

-pez

[Nadim]

1) Stage6, Aol videos, and the ability to add other online streamer service support (this should be easy)

2)Internet Radio, Shoutcast, XM (net), Sirus (net), LastFM support

3) Ability to export/import or save channel listing mapping and customizations I have made. I hate it that every reinstall I have to mess with this for an hour. On this subject the ability to enable disable tunners from the menu, with out erasing the configuration (it does it now)

4) A better GUI, like SageMC, or somthing like XBMC skins.

5) ISO support for harddrive dvd files.

6) A Roaming feature. It should go like this, I am sometimes in one room with a SageTV reciever and I want to go to another room with the SageTV reciever. If I am watching live tv, and turn off my current Extender, I miss all that I have recorded so far and miss a few minutes. A quick fix is that I have is to record the program, or to leave the extender on. But sometimes I dont want to record the show. This is true also for when I pause for a long time. The roaming feature should be like a button to press for roam, and the ability to pick it up on another client. And while on this subject, the ability to remotly stop an extender and pick it up on the current. (this is good for when I leave it on pause and I want to continue it elsewhere)

7) Support for Mexican EPG (I live in a border town and have access to both USA and MEX programming)

8) IMDB integration (I know SageMC does it, but it would be nice for it to be official)

9) CDDB, Allmusic integration, Album pics and info for my Song Collection.

[dooferlad]

My #1 feature I am missing in Sage is that it doesn't seem to clean up digital recordings before saving the programs to disk. This results in programs which need to be cleaned up before they will play properly / encode properly in some software. Sure, running VideoReDo on a program will do the job, but it feels like something Sage should do. It would probably fix the problems with some recordings not playing and others not restarting from the same point as they were stopped at because the indexing is slightly broken.

My #2 feature I am missing in Sage is that a +1 channel is not something that Sage knows about, it is just another channel. What would be nice is if Sage knew that the +1 channel is a time shifted copy and could use it more intelligently. At the moment program foo on channel bar will be recorded on bar and bar+1 even though there is no need to do so! This includes when they have the same program ID!

[Nate]

1. Ability to use a channel listing per tuner. Eg, one tuner can get all channels great, but another doesn't get channel 4. Currently they use the same channel listing so disabling 4 disables for both tuners. I have to use a different channel lineup from a nearby city, which is only luck that it is the same.
2. Ability to mark two tuners as being the same device. Eg, I have a cable box connected with both svideo and firewire. This shows up in Sage as two separate tuners. I want to record HD channels through firewire and SD channels through svideo, but never have both at the same time. Currently Sage doesn't realize that both tuners are the same device, so it will happily try to record an HD show and an SD show at the same time, corrupting one of the shows since the tuner can only tune to one of the channels.

[banjo]

Well its time to give us a full UTF-8 Hebrew support.

Thanks

[pez]

• Add ability to “Play All Videos” starting with those that haven’t been watched first (regardless of the sort order).
• Add ability to display the preview picture with an offset into the show (say 1min) and on a per show basis.
• For Keep At Most Favorites (which I use for kid show re-runs), add ability to stop recording episodes once the limit is reached, unless shows have been watched. Any watched shows are then deleted and new recordings fill to the set limit.
• A Messages page (under Setup) that indicates a new update or new channels have been added.
• Remotely turn off an extender or client from another (pre-selected i.e. in my bed room) extender or client. This would include the ability to see that other extender/clients are in use.
• And of course my previously mentioned SageTV-On-The-Go Client feature.
  
  
  As said before:
• Support for exclusive or shared channels selection for any guide
• Viewer profiles for custom favorites, manual recordings, and display of shows
• Netflix “Watch It Now” integration
• To be able to stop a recording (i.e. from the “view recording schedule” list)
• Picture in Picture or better yet Picture by Picture (side-by-side)
• Native 64-bit support

[xred]

Throwing my 3 on the pile...

1. Distributed Audio Video Mode. - From the server you should be able to put all the clients in "slave mode". The clients could put up a message stating something like "A request has been made to put this client in slave mode. Allow? Y/N?

Once in slave mode the clients would playback an AV stream in sync with each other off the server. This would make Sage the ultimate replacement for pricey distributed audio systems and even pricier video distribution systems.

2. Support for playback of BD / HD-DVD & CD Audio discs... along with that add request "2b" an HD extender with a built in optical drive.

3. A newer streamlined UI.

[Brent]

Has there ever been any talk of flickr integration? It's something available for Media Center and now AppleTV and something I would love to see.

I guess it would be nice as a built-in feature, but would lend itself as a plugin if there was someone out there with the know-how and willingness to develop a flickr plugin.

[jsonnabend]

Flickr slide shows would be fantastic.

- Jeff

[BrandonMills]

Netflix downloadable movies integration would be *extremely* nice.

My current SageTV setup ( for my Mom ) is this -

* SageTV server downstairs with PVR-150 card in it.
* MediaMVP upstairs in Mom's bedroom for watching

and my Mom has Netflix. So this is where Sage needs to step in and let my technically-challenged Mom have easy access to the new Netflix downloadable movie service

So yes, please, Netflix downloadable movies. That'd be awesome in Sage 7.0.

[mc2wheels]

With the price of NAS boxes dropping, I would like to be able to "archive" recordings to a network share and have it actually move the file to the new location.

Of course, I can do this now, but I lose all of the show information. Network reads are fine, but I don't want to record to a NAS, I just want to archive there for playback.

It would also be nice to be able to custom define groups in the UI to organize the shows. I have 8 million kids shows and they make navigation difficult. I archived them, but now the archived section is messy. For instance, I have all the Christmas movies and animated shows that I would like to put in a Christmas group. With storage getting so cheap, I am sure that many people are starting to hit this issue.

If there is an STV that does this, I am oblivious. Anyway, to keep WAF high, I only want to use officially supported stuff.

[Julianus]

Here is my wishlist:
1. A better organized UI. I like the current one but navigation can be cumbersome. The home page is the most important page. From there we should be able to navigate easily and fast. In the same time we should be able to see relevant information like:
Weather Info
Upcoming recordings
Latest recordings
These are really small widgets. It would be amazing to have the capability to define and add new widgets in the way Google, Yahoo and Vista handles widgets.

I do like the current UI. I like the colors but really wish navigation to be a lot simpler.

Talking about the UI, SageTV guys should find a way to co-opt the SageMC guys. These guys basically given up on the SageTV UI and SageMC is a complete replacement of the UI.

2. Smaller OSD. The current one takes almost half of the screen. Can we have just a thin line to show where are we? Pressing the OK button could bring up more information.

3. Real fast forward/backward. We should have the same behavior as you get with a DVD player or a Video player.

4. Proper support for DirectShow drivers and capability to properly customize the decoding graph for each type of file. (MPEG2, MPEG4, MKV, AVI etc.). I am still waiting when SageTV can properly resume playing. I have to raise a bug with every new version of SageTV hopping they fix it.

5. Automatic Audio level adjustment. We all have media files that vary in the level of the Audio. SageTV should recognize this variation from file and raise or lower the volume to compensate.

6. Marking of commercials. I would be willing to pay for it separately even.

7. Proper re-encoding. Currently re-encoding a recording into MP4 has to be done on one one by one basis, it should be part of the Favorites setup. The re-encoding should be done on a configurable time table (like maybe at night) as long as do not interfere with viewing or recording.

[toricred]

What exactly do you mean by co-opt the SageMC guys? I don't think they've given up on the default UI. They just want it to do more things and look slightly different. That's the great thing about Sage, you can make it do all kinds of things if you want to.

Marking of commercials can be done by comskip or ShowAnalyzer and with either SageMC or an import can automatically skip them. With EP's SageMC Video Tools plugin or others for the default UI the commercials can be removed from the recordings.

[ybrew]

Originally Posted by Nate

1. Ability to use a channel listing per tuner. Eg, one tuner can get all channels great, but another doesn't get channel 4. Currently they use the same channel listing so disabling 4 disables for both tuners. I have to use a different channel lineup from a nearby city, which is only luck that it is the same.

Ditto.

And some kind of movie rental integration. Whether it be netflix or itunes (ok unlikely) or whatever, streaming movie downloads please!