Common STVis

[jgourd]

Now that I have a Sage installation working mostly that way it should I thought I would try a little customization.

What STVis would you recommend I start with?

[pjpjpjpj]

I would recommend starting with nielm's "Dynamic Customizable Menus". It basically leaves the STV (default menus) the same, but adds three things:
1) It adds little images/icons for each of the menu items, on the right side of the screen (if you don't like them, you can just delete them all from the folder on your hard drive).
2) It adds a disk space monitor and a "upcoming recordings" monitor on the screen. Either (or both) of these can be turned off if you wish, as well.
3) (Why you add this one in the first place) - It allows you to easily rearrange your menus, add new submenus, add links to any other customizations you might add, create new direct menu links to certain views of submenus, delete items, etc. It's all very simple to do - moving a link from one menu to another is just a copy and paste operation.

After that, everyone loves comskip - I don't use it because it takes some server "beef" that I don't have (plus I don't mind jumping through the commercials). But I think I am in the minority.

I definitely recommend IMDB search, MovieTimes, and of course the webserver (so you can access your Sage remotely). Also, the "multi-function stop" plug-in allows you to have a few more options for stop/start/restart (that many people seem to gripe about when they don't install it!).

I like the miniguide - it allows you to pop up a small window on the screen while still watching a show and scroll through the guide to see what else is on, without having to leave the show you are watching.

If you have multiple tuners with long, gobbledy-gook names, there is a plug-in allowing you to rename them in the "parallel" upcoming recordings view, so you can tell which tuner is which.

And depending on your interests, the Weather Report Suite is cool - I get a lot of pop-up storms around here in the Spring and Summer and it's nice to have a local animated radar that I can quickly pull up to check what's coming. (I also copied in the code from the hurricane tracking sites to watch those, even though I don't live near the coast, just because I like to follow that stuff... call it morbid curiosity...)

In case you had not noticed, there is a Sticky up top with a single compiled post by Opus listing all of the available plug-ins, both for the default STV and for SageMC (separate listings). And don't be afraid to check down the post into the plug-ins for Sage versions pre-6.x (5, 4, etc.)... many of them are handy and still work (several I mention above, in fact, are originally for older releases). Just read through the last few posts in the thread and see if anyone mentions whether it is working for the Sage version you have - seems like most do.

[jgourd]

Awesome, thanks a lot.

[waynedunham]

Originally Posted by pjpjpjpj

After that, everyone loves comskip - I don't use it because it takes some server "beef" that I don't have (plus I don't mind jumping through the commercials). But I think I am in the minority.

How little "beef" does your machine have?( I thought I was one of the puny ones out there! )
I run a P-4 2.8ghz with 1 gig ram and routinely record record 6 shows at once (4SD, 2HD via HDHomeRun) and can simultaneously play back an HD program to my HD Extender while having my commmercial marking program( ShowAnalyzer) marking one program.

I have SA (ShowAnalyzer) set up to only do one show at a time, wait until the show is done recording before starting to mark the show. I also have it set to limit the CPU usage (very tricky), I forget the percentage offhand.
With whatever the percentage CPU is I can mark SD programs quite quickly and HD programs way better than 1:1 (i.e. it takes less time to mark than to watch a recorded show).

Before I got the HD Extenders (1 in living room, 1 in bedroom) I had some trouble watching transcoded HD programs on my MediaMVP. It did ok if I set the transcode to low (regular?) rather than high quality as long as it wasn't also trying to mark commercials. If it was trying to transcode an HD show as well as trying to mark commercials then the show would become unwatchably jittery. However, now that I have the HD extenders and don't have to worry about transcoding I have no troubles.

[jgourd]

Originally Posted by waynedunham

How little "beef" does your machine have?( I thought I was one of the puny ones out there! )
I run a P-4 2.8ghz with 1 gig ram and routinely record record 6 shows at once (4SD, 2HD via HDHomeRun) and can simultaneously play back an HD program to my HD Extender while having my commmercial marking program( ShowAnalyzer) marking one program.

I run a Core 2 Quad with 2 gig RAM so it is a hefty machine.

[pjpjpjpj]

Originally Posted by waynedunham

How little "beef" does your machine have?( I thought I was one of the puny ones out there! )

It's in my signature.

I may be able to run comskip in some manner but I haven't felt the need (and more specifically, my wife hasn't). So I figure, why pile on another application onto an already-taxed machine, when I don't really care?

As for load on the machine, I have two HDHRs, and the most I believe I have had at once is two HD shows and one SD show recording, while watching an HD show. I can watch SD on the server (using VLC player) but HD crashes it immediately. Of course, I can't have more than two HD streams at once anymore since I only have a 10/100 network and the latest firmware upgrade on the HDHR and Extenders gives me issues. Hopefully that gets resolved before I start to find it being an issue and decide to go buy new hardware.

Background in case you care: I have one of the sets of FF/REW buttons on my HD Extender remote programmed for 2-minute jumps, and the other for 10-second jumps. When a show gets to a commercial, I hit the 2-minute button once right away, then hit the 10-second button a couple of times until I get to the show (depends on the show, whether the breaks are 2 minutes, 2.5, 3, or 3.5).... In some shows with lots of commercial time (*cough*cough*American Idol*cough*cough*) where there are 4-minute commercials, I just hit the 2-minute jump twice. We came over to Sage from Tivo, where you only had scrolling FF/REW (to get through commercials), so this is not even a bit of a hassle comparatively.

[ringobob]

I'm about to try out comskip on my duron 950/768 megs RAM (no separate client). I'll let you know how it goes

[waynedunham]

Originally Posted by pjpjpjpj

It's in my signature.

I may be able to run comskip in some manner but I haven't felt the need (and more specifically, my wife hasn't). So I figure, why pile on another application onto an already-taxed machine, when I don't really care?

As for load on the machine, I have two HDHRs, and the most I believe I have had at once is two HD shows and one SD show recording, while watching an HD show. I can watch SD on the server (using VLC player) but HD crashes it immediately. Of course, I can't have more than two HD streams at once anymore since I only have a 10/100 network and the latest firmware upgrade on the HDHR and Extenders gives me issues. Hopefully that gets resolved before I start to find it being an issue and decide to go buy new hardware.

Background in case you care: I have one of the sets of FF/REW buttons on my HD Extender remote programmed for 2-minute jumps, and the other for 10-second jumps. When a show gets to a commercial, I hit the 2-minute button once right away, then hit the 10-second button a couple of times until I get to the show (depends on the show, whether the breaks are 2 minutes, 2.5, 3, or 3.5).... In some shows with lots of commercial time (*cough*cough*American Idol*cough*cough*) where there are 4-minute commercials, I just hit the 2-minute jump twice. We came over to Sage from Tivo, where you only had scrolling FF/REW (to get through commercials), so this is not even a bit of a hassle comparatively.

Sorry I missed your hardware specs in your sig. 2ghz Celeron probably can't hack doing comskip in addition to everything else on the Sage Server side.
How are your HDHR's hooked up, on the main network or direct to a second nic on the server? If you hook them direct to the server then that might alleviate some of your network congestion problems.
Mine is (only have one HDHR currently) hooked into my gigabit network in the basement on the shelves where all the network equipment is and right next to where the cable comes into the house. Future plans call for a 2nd HDHR at which time I'll hook them direct to the Sage Server (which gets moved to the basement next to the network shelves).

You say you don't miss commercial skipping. All I can say is that's because you haven't had it. I come from the ReplayTV world. My original machines I had to skip/rw to skip commercials. The later models that I have mark commercials automatically and all you have to do is hit the right arrow menu button to skip the commercials. I have Sage set up the same way to skip commercials. Just hit the right menu button to skip the commercial. I don't have auto skip turned on because the commercial marking programs aren't 100% accurate and with autoskip turned on I had troubles backing up when a commercial was mis-marked.

When I went from ReplayTv to Sage I missed the commercial skipping ability of my later ReplayTv's. I had to go back to my old (and your current) method of skipping commercials. Then once I got ShowAnalyzer I was back in business.