Feature Request: Syncing with other TV's with SageTV

[jarredduq]

I've seen this requested for audio, but I would like to request this especially for Live TV. I have a TV in my living room (SageTV running on HTPC) and and another TV in my Family room (SageTV HD200 extender) just off of my living room.

The problem I have is if I'm trying to watch the same program in both rooms. I can never get them to be in sync. This is especially irritating, if you have people over and you watching a sporting event, etc.

It would be cool if you could pull up the options menu, and there was a button for "SYNC With." You would select it and it would bring up a list of available SageTV instances/locations to sync with.

Thanks,

Jarred

[ThePaladinTech]

As far as I know Sage is unicast and you'd need a multicast stream to have it synced. I tried this out for a different application and the slight (>3 second) differences in timing were unacceptable. we ended up using VLC to stream a mutlicast our to several pcs receiving the stream (again with VLC)

but I would agree it would be nice if sage could do that!

[bsung]

Originally Posted by enzominator

As far as I know Sage is unicast and you'd need a multicast stream to have it synced. I tried this out for a different application and the slight (>3 second) differences in timing were unacceptable. we ended up using VLC to stream a mutlicast our to several pcs receiving the stream (again with VLC)

but I would agree it would be nice if sage could do that!

I agree. I posted for this option under a different thread about a SageTV wishlist. I sometimes manually sync them by hitting pause and play. Biggest problem is that skipping commercials or anything like that puts them out of sync again. It seems as if one HD200 should be able to report back to the server that its currently playing back a specific point in the video and the other HD200 could just play from that spot or 1 second forward (to account for some delay). Some slight mismatch in time might be unavoidable but it seems as if it should be doable.

[GKusnick]

This is frequently requested feature that has been discussed a number of times before. Here are a few such threads:

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=40760
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=40774
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=39572
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=28379
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=26391

The bottom line is that Sage was designed for independent playback on each client, with no provision for synchronized playback across multiple clients. You could kluge something up with an add-on to relay Pause and Play commands from one client to another, but you won't achieve perfect sync that way, and perfect sync is (in my opinion) a requirement for multi-room music playback.