What Would You Ask SageTV?

[wado1971]

Although I initially read this tread mostly as friendly jabs and jokes, I could see how brent (or any OP of a thread this type) could start to feel a bit underappreciated for simply doing the community a favor.

Maybe Brent & Jeff conspired to write the OPost together just to show us why SageTV does NOT give out roadmaps & talk about new features being worked on

Brent - BTW: Nice write-up on SMW last week. Crossing my fingers I'll be able to use this for the default in the future.

Edit: Brents previous post beat me to the punch line.

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by Brent

Probably true. But if I were in SageTV's place I wouldn't tout many (if any) new features until they were ready either. Many reasons for this including:

I actually completely disagree with Sage's silence and secrecy.

Originally Posted by Brent

• People getting ticked off because it takes longer than planned
• People getting ticked off because the featureset changes over time or has to be modified/removed before it makes it to production

Honestly, these people are going to find a way to be ticked off no matter what you do. People being unreasonably angry/passionate/whiny/entitled is just noise on the internet.

Originally Posted by Brent

• Competitor stealing ideas and/or stealing their thunder by timing product releases or announcements to take the focus away from said product

What competitors? SnapStream? They stopped making splashes in the industry at least two years ago. Windows Media Center? You couldn't budge their roadmap with a team of oxen. MythTV? They'll never be organized enough to be a real problem. Boxee? Netflix, Hulu, Pandora, Last.FM, Picasa, Flikr, Twitter, Facebook, etc., etc... what ideas exactly do you think they'll be stealing from Sage? A blue-er UI? In fact, I think we would all be thrilled if Sage would start stealing ideas from *them*.

Honestly, I'm just chomping at the bit waiting for Sage to start showing signs of life again, and i'm hoping your interview provides some indication of this. The reason people (including venture capitalists and plug-in devs) are so excited about Boxee is that they're constantly giving them reasons to be excited. They're not some black box that awakens every few months to bestow a new feature before going back into hibernation. They're wide open with an active blog and twitter feed and they've added more features in the last year than Sage has in its entire existence.

[HelenWeathers]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

Honestly, I'm just chomping at the bit waiting for Sage to start showing signs of life again.....

I have to take a bit of an exception to this statement. We get updates for the HD200 and SageTV in multiples on a less than monthly basis. They are alive enough for me.

I'm speculating here, but I am happy to see them concentrate on the foundation right now. HiDef is demanding to deliver, to say the least. I left Media Center 2005 and Vista because I wanted substance over style.

Once the substance is handeled with some sureity, I'm sure the style will follow.

You've got to believe.

[Rob]

In addition, they recently got ripped blu rays playing on the HD100 with pass through of the core audio streams. I've watched a couple dozen movies recently without any issues.

So, I'm thrilled with their recent work. They seem to be alive and kicking.

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by HelenWeathers

I have to take a bit of an exception to this statement. We get updates for the HD200 and SageTV in multiples on a less than monthly basis. They are alive enough for me.

Yeah, but those aren't features, they're bug fixes. Don't get me wrong the last few months have been very encouraging (Bluray, subtitles, channel remapping improvements, metadata, system messages, RC6 compatability), but its all very random and doesn't give off a clear idea of where Sage is going. What's Sage's vision of Sage in 1,2,3+ years, that's what I want to know.

Originally Posted by HelenWeathers

Once the substance is handeled with some sureity, I'm sure the style will follow.

You've got to believe.

If I had more time i'd put together a montage of posts saying the same thing over the last 5 years

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Brent

Probably true. But if I were in SageTV's place I wouldn't tout many (if any) new features until they were ready either. Many reasons for this including:

• People getting ticked off because it takes longer than planned
• People getting ticked off because the featureset changes over time or has to be modified/removed before it makes it to production
• Competitor stealing ideas and/or stealing their thunder by timing product releases or announcements to take the focus away from said product

Yeah, not that it will make any of the "complainers" feel better, but those of us who have been around a while will clearly remember the whole Studio "fiasco". Back in the early days, V1, V2, Dan, and especially Jeff were quite active on this forum. Sage was their baby, and the forum was a small, almost family and Jeff and Dan would freely answer almost any question. It was exactly what most here think they want. We had some idea what was coming and when.

Shortly after V2 came out, Jeff revealed that it used an entirely "new" concept for programming the UI. He stopped by the forum to tell us (in sort of generalities) about the new development tool they used. He was obviously very excited and proud of what they were calling "Studio". The immediate question on everyone's mind was would it be available to end users to customize the UI. Jeff of course told us yes, and that it would be freely available to all registered users as part of V3.

Well weeks passed, and then months IIRC, and no Studio, a ruckus like you wouldn't believe grew into a veritable firestorm as each day passed. People were irate about being "lied" to about it's availability. Well we'd later come to learn that Studio was indeed part of V3, but V3 never made it to public consumption (or at least not V3 w/ studio can't remember exact details), the public version with Studio included became known as V4. And the ruckus/firestorm continued for a while (even though V4 was a free upgrade) because the availability was not as soon as was "promised" and not in the version promised.

Ever since Sage has kept their future plans very close to the vest. They pretty much don't tell us anything until it's imminent and they are basically positive the "new thing" will be ready in a few days/weeks. The Hulu thing may well be another example, they showed it at CES but the environment has changed and it appears Hulu is dead set against "CE" devices working with it.

So we all wish we had more insight into future plans, but Sage has been burned once quite badly for missing a "planned" feature release, and it's clear they're not going to make that mistake again.

[babgvant]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

I actually completely disagree with Sage's silence and secrecy.

We must have very different definitions for "silence and secrecy". Compared to the other player, Sage is very transparent.

e.g.

Sage:
I wanted to make embedded SRT subs work on the PC, so I asked Jeff about it. He suggested an approach that made use of some undocumented functionality and provided sample code for invoking a similar method.

Other Player:
I wanted to get line21 GOP subs working in their player so I figured out how to stream them into the container they use for TV and noticed that while it worked in GraphEdt, it didn't in their player. So I asked someone in their dev group; after playing Jeopardy (had to formulate the question perfectly) I finally got back that the sub/cc format was undocumented and there was no way short of reverse engineering the data structures to make it work.

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

Honestly, I'm just chomping at the bit waiting for Sage to start showing signs of life again, and i'm hoping your interview provides some indication of this. The reason people (including venture capitalists and plug-in devs) are so excited about Boxee is that they're constantly giving them reasons to be excited. They're not some black box that awakens every few months to bestow a new feature before going back into hibernation. They're wide open with an active blog and twitter feed and they've added more features in the last year than Sage has in its entire existence.

I'd rather have Sage spend their dev $ on functionality that is difficult for the community to provide (like BDMV navigators and tuner integration) than snazzy UI, blogging, or tweeting.

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by babgvant

We must have very different definitions for "silence and secrecy". Compared to the other player, Sage is very transparent.

Fair point, Sage has been very helpful to me in the past as well.

You'll have to excuse me, I think i'm projecting my remodeling frusterations on my SageTV setup and by extension Sage itself

[PLUCKYHD]

Coming from media center I felt like I was in a dark abyss only to have some light at the end of the tunnel but once you reached the light it was just really a hole that made you fall further into "what could have been" HELL! Talk about a platform with huge potienal that has fallen and in my opinion will never get up but will give you a new flashier UI with no real new features to try and blind you from what you should have

Okay enough of my anger at media center I think sage is much more open and listens grealy to request I am one that doesn't mind the ui being left up to users as long as the core function is there to make it useable

[Narflex]

Originally Posted by Polypro

What would I ask SageTV? Hmmmm....

I'd ask them to put a Donate link on their main page...cuz I ain't paid them anything in like 3 years and life would suck more if they went under

P

Edit: The above post was mainly for humor and kudos, not an actual worry.

In the past we've received shipments of beer from happy customers. (mmmm, Belgians... )

[toricred]

Just so we know how much beer to send, how many people will there be consuming it?

[Fuzzy]

Does it really matter? I'm sure no matter how much is sent, it will be consumed...

[Brent]

The post for the interview is finally complete. I plan to post on Monday barring any further distractions (disclaimer: I reserve the right to take even longer and therefore create even more craziness in this thread - but I'm just saying that in case)

I understand most of the crankiness in this thread was completely harmless - but I got up on the wrong side of the bed yesterday after having been forced to work remotely while on my vacation for the past few days and hence I was a little grumpy in response...

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

The reason people (including venture capitalists and plug-in devs) are so excited about Boxee is that they're constantly giving them reasons to be excited. They're not some black box that awakens every few months to bestow a new feature before going back into hibernation. They're wide open with an active blog and twitter feed and they've added more features in the last year than Sage has in its entire existence.

I'm not sure what excitement they've created beyond the Hulu thing.

I'm a little familiar with venture capital and I personally wouldn't want to be in Boxee's situation. They are being pushed to create enough buzz as fast as possible (and therefore burning through that VC money to pay for a very expensive PR firm to create that buzz) so they can get their user base up, then they'll be pushed even harder to start making money and quickly get cut off from the VC money.

I like Boxee because of the online content it pulls into the 10 foot interface. But overall Boxee has years of work to get their app as stable & usable as SageTV, BeyondTV or even MediaCenter. It's good to have good competition and great to have the new ideas injected, but other than that it's really no better than XBMC or Plex so I can't for the life of me see how they will turn a profit or even find a revenue stream and therefore I don't understand how the software willl survive for the longer term.

Originally Posted by wado1971

Maybe Brent & Jeff conspired to write the OPost together just to show us why SageTV does NOT give out roadmaps & talk about new features being worked on

It is sort of ironic. But no conspiracy

Originally Posted by Narflex

In the past we've received shipments of beer from happy customers. (mmmm, Belgians... )

Don't worry, I'm in the process of testing a variety of beers as I want to make sure only the best quality is shipped - no guarantee on shipment date though

[toricred]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

Does it really matter? I'm sure no matter how much is sent, it will be consumed...

I was just trying to figure out how many employees they have.

[Rob]

Originally Posted by Brent

Don't worry, I'm in the process of testing a variety of beers as I want to make sure only the best quality is shipped - no guarantee on shipment date though

That's a great idea. Three day weekend, several new blu-ray movies and beer testing. Perfect!

[rlvogel322]

Originally Posted by Narflex

In the past we've received shipments of beer from happy customers. (mmmm, Belgians... )

When I get into my Belgian rotation again I'll have to get an address. The only one on tap at the moment is a Saison. Not enough left to send (maybe three pints left).

Working on the fall rotation and consuming mass quanities of wheats, IPAs and a summer stout. I love having four on tap all the time

Back on topic, looking forward to Monday Brent. I appreciate all the work that you have done and will do on GeekTonic. Some great information out there.

[babgvant]

Originally Posted by Narflex

In the past we've received shipments of beer from happy customers. (mmmm, Belgians... )

Wouldn't it be great if there was a service like Paypal for buying someone a beer?

[MeInMaui]

Originally Posted by babgvant

Wouldn't it be great if there was a service like Paypal for buying someone a beer?

I used Internet Wine and Spirits a few times to sent beer to Dirk(flachbar). They even carried his favorite (Czechvar).

Aloha,
Mike

[babgvant]

Originally Posted by MeInMaui

I used Internet Wine and Spirits a few times to sent beer to Dirk(flachbar). They even carried his favorite (Czechvar).

Aloha,
Mike

I wonder if they have an API...

[toricred]

Originally Posted by MeInMaui

I used Internet Wine and Spirits a few times to sent beer to Dirk(flachbar). They even carried his favorite (Czechvar).

Aloha,
Mike

Do you know how flachbar is doing? We haven't heard from him in a long time.