Sage7 Feature Requests?

[texneus]

Does anyone know how to officially submit feature requests for SageTV 7?

What I'd like to see, all pretty minor stuff -- mostly polishing -- in no particular order:

1) The ability to play CDs. This is one thing that is sorely missing. In WMC, you just put a disk in and it plays, you don't even have to turn on the TV. In SageTV, you have to sit in front of the TV, rip it first with a separate program, then import it, then play it. It's much easier and quicker just to drop the disk in and have it play automatically (if you ask me).

2) Recognize the MS Audio decoder in Vista/Win7 without having to edit the sage.properties file (if not for this I wouldn't have to touch the properties file at all). Defaulting to AC3 filter is fine, but until it's configured it decodes everything to 2 channel PCM audio. The MS decoder passes DTS/DD "out of the box" and doesn't require configuration beyond setting up windows audio.

3) There needs to be a way to call an external program to do specific tasks. In my case I want to use TMT3 to play BRD/DVD. Dynamic menus (ala SageMC) would take care of this, but it need not be that complicated to solve this specific issue.

4) Please please please...when a user pushes the sleep button and Sage is recording something, have it go to away mode rather than cancel the recording and go to sleep. I don't always catch that it's doing something and most of the family don't even think about it. It's just a natural thing to turn everything off when they're done. It's very annoying to find little chunks of a program recorded at a much later date.

5) Enable users to select their own background pictures in the menus.

6) Turn the mouse off. It should just go away after a few seconds of inactivity. Instead it stays annoyingly on top of everything, menus, liveTV, videos, everything! You have to move it off to the side of the screen manually to get rid of it.

7) Speaking of mouse, there needs to be a way to navigate to the "options" at the bottom RH of the screen. It is impossible for me to get to it without having to get the mouse out to click on it.

8) In the program guide, when I press enter on a program currently in progress, chances are it is because I want to watch it. Please just have it go to that program without the intermediate menu. If I want to record it, I can press record. If I want to record a future airing, it's trivial to search for it.

9) When Sage is configured to minimize to the tray on exit, then I exit SageTV using the menus, it completely exits rather than minimizing. I can't fathom any reason why it should ignore this setting (incidentally, I did submit this as a bug, but Sage responded that this was normal behavior ). If there is a reason for this behaviour, then I want the option to disable it.

Thanks for listening!

[GKusnick]

4) Use service mode. Then you can sleep the UI without interrupting recordings.

5) You can do this now using themes.

6) The mouse cursor does go away on inactivity. It comes back again if you move the mouse (or accidentally nudge it), but tapping any key (e.g. the Shift key or Info button) will restart the timer to make it go away again.

8) There has to be some way to get to that dialog, and Enter is it. Use Play if you want to bypass it.

9) I don't have an explanation for this behavior, but again, using service mode ensures that no recordings will be lost as a result. In my opinion there's really no good reason not to use service mode.

And by the way, you can use the bug report form or the betatest email address to submit feature requests.

[HelenWeathers]

Originally Posted by texneus

9) When Sage is configured to minimize to the tray on exit, then I exit SageTV using the menus, it completely exits rather than minimizing. I can't fathom any reason why it should ignore this setting (incidentally, I did submit this as a bug, but Sage responded that this was normal behavior ). If there is a reason for this behaviour, then I want the option to disable it.

Thanks for listening!

When you right arrow on the Exit menu item, you should have two choices: Exit SageTV and Standby. Exit SageTV unloads SageTV - I think Standby behaves the way you're used to.

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by texneus

7) Speaking of mouse, there needs to be a way to navigate to the "options" at the bottom RH of the screen. It is impossible for me to get to it without having to get the mouse out to click on it.

You can hit the "options" button on your remote to bring it up. If yo don't have an options button, remap a button so that it is the options button.

[Khristopher]

Originally Posted by ke6guj

You can hit the "options" button on your remote to bring it up. If yo don't have an options button, remap a button so that it is the options button.

Generally the * button on your remote will bring up the Options dialog.

[texneus]

Thanks for the feedback, some of this may be my status as a recent WMC convert, so bear with me as I explain some of these more...

GK -

4) Service mode doesn't matter. You can sleep the UI with or without being in service mode and it will continue to record. But, I'm not talking about sleeping the UI, I'm talking about sleeping the computer, as in S3 standby when somebody presses a power button. If this can be interrupted to sleep the UI instead I'd love to know how!

5) I don't think anyone should have to spend hours learning how to create and compile themes for something as simple as personalizing the background art. Obviously this is not high priority, just something to make the product more polished.

6) Hate to disagree with you but it does not. The cursor will stay front and center from the time the windows desktop appears and Sage initializes. It does not go away in 1 minute, 1 hour, or even after 1 day. Nobody moves the mouse, it sits on a book shelf well away from everyone. I can turn the mouse off to guarantee there is no input, it simply does not matter. It's on and stays on until I move it off the screen.

8) I didn't know about pressing play, which will take some getting used to but is acceptable. I don't necessarily agree that this menu is needed though. No other PVR/DVR I have ever used brings up a secondary menu when a live TV program is selected. To each there own!

9) Except that on a one box machine, I had endless trouble running in service mode in 6.6 under win7. You are fundamentally correct though and I should try it again now that Sage is "fixed" for Win7. But it still does not resolve the apparent issue that SageTV does not follow how you set it in the settings.

Heather - The standby option starts the screen saver, which is what I want Sage to do in Standby (and incidentally this follows how it is set).

Kh/Ke - I don't have an options button but the * button does the job on my MCE remote. None-the-less I have neither button on my universal, but it's due for retirement anyway. Regardless, it should be reachable with the arrow keys. That's just good design that all UI elements are easily accessible, even to those without an MCE remote. :-)

Thanks again for everyone's help!

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by texneus

4) Service mode doesn't matter. You can sleep the UI with or without being in service mode and it will continue to record. But, I'm not talking about sleeping the UI, I'm talking about sleeping the computer, as in S3 standby when somebody presses a power button. If this can be interrupted to sleep the UI instead I'd love to know how!

I can't speak for Win7, but in XP, Control Panel > Power Options > Advanced gives you the option to control what happens when you push Power or Sleep. Not sure if that meets your needs. I personally don't use S3 standby on my Sage server but just leave it running 24/7.

Originally Posted by texneus

5) I don't think anyone should have to spend hours learning how to create and compile themes for something as simple as personalizing the background art. Obviously this is not high priority, just something to make the product more polished.

It doesn't take hours to create a theme (as opposed to a UI mod or full-blown UI replacement). A theme is just a folder under STVs/SageTV7/Themes with some image files in it (see Appendix O of the manual). Look in the Standard theme folder, find the files you want to replace, drop some image files in your own theme folder and give them those filenames. Hard to see how it could be much simpler.

Originally Posted by texneus

6) Hate to disagree with you but it does not. The cursor will stay front and center from the time the windows desktop appears and Sage initializes. It does not go away in 1 minute, 1 hour, or even after 1 day. Nobody moves the mouse, it sits on a book shelf well away from everyone. I can turn the mouse off to guarantee there is no input, it simply does not matter. It's on and stays on until I move it off the screen.

Are you running Sage in a window instead of full-screen? On all my XP machines, the cursor does disappear in full-screen mode. If it's not doing that for you, then there's something odd about your setup and you might want to take it up with Support.

[taylormadearmy]

Originally Posted by texneus

8) I didn't know about pressing play, which will take some getting used to but is acceptable. I don't necessarily agree that this menu is needed though. No other PVR/DVR I have ever used brings up a secondary menu when a live TV program is selected. To each there own!

I agree with you here - certainly with SageMC pressing enter just selected liveTV. Would be nice to have this option with Sage7.

Pressing play is a good tip though so thanks for that!

T

[49studebaker]

Originally Posted by texneus

8) In the program guide, when I press enter on a program currently in progress, chances are it is because I want to watch it. Please just have it go to that program without the intermediate menu. If I want to record it, I can press record. If I want to record a future airing, it's trivial to search for it.

Try my "Hide Options Menu when tuning a Live TV show" plugin.

[texneus]

Power options in Vista and Win7 only enable sleep, hibernate, and power off (I think the same options in XP). Microsoft, in it's infinite wisdom, does not give a way to force away mode.

Sage is running full screen, I guess I'll send that in as a bug report. Might be something unique with Windows 7 (or the video card), it did this in 6.6 as well.

3Doptics -- Thanks, might be just what the doctor ordered!

[sportera]

Originally Posted by texneus

3) There needs to be a way to call an external program to do specific tasks. In my case I want to use TMT3 to play BRD/DVD. Dynamic menus (ala SageMC) would take care of this, but it need not be that complicated to solve this specific issue.

This is a BIG ONE on my list. Right now I have to exit Sage and load TMT3 to play a Blu-ray DVD. Ran into a snag running Sage Launcher as it restarts Sage while using remote in TMT3. Now I have to go into task manager and shut down Sage Launcher as well to play a BR DVD in TMT3.

I don't know about others, but since I started getting Blu-ray vs DVD from Netflix, I find it hard to watch a regular DVD anymore.

I'm wondering, since there is now a SageMC for v7 out there, if that might be the way to go until Sage does something to allow Blu-ray disk playback. Only thing is I could never figure out how to get Blu-ray external playback working in SageMC in the earlier versions. Guess I go post on the SageMC forum and get the scoop.

[taylormadearmy]

Originally Posted by 3dOptics

Try my "Hide Options Menu when tuning a Live TV show" plugin.

Awesome - works great - thanks!