Music and video playback functionality in Sage 7 (HD300)

[Comitizer]

Hello Everyone,

So I just received my HD300 and I've swapped out my Windows 7 client machine. The WAF is way up because I was able to velcro the HD300 to the back of the TV so everything looks much cleaner. I must admit, I'm really impressed with the device.

However, as a result of the change, I'm no longer able to use XBMC for music and movie playback. In the past, I was switching to XBMC for these items because I like the way it looks / behaves and I wasn't a huge fan of the video and music functionality in Sage and I didn't want to take the time to figure it out.

So, now that I'm committed to using my HD300 I'm trying to figure out how to get everything working the way that I would like and I've encountered a couple of issues. I'm hoping that the community can help me come up with some solutions.

First, I figured out how to get Sage to randomly play through my entire library. This feature is similar to "party mode" in XBMC and was one of the things holding me back. If anyone is wondering it's in the "playlists" section.

The problem is that it's not possible for me to skip to the next song. I always thought this was because I was using an incorrectly configured remote with my client machine (which is why I didn't look into it) but I have the same problem with my HD300.

If I press "FF" or "Skip FW2" it switches the view from "folder", "playlists", etc (which seems odd). If I press "Skip FW" it skips forward in the song. This behaviour doesn't make any sense to me and isn't how any other app or player behaves. Am I doing something wrong? Is there a way to "fix" this because I can't actually skip tracks without opening the options menu and clicking "next song".

To make things odder, I can skip tracks in the full screen view with the "channel" buttons but these are page up / dn in the music view (and the view never automatically switches to full screen anyway).

Second, is there a way to have imported TV shows group by season? It takes FOREVER to scroll through my video list because I have hundreds of episodes and they are all listed seperate.

All in all, I love Sage. It's so nice to have a solid extender product. If I had known about them I would've never built the client (it was originally built for 7MC).

[SWKerr]

I don't like the way the FF works for music as well but it is fairly consistent with Video playback. I only use the Client but if you pull up the info\option menu there is a skip option there you can scroll to.

Are you are importing the TV shows as TV in BMT and they are part of the Recordings Library?

If you have the metadata for it the TV Explorer plugin will do what you want but you will have to use SageMC as I don't believe it works in v7 at this point. I suspect that this will be a feature that shows up in some of the GUI plugins that will come out soon.

[Comitizer]

Well I can handle the FF and REW being a skip vs. a smooth operation but I'd like an easier way to skip tracks. On every other device (DVD players, CD players, etc) the skip button skips to the next track. In Sage, this isn't the case. It seems just plain wrong to me.

What's the reason for this behavior?

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by Comitizer

Second, is there a way to have imported TV shows group by season? It takes FOREVER to scroll through my video list because I have hundreds of episodes and they are all listed seperate.

Do you have them stored on your hard drive in sub-folders that are arranged that way? If so, you can use the "folder view" for the imported videos. I think that's probably how most people are doing it.

[Comitizer]

Yeah, that's how I have it listed. It's not bad but I believe (I'm at work so I can't check) that it still lists the DVD rips separate (instead of having them in their folder). I'm not a fan of that either.

I don't really want a separation between DVD/BR Rips, I just want all my videos as one. Does anyone out there actually think "I want to watch a DVD" or do you think "I want to watch Indiana Jones".

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by Comitizer

Yeah, that's how I have it listed. It's not bad but I believe (I'm at work so I can't check) that it still lists the DVD rips separate (instead of having them in their folder). I'm not a fan of that either.

I don't really want a separation between DVD/BR Rips, I just want all my videos as one. Does anyone out there actually think "I want to watch a DVD" or do you think "I want to watch Indiana Jones".

Agreed. I guess I could see having some custom filtering options to filter in/out DVD's or BluRays, or other video files, but really, the main goal is to watch a movie and who cares what format it's in.

Because DVD's are a collection of files stored in a folder as opposed to a single video file, Sage treats the DVD folder the same as a video file. So, if you either bury your DVD's one folder deeper, or move your other video files one layer further up, it should sort them together.

So I think:
\\movies\terminatorDVD\terminator\video_ts\*.VOB
\\movies\terminator2\terminator2.mpg
\\movies\star wars\star wars.avi


should sort correctly with "star wars" first - I think. But, you will have to click through an extra layer on all the single file videos.

[Comitizer]

It's sort of annoying because I've never seen another piece of software behave this way. So there isn't a plugin or something that works like this?

[Tomahawk51]

Behold the powers of (thread) resurrection:

(yes, I RTFM) So going back to the OP's question on SKIPPING TRACKS...

I finally just setup a music share for SageTV (Sonos motivated a change actually). The v7 updates, and probably Diamond, make this much better than I last remember.

On an extender, I do find that channel up/down will skip if I am in a visualization. If I'm just browsing the list of albums, it pages up/down. The other ff/skip buttons only move ahead in the song, as described in the post. I get the page up/down thing, but wondering if someone can clarify:

Is it possible to skip tracks while looking at, say, a list of albums? I just find that I'm much more likely to want to skip while building out a playlist of albums vs. going to the visualization.

Just wondering if I am missing something...thanks for any input.