XBMC as a sage client?

gveres · #1 06-21-2011, 10:56 PM

Has anybody tried this and gotten it to work nicely?

There are two things driving me to look at this. First is that the Mac placeshifter client is incredibly slow and frustrating and since I just purchased a Colossus I have found that it wont play those files back at all, even though a program like VLC will play them back fine.

The thing that drove me to look into this now was the google deal. But the slow mac performance is the real impetuous.

I looked into XBMC a bit. Here are the features that I think are a must from XBMC:

being able to see my recordings
having my recordings organized by TV show like they are in Sage
being able to delete a watched show as I can in Sage
being able to have xbmc get the current location of where I am in a show from sage
being able to set the current location of where I am in a show back to sage

I think if I could do that with an integration I would be a very happy camper with xbmc. I think that means that I would have to use SJQ to move recordings around:

Movies would have to go to their own folder (xbmc doesn't deal with mixed tv and movies)
each show would have to go into its own directory

These two things I think are generally useful anyway when my wife wants to find a show outside of sage.

Has anybody tried doing this and could share their wisdom?

Thanks
Greg

jhh · #2 06-22-2011, 05:15 AM

hi,

Most of what you want can be done - there are 2 ways to go: one is a SageTV script which is a python script in xbmc and the other one is a plugin which is an xml file that instructs xbmc to get content from the SageTV webserver.

My feeling is that you are between platforms - why would you want to see things organised as in SageTV and why jump back and forth between the two with current location in a video? I wouldn't want to convince my houshold to use a different way to get to content on different screens.

I ended up with the xbmc as the frontend and the plugin which makes SageTV a source for videos and use SageTV as a backend only. It is the webserver that glues everything together. Reason for that is that this way xbmc has a consistent skin whereas if you use the script it looks a bit different.

I think if you do a search on xbmc and plugin you'd be able to find something.

Jan

gveres · #3 06-22-2011, 01:36 PM

Hi Jan

Thanks for the info. You say that you ended up with xbmc as the frontend using a plugin. Is the plugin that sageTV python script? I did see mention of it so I should be able to find it fairly easily.

The reason I stated my requirements to include xbmc telling sage where the current watch point is for each video is because we often do move from watching in one location to watching in another location. I have two hd300s, a couple hd100s and placeshifter on any of the Macs in the house.

The reason I am looking at this is that the HD300 is barely fast enough with sage7 and the Mac client is horrifically slow.

The other thing that I ran across last night is that I was reading a blog post about xbmc and it says that it has to scrape the directory every time the contents change and this can be slow. It seems that xbmc is best suited for a static library, but with a PVR system, the contents are changing every hour. Are you using xbmc to watch your TV recordings? How is it working for you?

Also, I think that means that xbmc would be scraping the directory system on each client individually because it is a client based system only right? I think I saw that you can setup the fanart to be in directories so that the scraping isn't necessary. Are you doing that? If so, are you using something like SJQ to move TV shows into their own directories?

Thanks
Greg

jhh · #4 06-22-2011, 02:38 PM

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