What about an Open Source frontend for Sage on top of XBMC?

[wayner]

First off - I am not a developer and I haven't used XBMC, but is this possible?

Write an XBMC plugin (or whatever XBMC calls it) that would give pretty much all of the capabilities that exist in a Sage client (or extender) that would connect to a Sage server that still does all of the recording?

Media playback sould be pretty easy as this is already part of XBMC - wouldn't this just be a case or transferring metadata from Sage which could be done from .properties files or even reading the metadata that Sage stores in recording files (starting in V7).

The Sage Web Server allows you to browse guide data, browse recordings, browse upcoming recordings, schedule recordings, etc - couldn't an XBMC plugin be written that would call the Sage APIs to do these functions.

Perhaps live or currently recording TV would be an issue but couldn't pretty much everything else be done?

I don't know if all of this could be done in iOS to run on an ATV2 but it should be doable on PCs, shouldn't it?

Is this possible or a stupid idea?

[david1234]

With HTML 5, you should be able to modify the sage web interface to stream video without too much trouble. Then you could use a simple browser just like a placeshifter client. Might need to do some transcoding though, I've been reading about html5 video, and I don't see where mpeg2 is going to be supported by anyone.

...Ihaven'ttriedthissodon'tflamemeifI'mwrong...

[wayner]

Now that you mention it - a lot of this is done today in stuff like TiSageTV on iDevices - including video streaming but it isn't yet as reliable as Sage.

[wayner]

It looks like someone started working on something similar 9 months ago:

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=80868

And here is some posts in this forum by the same person:

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=52340

And it looks like even more was done here: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=87261

edit - D'oh - I didn't have the foresight to look down the page a wee bit to see this thread:
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=56168

[Skirge01]

From what I've gathered in my preliminary venture into this, bradvido's script does all of this, except for allowing live TV, anything not finished recording, or scheduling recordings. Basically, the PVR features. However, once they're completed, this script allows XBMC to see them as just another video file, with all the matching metadata.

[wayner]

Sounds good - the current script doesn't change your files at all, does it? Could I install XBMC on one of the PCs on my LAN and try it out by importing media files without screwing up Sage?

[Skirge01]

As long as you set it up to use symlinks, yes. That's exactly what I'm trying to get working. Although, being the overly cautious person I am, I did set up a test folder with just 2 recordings and associated files (properties, edl, etc).

An awesome feature of his script is that it keeps the status of the shows in sync between the two systems, too (watched, position, last played date).