Come Back to SageTV - Open Source in "Near" Future

[dgeezer]

I personally would love to see the shield tv as I client. I already own one and an using it for Netflix, kodi and as a client for npvr. It's working great. It has been rock solid and works with my Logitech remote. Hopefully, if nvidia nvidia sees enough demand for thethe shield as a media device they will consider offering it without the controller.

[jm9843]

Originally Posted by coppit

I work for NVIDIA, on the streaming gaming part of the Shield. It already has a Plex app, and maybe I could help facilitate a SageTV app. e.g. Get a device donated to a SageTV dev.

Firstly, kudos to you and everyone else at Nvidia working on Shield. It's a great device and the Nvidia software/services make me giddy (e.g. Gamestream, GRID).

A SageTV client for Android TV needs to happen. One thing that you could do to help facilitate that eventuality is to push for more supported infrared remote codes on Shield. I haven't got a chance to try a universal remote with it yet, but it's my understanding that the "Harmony remote" support doesn't have things like the number pad mapped. Ideally, the remote profile would support any Android KeyEvents relevant to Sage that would be necessary to mimic controlling an HD300.

While you could map Sage commands to the keyboard and use Flirc, it'd be a shame if it didn't "just work" out of the box since Nvidia went to the trouble of including an ir receiver.

[reggie14]

I'd be very interested in a SHIELD/Android TV app, so long as it supported all (or at least most) of the features of the HD300. The $200 price tag doesn't bother me much, and wouldn't really bother me at all if it meant I didn't need to have a Roku box at each TV to get Netflix, HBO Go and Amazon Instant Video (or at least the first two).

[stlbearboy]

Originally Posted by coppit

Here's another crazy idea... If the Raspberry Pi is a bit underpowered, I bet the NVIDIA Shield wouldn't be. http://shield.nvidia.com/

I work for NVIDIA, on the streaming gaming part of the Shield. It already has a Plex app, and maybe I could help facilitate a SageTV app. e.g. Get a device donated to a SageTV dev.

At first I was going to propose that we start up a "reference design for extender hardware", but it seems better to use off-the-shelf hardware and focus on the software to utilize it.

The concern with the Shield is that NVIDIA did not license the Mpeg2 Codec for hardware acceleration/de-interlacing. In the reviews I have read local file playback of interlaced content was not very good.

[jm9843]

Originally Posted by stlbearboy

The concern with the Shield is that NVIDIA did not license the Mpeg2 Codec for hardware acceleration/de-interlacing.

MPEG2 was enabled in hardware last week in the 1.2 update.

[pjpjpjpj]

If Shield can be made to have a fully-functional remote (as mentioned above), it might be close to the "all sources in one box" idea that was discussed earlier (I think in this very thread)... where you wouldn't have to switch inputs on your TV, you would just use the menu within the device to switch between Sage (presumably for DVR content and for access to your personal media collection of movies, videos, music, photos), and streaming inputs like netflix. And you'd get gaming thrown in as a bonus!

I still have a bunch of extenders that are working fine. My kids are small but before I know it, they'll be using the TV themselves and eventually will want to play video games as well (I suspect). This would be a great all-in-one device that I could put at one TV (where the kids would be gaming) and leave Sage extenders at the other TVs. From that respect, a $200 price tag wouldn't bother me at all... an extra $50 above the HD300 original price to get a device that has native gaming, Google Play Store access for apps, and even 4K capability? Sounds darn good to me.

[Narflex]

Doing an android port for a media extender client shouldn't be all that bad to do if it supports the proper media formats. The placeshifter client is written in Java, so that would be a great starting point.

[Tomahawk51]

There is something elegant, or even appropriate, about Sage being OSed by Google and the future of extenders involving (Google) Android.

I'd go for the Shield @ $200 without much hesitation for the record as well. It would be great to get a few extra uses out of it.

[Eckwell]

Me Too!

[pdermody]

Is android still limited on what it can pass on the audio side (ie bitstreaming truehd/dts-hd/etc) ? Or did they resolve that? Just wondering out loud since I see folks discussing an android port is all... That and I would be curious if android would allow for native output resolution. In the meanwhile I did buy a couple hd300's as spares...

-pd

[wayner]

I don't mind the $200 for one or two extenders but I have nine (HD300s and HD300s). I don't want to be paying $1800 to replace them all. I think I even have three spare HD200s that I acquired in case my existing he started to die. It turns out I was overly cautious as these will very likely be unnecessary in the near future.

[stanger89]

Why would you replace them all? It's unlikely new extenders will provide additional functionality, at least not for a long time. They probably won't even quite measure up (no Native Resolution Swtiching, etc) for a while, if ever.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Why would you replace them all? It's unlikely new extenders will provide additional functionality, at least not for a long time. They probably won't even quite measure up (no Native Resolution Swtiching, etc) for a while, if ever.

Hopefully I won't have to replace them all but is possible that new functionality may mean that OS Sage 8 will not be backwards compatible with old extenders.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by wayner

Hopefully I won't have to replace them all but is possible that new functionality may mean that OS Sage 8 will not be backwards compatible with old extenders.

I can't forsee anything that might break backward compatibility with the existing extenders. I know nothing has been discussed that would.

[wayner]

I hope ypu're right but I guess files using new codecs like H.265 won't be backward compatible, at least not without transcoding, but that is something that I can control by not using files of that type.

[Eternal]

Is it possible to make captions work with non sage decoders?

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by wayner

Hopefully I won't have to replace them all but is possible that new functionality may mean that OS Sage 8 will not be backwards compatible with old extenders.

Unless the community does something stupid, backward compatibility won't be broken.

To be completely honest, I expect a lot of people are going to be (very) disappointed with the Open Source development. I think development/advances will be a lot slower than a lot of folks are expecting. I expect, for a long time, the only thing that will come out of OS-ing Sage will be the ability to do new installs without needing a license. New extenders? I wouldn't get my hopes up to see anything inside a year. Android, maybe that will be easier.

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Unless the community does something stupid, backward compatibility won't be broken.

To be completely honest, I expect a lot of people are going to be (very) disappointed with the Open Source development. I think development/advances will be a lot slower than a lot of folks are expecting. I expect, for a long time, the only thing that will come out of OS-ing Sage will be the ability to do new installs without needing a license. New extenders? I wouldn't get my hopes up to see anything inside a year. Android, maybe that will be easier.

I totally agree with you and I also do not see licensed users jumping to the OS anytime soon.... at least until EPG data is addressed in OS version.

[Slugger]

Originally Posted by stanger89

To be completely honest, I expect a lot of people are going to be (very) disappointed with the Open Source development. I think development/advances will be a lot slower than a lot of folks are expecting. I expect, for a long time, the only thing that will come out of OS-ing Sage will be the ability to do new installs without needing a license. New extenders? I wouldn't get my hopes up to see anything inside a year. Android, maybe that will be easier.

Originally Posted by nyplayer

I totally agree with you and I also do not see licensed users jumping to the OS anytime soon.... at least until EPG data is addressed in OS version.

So true. It's exactly what I'm thinking (both quotes).

I think it's really going to come down to how much new blood joins the party. Speaking for myself, as part of the "old guard" of developers, SageTV 7.1.9 and how I currently have it deployed in my house does everything I need it to do. I have no incentive/desire to move to the OS version. The only thing that would do immediately is add a lot of work to get me back to where I am today. As I've discussed else where, my Schedules Direct plugin won't work with the OS version of Sage as is. So to move to the OS version, I have to fix/rewrite my epg plugin or move back to the Sage epg (and lose features of my plugin I've come to take for granted). I'm more than happy to stay right where I am. Not sure about anyone else, but I feel like a lot of the existing devs are probably feeling the same way (to some degree).

I will definitely read the source and probably even tinker with it on my own fork, but updating & supporting plugins in the plugin repo ecosystem? I don't think I'm heading back down that road and unless that new killer feature comes to be, I really don't expect to ever update my current production server away from 7.1.9 that's happily sitting in my basement.

Now, some new devs come along with some new ideas and add something to the OS version that I can't live without, well then maybe I upgrade and bite the bullet on having to update my existing plugins, etc. But I think it's going to take some new blood to join in to spark some excitement/momentum for open source.

And a year for something significant? I'd even suggest that's best case scenario. Let's assume Narflex has been working at prepping the code base for release since his announcement. That's a few months and no sign of an imminent release coming so he's still working on it. How long does it take the community OS devs to read and comprehend this code base before it can start to be modified meaningfully? And yes, he's definitely not working on it full time, but that's also a very important point. No OS devs are going to be working on features full time either. A feature that takes 3 weeks to implement, might take that person 6 months to complete if they can only work on it a few hours a week. That's going to be the reality of the OS version. So I'd agree a year after the code is available seems like a minimum for "major" new features unless there's an major influx of new devs wanting to join in, which hopefully there will be.

[Monedeath]

Originally Posted by Eternal

Is it possible to make captions work with non sage decoders?

That is a decoder issue. If the program has captioning, it already is embedded/encoded in the content stream, the decoder just has to be able to recognize it and be setup to make use of it. Talk to developers for those other decoders.

Originally Posted by stanger89

Unless the community does something stupid, backward compatibility won't be broken.

Well, an update to support h265 on the server side would cause a problem for the extenders unless there is a way to update them as well, as already mentioned. But the solution for that is easy, don't record/transcode to h265 if you want to have native playback on the older extenders.

Originally Posted by stanger89

To be completely honest, I expect a lot of people are going to be (very) disappointed with the Open Source development. I think development/advances will be a lot slower than a lot of folks are expecting. I expect, for a long time, the only thing that will come out of OS-ing Sage will be the ability to do new installs without needing a license. New extenders? I wouldn't get my hopes up to see anything inside a year. Android, maybe that will be easier.

I'm hoping that the splitting off of the extenders from the server's JVM heap that was mentioned in Google's SageTV8 implementation finds its way over to the OS version, but we'll have to wait and see on that front.

Support for the newer FFMPEG would be nice, considering most of that stuff would need to be swapped out anyhow from what others have said. But again, will have to wait and see.

Originally Posted by Slugger

And a year for something significant? I'd even suggest that's best case scenario. Let's assume Narflex has been working at prepping the code base for release since his announcement. That's a few months and no sign of an imminent release coming so he's still working on it. How long does it take the community OS devs to read and comprehend this code base before it can start to be modified meaningfully? And yes, he's definitely not working on it full time, but that's also a very important point. No OS devs are going to be working on features full time either. A feature that takes 3 weeks to implement, might take that person 6 months to complete if they can only work on it a few hours a week. That's going to be the reality of the OS version. So I'd agree a year after the code is available seems like a minimum for "major" new features unless there's an major influx of new devs wanting to join in, which hopefully there will be.

I suspect he was working on some of the codebase before the announcement, and as he's been sticking to and reiterating his earlier comment about the OS release being "months not years" away. The coming change to the Sage EPG server license key policy over the 4th of July holiday has me wondering if it is coming sooner rather than later...

Not much need to lock down the EPG server unless it has either been getting flooded with people using 2 week trial keys for some reason(I guess it is possible, I don't consider it very probable, even with the recent problems it went through), or he is expecting that the EPG server would otherwise be getting flooded with prospective (new) users sometime shortly after that date for some reason that totally escapes me at this time.

Originally Posted by Narflex

I still use SageTV at home...version 8.something. It's basically the same as the last v7 we put out; but with an updated STV and Sage.jar file that have new features that I wanted.

Originally Posted by Narflex

My current plan for this is to take all the relevant changes we've made in the past 3+ years at Google and merge them into the codebase from when we were acquired. (I've already done most of that work, I'm leaving out all the Google Fiber specific stuff since that's not relevant and just clogs up the codebase for y'all) I'll then run that version myself for awhile to ensure it's solid and then that'll be what we open source. The only code we've changed since acquisition that'll be released is basically the Java code. We didn't touch the native windows/linux code much here at all (w/ the exception that we wrote a whole new thing that did the recording/playback portion, i.e. network encoder/streamer, but that piece won't be open sourced as it wouldn't really be of use to you all)

Originally Posted by Narflex

Well....I'll be available to help as needed. But as it was already a very solid product; it's not like much needs to be done with it to make it useable again (main thing is new installers, and recompiling it with all the licensing code removed...most of which is already disabled)

Originally Posted by Narflex

It's going to happen. And I stick by my original timeline.