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

[rlvogel322]

This is great news and I'm glad we continue to use SageTV in our household.

Originally Posted by SWKerr

I would love to see the SageTV Server software morph into a recording engine that just stored recordings in a format that could easily be used by Plex, Kodi and other similar client software. (Adding all the necessary show metadata in as open a format as possible)

Once you have a open back-end you could have lots of different forks\projects for front ends. From something as simple as a guide and scheduling app to a full replacement of the SageTV Interface for PC Clients and Extenders.

This is exactly what I am thinking. A rock solid recording engine with updated tuner compatibility.

[baudfather]

Just curious, would SageTV (the company, if it still exists outside Google?) be permitted to make/sell hardware (e.g. new extenders)? Or would that be up to a third party? Would that even be possible?

[SHS]

Originally Posted by pjpjpjpj

Hey Jeff, here's a question that no one has mentioned yet...

Is there still a legal reason that you - or someone who you teamed with - couldn't order a batch of HD300s from the same company/factory that made them before?

It's assumed that the all of the code/design/firmware/whatever-else inside of the HD300s was proprietary to Sage, just like the software program itself, and when Google bought it, that all went to Google. But since Google has decided to share the programming of the software, are they inherently also sharing all the stuff that makes the extenders tick?

Obviously there would be some (presumably large) number of extenders that would have to be ordered as a minimum, but is the code now "freed" by Google to have someone order a big batch of extenders? Or is there a separate "you can't make money off Sage" deal in place that still prevents this?

As much as everyone is ecstatic about the OS news, if there was hope that HD300s (or 400s??) could once again be made available, this place would friggin explode.

(I also realize that making extenders available would go against any idea that Google might have had of making Sage OS in order to encourage people to use GoogleTV devices to serve it up...)

Any reason why you want keep this a round when there are other more powerful option and just as cheap out there?.

[reggie14]

I don't have much hope for another batch of HD300s. Who would front the money for an order? How many would be ordered?

The situation for software clients is much better now, at least. An RPi option seems pretty compelling, and Chromeboxes can be had for awfully cheap. Dedicated system images for those might work quite nicely.

Personally, I'd ideally see apps that would run on media streamers, like Android TV devices, Rokus, and Fire TVs. The major problem, of course, is the lack of mpeg2 (with deinterlacing) support on all of those devices, which isn't likely to change.

[7up]

I sold my HD300s a while back but I have to think that a near equally as stable extender could be done using a Chromebox or RPi2 loaded with OpenELEC.

Jeff, Can you share if you ever played around with or attempted to use an ADT-1 as an SageTV extender?

[trk2]

Originally Posted by reggie14

The major problem, of course, is the lack of mpeg2 (with deinterlacing) support on all of those devices, which isn't likely to change.

That and the lack of HD Audio support. There are plenty of alternatives for less than ideal quality media devices. But if you care about quality, the choices get real slim.

[SHS]

Originally Posted by reggie14

I don't have much hope for another batch of HD300s. Who would front the money for an order? How many would be ordered?

From what I recall it something like min 10,000 device for anything that being made.

[traker1001]

Originally Posted by Narflex

Sorry, there weren't any changes for Text to Speech services. We did add in CEA-708 closed caption support...so that may be nice for some of the hearing impaired (although overall 708 isn't that much better than 608).

The network encoder API has been open since 2004 I think (a long while back). The streamer was always inside the java code (and will still be in the open sourced version)...we just moved it to native code for Google Fiber for performance reasons.

Narflex,

Oh ok, that's sad. But hey maybe now going open sourced someone can work something out. Do you see any possibilities for that or is sage coded in such a way that it just not possible? We love sage, this would be awesome to see some day.

Im curious, And in reading this thread over I hope I didn't overlook it, Once it is released as Open source will you still developing on the Open source version at all or just be leaving it to the community as a whole?

Also, Just in case I haven't said, Thank you.

[rnadeau]

Thanks Jeff, this is GREAT!!! news!

[pjpjpjpj]

To SHS and reggie, regarding client options, I have never, nor never want to have to, deal with codecs, settings, client programming and maintenance, etc. The Sage HD extender was ahead of its time and is still one of the best devices out there for playback at a TV. With an update for video/audio types that are new since the Google purchase, it would be back to being the best. Plug it in and forget it. Our house gets all media through Sage and has no need for extra functionality (HD Netflix?) that a client could provide. There are literally dozens and dozens of threads on this forum that I've never had to read/worry about because I'm a 100% extender house and always will be.

By the way, don't read any snark into my answer, I don't intend any, though I suppose it could be taken that way. I'm typing with raised eyebrows and shrugged shoulders.

[waylo]

Originally Posted by aaronb

I agree that the PVR stuff built into Kodi is a bit lacking. Our plugin was not using any of that, it's a standalone addon that display and plays back your recordings with metadata. I haven't setup Sage on my new server yet or I would give some screenshots. It's not perfect, but if someone wants to consume all of their media in Kodi it was a pretty good option. Has some basic ability to schedule recordings, but is really centered around watching already recorded shows

(not trying to toot my own horn, I had hacked something together that worked specifically for my setup and the two other guys ran with it and made it 10x better)

I've used your plugin with Kodi and it certainly is a decent stop-gap measure for keeping SageTV recordings usable. Also allows me to easily play those weird cablecard HDHR Prime recordings that SageTV cannot play natively, but every other media player can.

However, the limitations of Kodi are made very apparent by it. For example, I find the native video player in Kodi lacking and unresponsive compared to Sage's UI. Also, commercial skipping integration is really frustrating with no visible 'commercial bars.'

These are limitations in Kodi, not your plugin per se, and I am grateful you and your colleagues put it together!

Looking forward to seeing what the next iteration of SageTV will look like.

[SWKerr]

Originally Posted by PiX64

Maybe thing have greatly improved since I last used that feature or xbmc for that matter, but the whole mysql and adavancedsettings.xml was a huge pain in the ass for me. i hated every second of it. IT shouldn't be that difficult thats for darn sure.

I did not say it was easy. It is overly complicated really. But it works quite well for me at this point and was not really difficult to setup once I found the documentation.

...of course I work in IT all day long on Linux, Window and Mainframe environments using various programs, databases, scripting and coding tools so may not be a good judge of what is difficult to Non IT people. Although I suspect that is really the bulk of our Forum audience.

[KryptoNyte]

Originally Posted by pjpjpjpj

To SHS and reggie, regarding client options, I have never, nor never want to have to, deal with codecs, settings, client programming and maintenance, etc. The Sage HD extender was ahead of its time and is still one of the best devices out there for playback at a TV. With an update for video/audio types that are new since the Google purchase, it would be back to being the best. Plug it in and forget it. Our house gets all media through Sage and has no need for extra functionality (HD Netflix?) that a client could provide. There are literally dozens and dozens of threads on this forum that I've never had to read/worry about because I'm a 100% extender house and always will be.

By the way, don't read any snark into my answer, I don't intend any, though I suppose it could be taken that way. I'm typing with raised eyebrows and shrugged shoulders.

I believe that a single piece of strong hardware, probably something better than an HD300, is a necessary thing for our fixed device viewing. Equally important would be the client/placeshifter software for virtually any other device/environment, so I vote both.

I do believe that this single piece hardware would need to boot directly to a Sage environment on arrival, or be darn close to it. I also despise the codec fooling, and the extenders have saved me so many hours of screwing around that they've paid for themselves many times over - even those that I bought on Ebay that were twice their original price.

[7up]

Originally Posted by KryptoNyte

I do believe that this single piece hardware would need to boot directly to a Sage environment on arrival, or be darn close to it. I also despise the codec fooling, and the extenders have saved me so many hours of screwing around that they've paid for themselves many times over - even those that I bought on Ebay that were twice their original price.

A Chromebox loaded with OpenELEC has this potential.

[KryptoNyte]

Yeah. I think a bunch of us are going to have to get our hands dirty with numerous device purchases until we find something that works. I believe that the fixed viewing extender is one of the most important aspects of this endeavor. How we get the media to our ears and eyes without headaches is critical.

[SHS]

Originally Posted by pjpjpjpj

To SHS and reggie, regarding client options, I have never, nor never want to have to, deal with codecs, settings, client programming and maintenance, etc. The Sage HD extender was ahead of its time and is still one of the best devices out there for playback at a TV. With an update for video/audio types that are new since the Google purchase, it would be back to being the best. Plug it in and forget it. Our house gets all media through Sage and has no need for extra functionality (HD Netflix?) that a client could provide. There are literally dozens and dozens of threads on this forum that I've never had to read/worry about because I'm a 100% extender house and always will be.

By the way, don't read any snark into my answer, I don't intend any, though I suppose it could be taken that way. I'm typing with raised eyebrows and shrugged shoulders.

Just so know I never had any problem with codecs or settings with both of the PC SageTV client I had that was running Windows 7.
But any in case it doesn't if matter if it soft or hard codec you still end up with some problem case in point like with HD-PVR 2 and LiveTV on HD200 and HD300

That maybe good point but getting the HD300 back after 5 years will be more like be a pipe dream which is way out of reach US by now as I can only guest that depend on weather not they are willing to re-make the chip as it look like it all ready a discontinued products.

The last media extender out was by Ceton called Echo 2012 there been no new extender as far I know as Windows 8 petty much kill it, so if you been paying attention you see that market has all ready shifted to mobile device like Android, iOS or other embedded OS so that is really are best beat for new media extender, But you never know.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by baudfather

Just curious, would SageTV (the company, if it still exists outside Google?) be permitted to make/sell hardware (e.g. new extenders)? Or would that be up to a third party? Would that even be possible?

Oh, it's definitely possible, there are boxes out there that ship with XBMC on them. It would be no different for a Sage extender, some company could build boxes with "Placeshifter" on them.

Originally Posted by reggie14

The situation for software clients is much better now, at least. An RPi option seems pretty compelling, and Chromeboxes can be had for awfully cheap. Dedicated system images for those might work quite nicely.

Personally, I'd ideally see apps that would run on media streamers, like Android TV devices, Rokus, and Fire TVs. The major problem, of course, is the lack of mpeg2 (with deinterlacing) support on all of those devices, which isn't likely to change.

There are a couple problems that prevent me from getting very excited about any client that's not an HD300. Bitstreaming HD audio and video processing.

The Rpi sounds great until you read about it and realize that it doesn't bitstream HD audio. So that definitely puts a damper on that.

The other issue is video processing. Kodi is pretty terrible, at least on Intel GPUs (I've run OpenELEC on a i7 3770s, HD4000 graphics, and now a Chromebox). Since these are PCs running PC drivers and PC hardware, you still have issues with Frame drops, and the deinterlacing is poor at best. It's definitely much worse overall than an HD300 set to native resolution switching and letting my Radiance handle all that.

Unfortunately I fear the days of people caring about that are gone. For OpenELEC I've actually reverted to re-encoding my 480i content to 1080p offline using some very powerful AVISynth scripts.

Originally Posted by pjpjpjpj

To SHS and reggie, regarding client options, I have never, nor never want to have to, deal with codecs, settings, client programming and maintenance, etc. The Sage HD extender was ahead of its time and is still one of the best devices out there for playback at a TV. With an update for video/audio types that are new since the Google purchase, it would be back to being the best. Plug it in and forget it. Our house gets all media through Sage and has no need for extra functionality (HD Netflix?) that a client could provide. There are literally dozens and dozens of threads on this forum that I've never had to read/worry about because I'm a 100% extender house and always will be.

By the way, don't read any snark into my answer, I don't intend any, though I suppose it could be taken that way. I'm typing with raised eyebrows and shrugged shoulders.

FWIW, video processing aside, OpenELEC does work quite well on a Chromebox. Total cost is about $150 for that route and it's probably just as reliable and trouble free as my HD300.

[KryptoNyte]

SHS, you sound like my nephews and nieces, like anyone watching media on a screen larger than 8" must be too old to be breathing.

[trk2]

Originally Posted by KryptoNyte

I believe that a single piece of strong hardware, probably something better than an HD300, is a necessary thing for our fixed device viewing. Equally important would be the client/placeshifter software for virtually any other device/environment, so I vote both.

I do believe that this single piece hardware would need to boot directly to a Sage environment on arrival, or be darn close to it. I also despise the codec fooling, and the extenders have saved me so many hours of screwing around that they've paid for themselves many times over - even those that I bought on Ebay that were twice their original price.

I completely agree. I liked Sage in the days before the extenders, but it wasn't until my first HD200 that I loved Sage. Many of the issues had little to do with Sage. It was the normal PC maintenance, the codecs, the automatic updates that break things, background programs that would steal resources or focus, custom directshow filters, custom Powerstrip resolutions and refresh rates etc... And every issue would require me hauling out a keyboard and mouse and awkwardly trying to diagnose the problem. Most of these are non-issues now, but the extenders showed me a better way. Just as important, it wasn't until the extenders that my wife felt confidant that she could use Sage without experiencing, or inadvertently creating, issues. The extenders made her a believer too.

[SHS]

Originally Posted by KryptoNyte

SHS, you sound like my nephews and nieces, like anyone watching media on a screen larger than 8" must be too old to be breathing.

Yup that my nephews and nieces for you they to do that
But I ref to device like ASUS MiniPC, MiniX NEO Z64 or Z64W, Intel NUC, ECS LIVA, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Google Chrome Cast, Roku and min other out there.