What is your dream SageTV client?

[jchiso]

Originally Posted by dinki

Are you talking about Android TV specifically not being a great platform or Android in general? The only reason I ask is that I've got a GBox MX2 (Android based) that plays everything I throw at it.

I have a pair of GBox mx2 boxes, but they seem to be limited to 720p output. Outside of that, they work fine as Kodi clients and I imagine would do as well with a SageTV playback client app ...

[Skirge01]

Originally Posted by SWKerr

I would rather have something like X-newa than rely on the PVR integration. If you can get your SageTV TV Library to scan into the Kodi TV Library by naming the recording correctly then the PVR integration is only useful for live TV and setting up recording. For that the X-newa is perfect.

With the renamer PluckyHD is working on, getting your Sage recordings into Kodi will be a piece of cake. It's already very far along.

One issue with using two different programs is your watched status is out of sync (nevermind resuming where you left off). If you record with Sage, but watch with Kodi, the watched status will never get updated in Sage. If you proceed to delete it from Kodi after watching, it will disappear from Sage and will most likely get recorded during its next airing. I think a great intermediary would be to have trakt.tv integration in Sage, since Kodi already does. Then, no matter which software you use to watch recordings, the other one would update itself via your trakt.tv account. Sadly, I'm no programmer.

[dinki]

Originally Posted by jchiso

I have a pair of GBox mx2 boxes, but they seem to be limited to 720p output. Outside of that, they work fine as Kodi clients and I imagine would do as well with a SageTV playback client app ...

This is true and in all transparency, I did install OpenElec (linux) on both of mine and it outputs at 1080 just fine. I would definitely go back to Android if a SageTV client were written for Android though.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by dinki

Are you talking about Android TV specifically not being a great platform or Android in general? The only reason I ask is that I've got a GBox MX2 (Android based) that plays everything I throw at it.

First off... I think that Android TV and Android are both great platforms. The problem is that the stock media players in both are very picky in what they play.

Kodi plays anything your throw at, because, they have spent years building their own media playback engine. They are not using the stock media player on Android.

So, while you can build some pretty cool apps for AndroidTV, is is limiting in what the stock player will play.

For the project that I linked (there are downloadable apks) I give the option of using an embedded player, or using an external player suck as KODI or MXPlayer.

The problem with "jumping out" to player is that tracking the watched status is tricky, and you get no control over skipping, etc. Which is why I started to pull in an embedded player. Ideally the playback client should support comskip, etc (I never it got it to that point).

The project was more of a proof of concept to get to know the AndroidTV apis.

[reggie14]

The recent OTA update to the SHIELD Android TV added hardware-based mpeg2 decoding and deinterlacing. I think it's still locked to 60hz (although that's a bit unclear), but that doesn't concern me as much.

[Dargason]

It seems to me that there are many options when it comes to clients, both for hardware and software. An many of them are (dare I say it?) more advanced than SageTV, at least with respect to the variety of hardware that they run on.

For me the strength of SageTV, and what has kept me using it, is the backend. While I'd love to have the SageTV Client ported to all manner of devices, a shortcut might be to focus on making it easy to integrate the backend with existing clients like Plex, Kodi, Roku, etc.

I know that there has been some work to do this. I played around with the Plex stuff for a while, and I installed the SageTV Roku channel, but these have always fallen just short of usable for what I want. I don't know if the limitations were with the closed-source nature of the clients, or the SageTV limitations.

Has anything changed with this? Would it be difficult to create a SageTV 'plugin' for Kodi, for example, that we give me the power of SageTV PVR with the flexibility of Kodi?

Just some thoughts... probably not worth $0.02.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by Dargason

It seems to me that there are many options when it comes to clients, both for hardware and software. An many of them are (dare I say it?) more advanced than SageTV, at least with respect to the variety of hardware that they run on.

For me the strength of SageTV, and what has kept me using it, is the backend. While I'd love to have the SageTV Client ported to all manner of devices, a shortcut might be to focus on making it easy to integrate the backend with existing clients like Plex, Kodi, Roku, etc.

I know that there has been some work to do this. I played around with the Plex stuff for a while, and I installed the SageTV Roku channel, but these have always fallen just short of usable for what I want. I don't know if the limitations were with the closed-source nature of the clients, or the SageTV limitations.

Has anything changed with this? Would it be difficult to create a SageTV 'plugin' for Kodi, for example, that we give me the power of SageTV PVR with the flexibility of Kodi?

Just some thoughts... probably not worth $0.02.

I really don't think that porting the sagetv miniclient to other devices is going to be incredibly difficult. It just depends on how easy the api's for the device are to program for. At the very least, the Placeshifter interface is almost completely rendered on the server, so the amount of code that needs to be done on the end device is limited. Simply opening up to other devices will tend to allow the core UI to become even more stale, because there will be less interest in improving it. There were three different groups working on improving/replacing the base UI when sage closed up shop. And there are plenty of other great UI designers and coders out there that would love the opportunity to get their mittens into SageTV to improve it, once the software is free and can hit a very wide audience.

[CanadianEh]

I wonder how difficult it would be to port over the linux version to run on the Raspberry Pi2? The Pi2 supports MPEG4/h.264 nicely out of the box, and the HW MPEG2 decoder license costs around $2. It's a huge improvement over the original Pi's.

[aaronb]

Originally Posted by Dargason

Has anything changed with this? Would it be difficult to create a SageTV 'plugin' for Kodi, for example, that we give me the power of SageTV PVR with the flexibility of Kodi?

We created one a couple years ago, and it works well but it has some limitations on functionality. For just watching recorded shows with metadata it's great, but scheduling recordings is a little clunky, and there's no grid-style program guide. It does not use the PVR functionality in Kodi because it was built before that was fully fleshed out. But with the excellent SageTV API and the easy extensibility of Kodi I think it is very possible to get a great SageTV Kodi client

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by CanadianEh

I wonder how difficult it would be to port over the linux version to run on the Raspberry Pi2? The Pi2 supports MPEG4/h.264 nicely out of the box, and the HW MPEG2 decoder license costs around $2. It's a huge improvement over the original Pi's.

Yeah, and now that they've got DTS-HD MA decoding, and 3D capability, a Pi2 could really be a great HD300 replacement.

Originally Posted by aaronb

We created one a couple years ago, and it works well but it has some limitations on functionality. For just watching recorded shows with metadata it's great, but scheduling recordings is a little clunky, and there's no grid-style program guide. It does not use the PVR functionality in Kodi because it was built before that was fully fleshed out. But with the excellent SageTV API and the easy extensibility of Kodi I think it is very possible to get a great SageTV Kodi client

I tried Kodi (XBMC) with ServerWMC backend and I was very disappointed, it was barely usable IMO after using SageTV.

[CanadianEh]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Yeah, and now that they've got DTS-HD MA decoding, and 3D capability, a Pi2 could really be a great HD300 replacement.

I tried Kodi (XBMC) with ServerWMC backend and I was very disappointed, it was barely usable IMO after using SageTV.

Very interesting - I wasn't aware of the other new codec support. I've been very impressed with the Pi2 so far. I'm using one as a Kodi client in my bedroom, and ordered a second one for our family room in the basement. I use MediaPortal as the backend, which is pretty decent - but I do miss some of SageTV's PVR functionality and the overall client feel. My living room client is full Windows with MediaPortal client, just because I'm still not a big fan of the Kodi UI when it comes to PVR functionality.

I'm hoping that SageTV OS really does take off, as I'd likely switch back in a heartbeat. I left Sage only because my extender crapped out and I couldn't buy additional client licenses.

Damn, I wish I was a programmer - I'd love to help out with this project when it gets off the ground. Perhaps I can help out in other ways, such as beta testing, documentation and such.

[aaronb]

Originally Posted by stanger89

I tried Kodi (XBMC) with ServerWMC backend and I was very disappointed, it was barely usable IMO after using SageTV.

Yeah, I'm hoping that adding the SageTV community to the mix has a good chance of improving the PVR functionality. Seeing some of the work people have done here gives me hope that applying those smarts to Kodi/Sage integration could turn out great. The PVR stuff in Kodi just isn't up to par yet, but there's a ton of potential. I'm certainly willing to help out, but I don't have the programming skills to lead something like this myself.

I've always thought it was odd that SageTV was never one of the backends that was targeted for kodi, besides the plugin me and a couple other guys worked on.

[7up]

What about possibility of developing a SageTV add-on for Kodi which doesn't use the standard Kodi PVR interface, similar in concept but not necessarily same UI as what SiliconDust is doing with their add-on which is more of a separate app running in Kodi?

[valnar]

I know I have no say in this since I'm not a programmer, but boy do I hate Kodi. I hope we do NOT go that way! XBMC, MythTV, and the gibberish that is most Linux apps is what swayed me to look at Sage in the first place.

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by valnar

I know I have no say in this since I'm not a programmer, but boy do I hate Kodi. I hope we do NOT go that way! XBMC, MythTV, and the gibberish that is most Linux apps is what swayed me to look at Sage in the first place.

I've always had the opinion that the Linux community is at least as pretentious as the Apple community. Not saying all Linux or OSS projects are this way but it seems like many of them are written for programmers by programmers. Other than the lack of "popular" software and needing to be a conscious choice I believe that's one of the reasons that keeps the general public away from Linux. In the end it's not as accessible to a non-technical person as Windows.

There has been a lot of work to make it more accessible but anything more than the basic configurations still require specialized knowledge that a non-technical user doesn't have.

I'm already my family's IT helpdesk. I don't want to have to provide that level of support. For the most part Windows just works and the fixes are generally easy enough to not need to go on-site. Most problems I usually deal with are hardware related. Plus the software used requires Windows. No Linux versions or analogues.

[dinki]

Originally Posted by valnar

I know I have no say in this since I'm not a programmer, but boy do I hate Kodi. I hope we do NOT go that way! XBMC, MythTV, and the gibberish that is most Linux apps is what swayed me to look at Sage in the first place.

Having run just about every PVR software I could get my hands on, I'd have to agree with Linux not being the right OS for the job for a PVR server for me. At the time, software drivers for my hardware always seemed to be hard to come by and trying to find help it often turned into "if you want that then you program it and share it with the rest of us". Things may have changed, but there's a reason I'm still running SageTV after all these years. I may give SageTV Linux a try once the license requirements are removed.

I do, however, have to disagree with your statement in general. I have a little Linux server that I use for my Home Automation software (Agocontrol), that replaced my Windows based Homeseer software and it does a ton more. I use my Linux box as a VPN to tunnel my traffic from home to work. I have some simple scripts that record streaming radio programs I listen to every day and they are sync'd to my phone when I go home at night. I use it for my occasional bittorrent downloads, it acts as a fileserver, it acts as my IRC relay. This is all on a little Pogoplug device that I picked up for $20 on eBay and installed Debian Linux on. I am not a programmer either but was able to do these things with just a bit of searching.

I run Kodi on my phone and Android boxes to connect to my Windows based install of nPVR backend and it serves it's purpose fine for my needs. I'm hoping that a SageTV backend will be created for Kodi so that I only have to have one PVR server running. I'm pretty sure that others are interested in this as well. I also believe that many others are not. The beauty of OS is that everyone will get a chance to do what they want with the code. I'm pretty sure that if work is done to integrate SageTV into Kodi that that effort won't hamper things for the way you want Sage to go. I expect to see it go in multiple directions and I'm up for trying them all!

[zoop]

Originally Posted by dinki

Having run just about every PVR software I could get my hands on, I'd have to agree with Linux not being the right OS for the job for a PVR server for me. At the time, software drivers for my hardware always seemed to be hard to come by and trying to find help it often turned into "if you want that then you program it and share it with the rest of us". Things may have changed, but there's a reason I'm still running SageTV after all these years. I may give SageTV Linux a try once the license requirements are removed.

Been running SageTV (server) on Linux since it was beta... I personally wouldn't go any other direction, but then again I am using HDHRs exclusively these days so YMMV. I will say that even when I was still in HD-PVR land life was pretty good with Sage on Linux... pretty good to me == stable and WAF. Might have helped that Jeff also ran/runs the Linux version

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by zoop

Been running SageTV (server) on Linux since it was beta... I personally wouldn't go any other direction, but then again I am using HDHRs exclusively these days so YMMV. I will say that even when I was still in HD-PVR land life was pretty good with Sage on Linux... pretty good to me == stable and WAF. Might have helped that Jeff also ran/runs the Linux version

OT: Is there a link to some info on what it takes to get that working. Do you need to install or have drivers in the kernel for HDHR on linux?

[aaronb]

Originally Posted by valnar

I know I have no say in this since I'm not a programmer, but boy do I hate Kodi. I hope we do NOT go that way! XBMC, MythTV, and the gibberish that is most Linux apps is what swayed me to look at Sage in the first place.

If people decide to develop a client for Kodi no one will force you to use it. And it's not a Linux app

[jchiso]

Originally Posted by zoop

Been running SageTV (server) on Linux since it was beta... I personally wouldn't go any other direction, but then again I am using HDHRs exclusively these days so YMMV. I will say that even when I was still in HD-PVR land life was pretty good with Sage on Linux... pretty good to me == stable and WAF. Might have helped that Jeff also ran/runs the Linux version

I also have a SageTV server running on a Linux (Ubuntu) desktop that runs an HD-PVR and HD Homerun combo without issue. It's by far my most-reliable Sage server ...