Open source HD400

[7up]

Originally Posted by stanger89

I say the following with great respect, and no offense intended toward the great work of the plugin makers here... But SageTV is just not a great media center app, it never has been. If you take live TV/recording out of the picture, SageTV just doesn't compare/compete well with the likes of Kodi, Plex, Emby, etc.

+1 and I'd love to see your suggestion for SageTV app with aggregator feature

I appreciate the attraction to an "HD400" but I'd vote for continued development of the Android TV Mini client.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by SomeWhatLost

I semi-agree with the doom and gloom theory... the big difference for me is that I have found that as it becomes more difficult to manage the different OTT options and integrate them with sage, I just quit... gave up on them....
I find, for me personally, that Sage + OTA + the (somewhat lacking) Media Extender + Netflix (DVD) + the occasional bought BR is more then enough TV/Movie viewing time... and just do other stuff with my new found free time instead...
(sadly, not productive "other stuff", or any better use of my time, just different... play video games, drink excessively, etc..)
I still have ~5TB of recordings I need to catch up on...

You know this is the truth - it is just too much of a PITA in many instances to find what you want to watch. Is it on Netflix? No, what about Amazon -no. Does iTunes have it? One place that almost always has it is The Pirate Bay (not that I am advocating pirating). It is kind of like music before iTunes took over - Steve Jobs convinced people it was a better use of their time to just pay $1/song rather than to try to pirate the music.

Services like Spotify have solved this for music as in most instances you don't need to own your music anymore. Somebody needs to do the same for video and I am willing to pay about $120/month to be able to watch anything at any time on any device. Kind of like Spotify but for video and with every movie and TV show ever made, including live sports. That amount is about what I pay today for cable + Netflix + DVD purchases, etc.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by stanger89

I say the following with great respect, and no offense intended toward the great work of the plugin makers here... But SageTV is just not a great media center app, it never has been. If you take live TV/recording out of the picture, SageTV just doesn't compare/compete well with the likes of Kodi, Plex, Emby, etc. The media center features of SageTV are, and really have always been, just acceptable/usable only when in the context of already having a SageTV setup.

I have never understood what makes Plex, Kodi, etc better than Sage at media playback. I run Plex and can access Plex via Xbox on my main TV but I always use SageTV instead as it is easier and faster. Sage shows me a wall of movie posters and I pick the one that I want - just like Plex does. And it plays back properly and can instantly skip forward when I want.

[trk2]

Originally Posted by wayner

I have never understood what makes Plex, Kodi, etc better than Sage at media playback. I run Plex and can access Plex via Xbox on my main TV but I always use SageTV instead as it is easier and faster. Sage shows me a wall of movie posters and I pick the one that I want - just like Plex does. And it plays back properly and can instantly skip forward when I want.

This puzzles me as well. Likewise I have a Plex server and have played with Kodi in the past. Plex is great for getting media to all your devices, but Sage has always worked better for the actual media playback. I run a 15TB media server and still have not found anything better than SageTV + HD300 for the actual media playback experience.

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by trk2

This puzzles me as well. Likewise I have a Plex server and have played with Kodi in the past. Plex is great for getting media to all your devices, but Sage has always worked better for the actual media playback. I run a 15TB media server and still have not found anything better than SageTV + HD300 for the actual media playback experience.

Plex will change the refresh rate of your display to match the content that is playing. SageTV doesn't do that (never owned an extender) and playback of certain types of blu-rays never worked properly on my PC clients. VC-1 and the sage splitter were not friends.

I got around it with Fuzzy's external player plugin, but that would sometimes freak out and my wife wouldn't be happy. Plus I used the Sage My Movies plugin and none of the other movie views were ever as good as that one for me.

Plus, plex allows me to sync movies,TV to a tablet so the kids can watch in the car. Very simple. It will also auto backup all the pictures I take with my phone to my local server so I have full copies in case something goes wrong with my phone. Plex is a pretty great solution if you care about all of it's features.

The one thing it and nothing else can do as well as SageTV...PVR. There is just nothing better. My preference would be either continued miniclient development to work out the minute bugs/limitations it has or a full android client. Or both.

The full android client could be integrated with the sort of universal search on the AndroidTV so if you want to watch a show, just search for it and if you have a recording, simply select it and watch it.

I like having separate apps for everything. Although it would be nice to get all my streaming services into one interface, but if I want to watch LiveTV or my recordings, choose sage. If I want to watch my local movies, choose plex. Want to watch streaming, pick the app that has what I want to watch. Pretty simple. WAF is very high at my house right now.

[wayner]

Maybe this comes down to extenders using full PCs as their playback devices.

At my house I have set up separate TV and Movie items for Kids TV shows and Kids movies. This is trivial to do in Gemstone by filtering on Genres either as an include or exclude filter. In Plex I could never figure out how to create separate Kids and other libraries other than having separate folder structures that separate Kids and other shows. But having to use folder structures seems very Neanderthals when we have metadata.

[bialio]

Media aggregation is present in a few apps - and there is some trend moving that way.

Apple is trying with their new 'TV' app -it is woefully lacking, but at least they are moving that way. Which is good since the industry typically copies Apple, even if they don't admit it.

Tivo actually has a pretty nice integration with recorded TV content and shows that are available on Netflix - they all show up in one list and you can watch them / mark them watched / etc from mostly one interface. Tivo's interface is pretty lame (especially compared to enhanced Sage / Kodi / Plex) - but they have the right idea.

Hopefully Android TV (i.e. Google) will try to flex some of their muscle and get some decent aggregation on that platform. Of all the smart TV platforms I've landed on Android TV as my favorite...

btl.

[jm9843]

Originally Posted by wayner

In Plex I could never figure out how to create separate Kids and other libraries other than having separate folder structures that separate Kids and other shows.

A Plex Pass feature called Plex Home makes this a cinch. You can create user profiles protected by pins (optionally enabling an unprotected 'guest' profile) which are configured to only see content matching a particular rating/label.

Originally Posted by bialio

Hopefully Android TV (i.e. Google) will try to flex some of their muscle and get some decent aggregation on that platform. Of all the smart TV platforms I've landed on Android TV as my favorite...

Google announced their Assistant for Android TV yesterday so that should portend good things to come. It may not deal with aggregation right away but will make things like “Watch <Orange is the New Black> <on TV>" or “Watch <Orange is the New Black> <on/from Netflix> <on TV>" a reality. Extending support to 3rd party apps that aren't named 'Netflix' (e.g. SageTV) will be possible too.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by SomeWhatLost

I semi-agree with the doom and gloom theory... the big difference for me is that I have found that as it becomes more difficult to manage the different OTT options and integrate them with sage, I just quit... gave up on them....
I find, for me personally, that Sage + OTA + the (somewhat lacking) Media Extender + Netflix (DVD) + the occasional bought BR is more then enough TV/Movie viewing time... and just do other stuff with my new found free time instead...
(sadly, not productive "other stuff", or any better use of my time, just different... play video games, drink excessively, etc..)
I still have ~5TB of recordings I need to catch up on...

and while it would be nice if "the (somewhat lacking) Media Extender" capabilities were better, and I am sure as time goes by they will get better, and they are mostly fine for now...

as far as Sage not being a reliable install goes, I have to completely disagree... while my setup can be a bit "finicky" , mostly cause I like being on the bleeding edge... or because I fiddle with stuff? I felt 100% comfortable setting up my extremely non-technical mother with a sage + hd300's setup, she uses it all time, the only support calls I received were network related (old router was dying, everything IP based was having issues), someone (she is the only one there?) unplugged an enet cable, and lastly, one dead recording HDD (standard used consumer drive, lasted about 5 years or so of regular sage use, then completely died... not sure how old it was before sage, 500GB, so couldn't have been too old?, now it is a NAS rated drive, should last longer, I hope...)

Originally Posted by 7up

+1 and I'd love to see your suggestion for SageTV app with aggregator feature

I appreciate the attraction to an "HD400" but I'd vote for continued development of the Android TV Mini client.

I'd personally love an HD400, but I just don't see it doing anything much for expanding the SageTV userbase. And Android TV app would do far more, since that would get SageTV available on a lot more TVs.

Originally Posted by wayner

I have never understood what makes Plex, Kodi, etc better than Sage at media playback. I run Plex and can access Plex via Xbox on my main TV but I always use SageTV instead as it is easier and faster. Sage shows me a wall of movie posters and I pick the one that I want - just like Plex does. And it plays back properly and can instantly skip forward when I want.

I guess the problem for me is, stock Sage just isn't very usable, only displaying filenames, no fanart, etc. Next problem is I just don't really like any of the plugins that aim to fix that. They're great feats of software engineering but they're too complicated to configure and they have usability issues that bug me, and even if I look past all that, they don't look as good as Kodi.

Kodi via LibreELEC with the Aeon MQ7 skin is clean, attractive, quick, plays back properly.

Of course sage has some built in wrinkles too, like it doesn't read MKV default/forced track flags and just plays the first track, regardless of which track (audio or subtitle) it's supposed to, which Kodi does without issue.

IIRC there's issues with Windows SageTV and Blu-ray subtitles.

[7up]

I currently have a Xiaomi Mi Box for mini client app and S905x box should a test version of an HD400 ever become a reality. If there is genuine interest in an HD400 would it be possible to incorporate with Libreelec?

My preference for continued development of the Android TV app is the ability to access wide variety of online content (including DRM stuff) from multiple apps on a single box, the ability to use Kodi/Plex, potential for SageTV to act as content aggregator for other online content and the greater exposure to new users.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by 7up

I currently have a Xiaomi Mi Box for mini client app and S905x box should a test version of an HD400 ever become a reality. If there is genuine interest in an HD400 would it be possible to incorporate with Libreelec?

Isn't LibreElec, just Kodi on a minimal OS? So you are asking if a stand-alone hardware HD400 could run it... likely so, but unless there was some tight integrations with sagetv and kodi, not sure it would be much different than having sagetv app and kodi app running on Android.

My preference for continued development of the Android TV app is the ability to access wide variety of online content (including DRM stuff) from multiple apps on a single box, the ability to use Kodi/Plex, potential for SageTV to act as content aggregator for other online content and the greater exposure to new users.

Isn't that what the Android App does now... Although I don't see SageTV app being an aggregator for other online content (outside of the existing play-on support that sagetv does today using tmiranda's plugin.).

[7up]

Originally Posted by stuckless

Isn't that what the Android App does now... Although I don't see SageTV app being an aggregator for other online content (outside of the existing play-on support that sagetv does today using tmiranda's plugin.).

As I've stated, my preference is for continued development efforts to advance the current mini-client Android app. If an HD400 were to ever happen on an S905x, I wont be complaining.

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by stuckless

Isn't that what the Android App does now... Although I don't see SageTV app being an aggregator for other online content (outside of the existing play-on support that sagetv does today using tmiranda's plugin.).

There are many reasons why an open source project really cannot attain this ability. One reason is that DRM schemes are generally a closed source situation. Another reason is often they want you to use their app so there's no open API to even work with resulting in a constant cat and mouse game as they make changes to their website/software. This is why you sometimes see Netflix plugins in software like Kodi, then within a few months, it's broken and no one can fix it. This is why I paid for PlayOn. I essentially paid for someone else to play that game for me. Since the reality is that SageTV will never have it all, I would much rather it be an app among other apps for the other content I'm interested in instead of needing to change input sources on my TV just to use a particular service (which is definitely less intuitive in general).

[wayner]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

Another reason is often they want you to use their app so there's no open API to even work with resulting in a constant cat and mouse game as they make changes to their website/software. This is why you sometimes see Netflix plugins in software like Kodi, then within a few months, it's broken and no one can fix it.

IMHO this is why the current structure of cable/sat, OTT services, etc is doomed to failure. All of these players are concerned with protecting their own turf and creating the best experience for end users is far down their list of priorities.

That is why I keep saying a Spotify for video is the ultimate end game from a consumers perspective but it is very hard to get there since many people will be put out of business.

So we now live in a world where the best way to get the content you want is via breaking the law, just like music a decade or so ago.

[DarkWolf77]

Originally Posted by trk2

This puzzles me as well. Likewise I have a Plex server and have played with Kodi in the past. Plex is great for getting media to all your devices, but Sage has always worked better for the actual media playback. I run a 15TB media server and still have not found anything better than SageTV + HD300 for the actual media playback experience.

Yeah, I still don't get why plex is so awful at media playback. I've yet to be able to fast forward past commercials on the thing without the app locking up eventually and even if it didn't, using the current fast forward scheme on it is a crap shoot at best. Why is it so hard to give us thumbnail previews, or a hard X-second skip the way Sage does it (and have it WORK)? Doing a dvd-like fast forward with nothing but a time line on the screen is just painful.

Forget about asking for comskip support on the forum there. They look at you like you just asked them to put a man on the moon with nothing but a fork and a bit of string.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by DarkWolf77

I've yet to be able to fast forward past commercials on the thing without the app locking up eventually and even if it didn't, using the current fast forward scheme on it is a crap shoot at best. Why is it so hard to give us thumbnail previews, or a hard X-second skip the way Sage does it (and have it WORK)? Doing a dvd-like fast forward with nothing but a time line on the screen is just painful.

^^^This times 1e12! Exactly my experience with Plex when I tried to watch TV shows imported from Sage. I can live with UI shortcomings, I can't live with playback not working.

[bialio]

Plex's issue I think is that it is a transcoding first engine - I've never had any luck getting it to stream native content - it only 'works' when I let it transcode. It does a fine job transcoding if that's what you need. For most DVR-like locations (i.e. TVs in a permanent room in your house) it just isn't necessary to transcode, not with today's hardware.

btl.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by bialio

Plex's issue I think is that it is a transcoding first engine - I've never had any luck getting it to stream native content - it only 'works' when I let it transcode. It does a fine job transcoding if that's what you need. For most DVR-like locations (i.e. TVs in a permanent room in your house) it just isn't necessary to transcode, not with today's hardware.

btl.

And getting further off topic... I've been looking into doing an intergration with Emby... I think that it's less polished than plex, but appears to be much more open. While I really like Plex... they are hard to deal with

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by stuckless

And getting further off topic... I've been looking into doing an intergration with Emby... I think that it's less polished than plex, but appears to be much more open. While I really like Plex... they are hard to deal with

I played with Emby for a bit. Was completely unimpressed with their iOS app. As you said, less polished.

[KarylFStein]

Originally Posted by stuckless

And getting further off topic... I've been looking into doing an intergration with Emby... I think that it's less polished than plex, but appears to be much more open. While I really like Plex... they are hard to deal with

I've used Plex and Emby, and settled on Emby. It's not as polished-looking, but allows me more control and is easier for my main use: allowing various family and friends access things like home movies and pictures remotely. It seems well supported and frequently updated. Plus they have things like audio passthrough and native resolution switching through my SHIELD TV. I played around with using it for SageTV recording playback as I really want something reliable for remote or in-home, small-screen playback, but didn't get very far, (basically had to rename files to get them picked up in a nice manner). I'd personally like to stay within SageTV for TV, but if Emby is the best way to get solid playback...