Practicalities of MiniClient as HD200 Replacement ?

[PeteCress]

I just discovered the MiniClient.

Got it running on my phone, my 10" tablet, and a little Android box called "WeTek Core".

A significant step up for Sage, IMHO - and whoever wrote it should be charging for it just in the interest of keeping the development effort alive..... Personally, I'd pay ten bucks without even blinking; probably a good bit more.

The Question:

Has anybody actually explored the practicalities of using MiniClient on an Android box like WeTek's "Core" or Amazon's "FireStick" as a replacement once their HD200 goes belly-up?

By "Practicalities", I am thinking mainly the Remote Control aspect.

[wayner]

I have a whole bunch of HD200s and I have played around with the miniclient on an HD200 or 300 to a MiBox which I have that is an AndroidTV device. I still prefer the HD200, particularly since the miniclient tends to have some issues with MPEG-2 playback from OTA recordings - although that may be fixed now. But I think it is feasible and you get the advantage of other apps like Netflix, Youtube, etc. The other potential advantage in the future would be H.265 and/or 4K playback which should be able to work on these boxes but definitely won't on HD200 or HD300 extenders

But I think that the HD200s are pretty solid and may last for a lot longer yet. I think the HD300s are less solid and are a little flakey and tend to overheat. And I have one that appears to have a grounding issue as it reboots if you touch it. Even the power supplies seem to be holding up, unlike those for the HD-PVR or HD-HR which die every couple of years or so.

edit - And you are right that the remote doesn't seem to work as well.

[PeteCress]

I just stumbled on to https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=62852 and that seems to be addressing this thread's subject already,.

[stuckless]

I think the link you posted is good, since it does highlight some of the differences (ie, DVD support or Bluray support, etc).

I think the practicality will vary from person to person. For me, I replaced all my HD300 extendeders (3 of them) with 2 NVidea Shields and 1 MiBox, all running AndroidTV.

My entire library is recorded ts files (h264) and bunch of mkv and mp4 files using h264 as well. So, I was able to entirely rely on the Android MiniClient and my experience has been great. Because Netflix, YouTube, and other apps are all on the same box, I find my switching between each of those on a daily basis, while on the hd300 I never watched youtube at all, and certainly not netflix.

I think over time, the Android MiniClient will be the primary client for many people, as HD200/300 boxes die, or they migrate their libraries to h264/h265.

All that being said, while the client does run on a phone/tablet, that is not the primary target, and as such, the experience is not great.

So today, I have 3 hd300s sitting in storage and I intend to, at some point, raffle them off (for free), since I no longer have a need for them, and no, I will not sell them, since 2 of those were provided to me as "thanks" or "gifts".

[Oddity]

Stuckless absolutely appreciate the development you have done on the mini-client. Here in the UK we are still reliant on live tv largely in MPEG2 format and also my DVD collection is all VOB files (MPEG2). Is this going to be possible, happy to contribute to help this along.


Regarding the Remote issue, try one of these

http://cpc.farnell.com/flirc/flirc-v...ontrol-SC14377

[wayner]

There is actually a better option if you have Harmony Remotes/hubs that support Bluetooth. You can set up to the remote to act like a PC keyboard that connects to the AndroidTV device using BT. You are then essentially using keyboard shortcuts - someone wrote about this about 10 months ago.

[jm9843]

Re: MPEG2. I think that it's a ymmv situation.

I use Sean's miniclient on the Shield TV with MPEG2 all the time (Comcast/HDHomeRun Prime) and it's near flawless. I used to forgo 5.1 audio (available with ExoPlayer setting) because skipping was broken, but it has been mostly fixed with the last update.

So, because I don't need DVD/Blu-ray support, the Android miniclient is a defacto replacement for the HD300 for my use case.

[PeteCress]

Originally Posted by jm9843

So, because I don't need DVD/Blu-ray support, the Android miniclient is a defacto replacement for the HD300 for my use case.

I just put the MiniClient on my own NVIDIA Shield and it's working like a charm.

Seems like my fears of my last HD200 biting the big one have been put to rest.

But your Blu-Ray comment may have answered my question as to whether the Mini-Client does DVDs.

I think not because it just sits there - both on the NVIDIA and on my phone - when I try to play a DVD.

Not a big deal to me because I always rip my DVDs to .mpg for ease of access, but I was wondering....

[Dargason]

I guess I'm a bit late to this, since you already bought a shield.

I cut the cord several years ago, so now everything I record is OTA, which poses a challenge for many devices. Even the full SFF client I have occasionally struggles with a show.

I was wondering if anyone had tried the latest FireTV. I have a gen2 that doesn't work well at all, but this new one supports OTA all on it's own, so I'm optimistic that it would work better.

edit: I didn't read carefully enough... it looks like they are just bundling a HDTV antenna and you attach it to your TV and use it like well... a TV. The FireTV wouldn't be involved at all.

[PeteCress]

Originally Posted by Dargason

I guess I'm a bit late to this, since you already bought a shield.

I cut the cord several years ago, so now everything I record is OTA, which poses a challenge for many devices. Even the full SFF client I have occasionally struggles with a show.

We have never had cable - ever.

I have this monster Winegard antenna on the garden shed and aimed at an antenna farm about 20 miles away.

It"s connected to a couple of Silicon Dust tuners feeding into our LAN - from which SageTV running on my 24-7 PC gets all it's TV stations, recording to a couple of 3-tb drives in said PC.

No problems at all and I really couldn"t ask for anything better.

I have the Sage mini-client on my Android phone and tablet and the full client on my Windows laptop.

All work, but in real life 99.9% of my TV viewing is on the kitchen TV via an HD200.

We have a second antenna on the roof that feeds directly into the TV but we hardly ever watch in realtme - virtually aways via the HD200.and the Silicon Dust tuners.

But it"s a relief to know now that the HD200 could go belly-up and I woud still have full SageTV functionality going into the TV via MiniClient on the new NVIDIA box.

Oh yeah: But now that I'm thinking about it, I lied a little about the "No Problems". ... My son-in-law has an HD200 in his house on the other side of town through which he watches out OTA TV and ripped movies.

Sometimes it works a-ok, but he can only render mpeg material. ... Seems like there is an issue with my Sage server thinking there is insufficient bandwidth and managing the feed in such a way that either the server or the HD200 is unnaturally forced to decode and, whichever one it is, does not have the CODECs to do that.

Seems like a holdover from pre-broadband/pre-FIOS days and some sort of hack to make Sage think it has a LAN connection to the remoe HD200 would remedy the problem most of the time.