STV: Cayars17 Ultimate STV (Release 17 - Jan 18)

[Hector]

Originally Posted by Cayars

Was this the thing were you could have a couple of channel filters setup and be able to switch between say "Movies Channels", "Sports Channels", "Shopping Channels", etc... while in the guide? You would be able to configure a couple/few different "guide channel filters" and switch between them by hitting the guide button or something similar?

Yes that's it.

The thing is that it takes me 57 page key presses to go from one end of my full guide to the other and these are of channels I watch, I've already eliminated though channel setup the shopping and other ones that I know I will never watch. This is also with 50 PPV channels disabled that its just easier to use on Tivo.

The problem in part stems from the decision by Frey not allow you to select (by punching in the number) a channel that is not in your guide. For example there are 40-50 or so Music Choice channels (many page key presses) that I have to keep in the guide just because if I don't I cannot select them. There is no guide data for these channels but I have to keep there anyway because if you don't carry their weight in the guide you can never select them or at least I don't know how.

User experiences always work best so here it is. Right now there are probably 10 college football games on. Using the guide I have to sort through 50+ pages to find them. There is no mechanism to remember the channels (like a dynamic jump list, another feature idea) on the fly so I either have to scan 50+ pages or try to remember all the channel numbers. Browsing by category in the Sage menu structure is obviously not conducive to jumping between channels. We need to be able to slice the data up at the Guide level.

With Tivo and the football category selected when I select my guide all I see are football games/shows.

So there is just a huge pile of channels/guide data and like Tivo and most other solutions there needs to be a way of slicing it up through filters. Tivo allows you to do this in two ways and its selectable as a guide option toggled from the guide screen.

1) You can toggle between three channel lists: All the channels your provider carries, all the channels you marked that you receive and channels you have deemed favorites. Favorites can be any number of the ones you receive.

2) You can filter the guide by categories.


These two are independent and you can use one, none or both. And it's persisted.

How it's toggled and implemented is of course a user metric, there have been several opinions. But if you have a lot of channels its a big problem for us, honestly I am surprised Sage has not addressed this. If you decide to tackle this problem I'll be glad to help anyway I can as I am sure would others with big channel lists.

peace. . .

[Cayars]

Originally Posted by rsagetv99

Detailed Setup>Comercial Skip>Enable Background Comercial Processing, then you will see the options (While Awake, While Recording).



This one's a little trickier - Detailed Setup>Interface>OSD Options>Modify>Enable Malore options.

Carlo, I'm all for giving Marlore props, but you might get less questions about this if it had a different name and if it was in the Comercial Skip screen.

Darn, I answered his question too without scanning through the messages first to see if someone else answered it. I appreciate the help. I'll have to start scanning before answering....

You are probably correct. I've tried to make sure credit is given where it should be and I've tried to keep the author's names intact where ever possible to give credit to them for the work they have done. But, I guess I need to keep the end-user in mind as more and more options are added. Plus I think I'm getting people using this STV that never used the other STVs as much so they're not as familar with the names and what some of the features do.

I guess I'm starting to get to the point where an online manual would be helpful. I hate to spend the time and do this especially because there is so much "extra" stuff here that isn't in the original.

Any volunteers?????????

[rsagetv99]

Originally Posted by Cayars

But this still doesn't cover what pengdahl mentions in message 743. So I think we do need 4.

That's fine, sounds like you are giving the three I gave you consideration then.

Still not convinced about the 4th one, but I don't have IR enabled either. I would think that once you set it a program as "Don't Like", even if you watch it IR shouldn't record other episodes on its own - at least that's how it "should" work IMO.

[Cayars]

Originally Posted by Hector

Yes that's it.

The thing is that it takes me 57 page key presses to go from one end of my full guide to the other and these are of channels I watch, I've already eliminated though channel setup the shopping and other ones that I know I will never watch. This is also with 50 PPV channels disabled that its just easier to use on Tivo.

The problem in part stems from the decision by Frey not allow you to select (by punching in the number) a channel that is not in your guide. For example there are 40-50 or so Music Choice channels (many page key presses) that I have to keep in the guide just because if I don't I cannot select them. There is no guide data for these channels but I have to keep there anyway because if you don't carry their weight in the guide you can never select them or at least I don't know how.

User experiences always work best so here it is. Right now there are probably 10 college football games on. Using the guide I have to sort through 50+ pages to find them. There is no mechanism to remember the channels (like a dynamic jump list, another feature idea) on the fly so I either have to scan 50+ pages or try to remember all the channel numbers. Browsing by category in the Sage menu structure is obviously not conducive to jumping between channels. We need to be able to slice the data up at the Guide level.

With Tivo and the football category selected when I select my guide all I see are football games/shows.

So there is just a huge pile of channels/guide data and like Tivo and most other solutions there needs to be a way of slicing it up through filters. Tivo allows you to do this in two ways and its selectable as a guide option toggled from the guide screen.

1) You can toggle between three channel lists: All the channels your provider carries, all the channels you marked that you receive and channels you have deemed favorites. Favorites can be any number of the ones you receive.

2) You can filter the guide by categories.


These two are independent and you can use one, none or both. And it's persisted.

How it's toggled and implemented is of course a user metric, there have been several opinions. But if you have a lot of channels its a big problem for us, honestly I am surprised Sage has not addressed this. If you decide to tackle this problem I'll be glad to help anyway I can as I am sure would others with big channel lists.

peace. . .

I'll take a look at this and see what's involved in the filtering process. I've got a few ideas that I think will blow people away if I can pull off the implementation.

[ptaylor]

Originally Posted by Cayars

I just gave it a quick try and it's working for me on my system. Just for kicks, switch back to the originalV2.stv and see if you experience the same problem.

Doh! I already had a FirstRuns favorite for that show, so it won't let me make another one!

Sorry..

[MacDaddy]

Originally Posted by Cayars

In overlay mode you want to make sure you have 3D accel. turned on and Overlay Color Keying on also. How are these set?

A mind is a terrible thing:-) Thx - I had Overlay Color Keying disabled.

[Cayars]

I'm on a roll

At least the "problems" are getting easier now.

[krutaw]

Cayars ~

First off, I really appreciate the STV. This thing rocks!

I do have a single question for you, and request if it's not possible.

Is it possible to make a playlist from media other than what has been imported? Specifically, I'd really like the ability to watch an entire season of recorded videos that haven't been pulled out of the Sage Recordings.

Whatcha think?

[Hector]

This would be huge but I'll bet not possible without a different media player module. Does Sage even save the list in any readable format? I hate that stupid wiz.bin.

peace . . .

Originally Posted by krutaw

Cayars ~

First off, I really appreciate the STV. This thing rocks!

I do have a single question for you, and request if it's not possible.

Is it possible to make a playlist from media other than what has been imported? Specifically, I'd really like the ability to watch an entire season of recorded videos that haven't been pulled out of the Sage Recordings.

Whatcha think?

[Hector]

Well ideally it would only be a filtered view so if you had a scheduled recording it would still record, and otherwise yes a toggle with maybe a icon to show it was implemented. Even further you could allow the pattern to be ommited to be configurable.

I was thinking (without data) that you had more control over the mini-guide and then it would only be limited to the current time frame.

But really this is a pretty advanced feature. I've seen it once before is it Myth that does it? Or maybe an online guide. I just can't remember.

I just thought it might be low hanging fruit with a high cool factor. If that's not the case there is a lot more important stuff than this.

peace . . .

Originally Posted by Cayars

OK not what I was thinking. I see your point. However if I were to filter these out based on a couple of hours what would happen if you wanted to record a show at 10AM on a channel that is presently filtered out? You wouldn't be able to unless of course we make it a toggle. I'll take a look at this for you.

[Deadbolt]

Wondering if I found a bug: I can't seem to get background video while displaying Malore Recordings.

Also, is there a way to make bakground comskip kick off against manual recordings, and favorites prior to IR recordings?

Thanks!

[DFranch]

I have a small little feature request. On the screen where you specify the default recording quality and the screen where you set the quality for manual recordings it lists them like:

Great

Good

Fair

Their are like 10 different quality settings, and I can never remember what how many Gb per hour each setting represents. Could you show the Gb/hr like this:

Great (3 Gb/hr)

Good (2 GB/hr)

fair (1.5 Gb/hr)

I think either the original stv or malore's used to do this.

Thanks!

[JasonJoel]

One thing you could do is just rename the quality settings in the sage.properties file to include that information.

Would have to do the math and figure out how many GB/hr yourself (bitrate*time is all you have to do).

But that way you could have that now, without having to wait for someone else to do it.

Jason

[Cayars]

Originally Posted by JasonJoel

One thing you could do is just rename the quality settings in the sage.properties file to include that information.

Would have to do the math and figure out how many GB/hr yourself (bitrate*time is all you have to do).

But that way you could have that now, without having to wait for someone else to do it.

Jason

Some of these rate aren't constant and are variable. I believe this is why Frey removed them from SageTV as the "rates" aren't completely accurate for all the VBRs.

I agree also to rename them in the properties file.

[Cayars]

Originally Posted by Deadbolt

Wondering if I found a bug: I can't seem to get background video while displaying Malore Recordings.

Also, is there a way to make bakground comskip kick off against manual recordings, and favorites prior to IR recordings?

Thanks!

This is a well known issue in the Malore modules. It's probably one of the biggest factors why I set out on my quest.

EDIT: I took the "well known" problem from another user who told me this. After investigating where I saw this, it wasn't in my STV, but another. Problem is fixed in next release.

[Deadbolt]

huh, I could have sworn that when I was running Nielm in V2.0 that the Malore Recordings had background video....no matter, if this is one of the main reasons you made your .stv are you planning on fixing it? I still think the Malore Recordings layout, colored progress bars, colored titles for new recordings functionality is trumps everything else out there.

Thanks!

[JasonJoel]

Of course. The disk space required for the VBR profiles would be estimates, not absolutes.

But that is true no matter what with VBR... Although it should average close to the target bitrate, it won't be exact. That is what the "V" in VBR is for.. heh



Jason Bottjen

Originally Posted by Cayars

Some of these rate aren't constant and are variable. I believe this is why Frey removed them from SageTV as the "rates" aren't completely accurate for all the VBRs.

I agree also to rename them in the properties file.

[Hector]

I agree 100%. It's not very pretty at this point but it's the best method I've ever seen. A lot of info in a very tight view. Brilliant I thought.

peace...

Originally Posted by Deadbolt

huh, I could have sworn that when I was running Nielm in V2.0 that the Malore Recordings had background video....no matter, if this is one of the main reasons you made your .stv are you planning on fixing it? I still think the Malore Recordings layout, colored progress bars, colored titles for new recordings functionality is trumps everything else out there.

Thanks!

[turak]

Originally Posted by Deadbolt

huh, I could have sworn that when I was running Nielm in V2.0 that the Malore Recordings had background video....no matter, if this is one of the main reasons you made your .stv are you planning on fixing it? I still think the Malore Recordings layout, colored progress bars, colored titles for new recordings functionality is trumps everything else out there.

Thanks!

Not to mention listing the episode numbers. Being able to see the episode number and being able to see the majority of my recordings at a glance are the two main reasons why I use malore's recordings

[justme]

Not to mention listing the episode numbers.

I love that part, i got used to it with my Tivo. It's one of the things, I feel should be added to every STV, including the official Frey STV.