Suggesting features for the next version of SageTV

[Goodspike]

Originally Posted by jlowery7

I haven't found this option yet, so if someone knows it exists, then enlighten me. But, I would like for there to be somesort of a live tv stop timer. My wife never remembers to hit stop playback, she just turns off the tv, so Sage just keeps on eatin up hd space. Thx.

Don't the shows autodelete when finished?

DTivos record two shows constantly if left on. Doesn't seem to lead to issues.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by jlowery7

I haven't found this option yet, so if someone knows it exists, then enlighten me. But, I would like for there to be somesort of a live tv stop timer. My wife never remembers to hit stop playback, she just turns off the tv, so Sage just keeps on eatin up hd space. Thx.

There is a sleep timer in the customizations forum (check the sticky index post) & live TV will get deleted first anyway.

As with any new tool, there is some learning involved. Remind her that she wouldn't just leave the car running in the garage when closing the garage door & coming inside, or leave the stove on after boiling some water & taking the kettle off the stove, or leave the kitchen faucet on after filling a pot & taking the pot out of the sink, or... well, maybe you wouldn't use those words. But, there is a new usage pattern to get used to now that an extra tool is in use for TV viewing.

- Andy

[mlbdude]

I notice many of these requests already exist in the product. This is interresting that they are not already know. I would like to ask users why this is? What can be done to make the learning curve easier?

For Ex., schedule look ahead is defaulted to 3 days. This can be configured to anything up to 14 days. What could have been done to make that info more accessible to that user?

[PhillJones]

There is already a fix for non-square pixels for video playback. I'd like one for the photoviewer too.

Either that or something in the setup menu where you can tell sage the resolution of your display and it's physical dimensions.

I have a 16x9 plasma display with 1280x768 native resolution. Feeding it the native res is a far superior picture quality than giving it 1280x720 but the pixels are 6% wider than their height. I know that a number of 42" plasma screens have 1024x768 pixels and many of those people resort to feeding the screen a 720p signal and letting the internal scalers sort it out, which drastically reduces picture quality.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by jlowery7

I haven't found this option yet, so if someone knows it exists, then enlighten me. But, I would like for there to be somesort of a live tv stop timer. My wife never remembers to hit stop playback, she just turns off the tv, so Sage just keeps on eatin up hd space. Thx.

How I got around this is on my Harmony remote when the Off button is pressed I also have it do 2 "Stop" commands before it shuts everything down. That way the video is stopped and not deleted (using SageMC) and works out for everyone.

Gerry

[malbec]

Originally Posted by mlbdude

I notice many of these requests already exist in the product. This is interresting that they are not already know. I would like to ask users why this is? What can be done to make the learning curve easier?

For Ex., schedule look ahead is defaulted to 3 days. This can be configured to anything up to 14 days. What could have been done to make that info more accessible to that user?

Well, this may be a crappy answer. Opus, I sincerely apologize for this! But, I hope you will take solace in the fact it is the God's honest truth.

The manual is 249 pages long. I have two kids (3 and 5). I work 50+ hours a week. My wife, a more senior executive than I, works the same and travels about once every two weeks on top of it making me a single dad.

That math works out to ... I am not going to read the manual. My time for fishing out the answers in the forum (which I love to do by the way, you guys are awesome!!!!) ... if I can't figure it out while dinking around, it ain't gonna get done. Some day, maybe I have time to figure the stuff out, etc. By that time, I anticipate I will have many, many hard drives full of stuff to watch and the extra time spent finding this information might result in a net positive to my free time.

Again, great product, love it to death, but some things need to be standing there naked in front of me stomping on my foot to take notice.

EDIT: So, how do I get the schedule to look more than three days ahead?

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by malbec

Again, great product, love it to death, but some things need to be standing there naked in front of me stomping on my foot to take notice.

Feature Request of the Week!




Gerry

[bcjenkins]

Originally Posted by BobPhoenix

Think my plugin may do at least some of what you want. It uses the parental lock code as an access method to unlock the guide display and the Favorite Channel Lists setup screen. Download it here. Also I'm hoping to be uploading a new version that fixes a couple of bugs I found as well as some new features in the next day or so. Support thread is here.

BobP.

Bob,

I have looked at your plugin, although I can't say that I kicked the tires on it yet.. My biggest gripe about Parental controls is that they are system wide. I want to control it at the client level. I don't want to deal with it on my TV, only the youngins. Oh yeah and I'd like it built in. :-)

B

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by malbec

The manual is 249 pages long. I have two kids (3 and 5). I work 50+ hours a week. My wife, a more senior executive than I, works the same and travels about once every two weeks on top of it making me a single dad.

That math works out to ... I am not going to read the manual. My time for fishing out the answers in the forum (which I love to do by the way, you guys are awesome!!!!) ... if I can't figure it out while dinking around, it ain't gonna get done. Some day, maybe I have time to figure the stuff out, etc. By that time, I anticipate I will have many, many hard drives full of stuff to watch and the extra time spent finding this information might result in a net positive to my free time.

There is a 'getting started' section of the manual that tries to cover the basics, but the rest of it is geared towards being a reference for the various menus so you can find out what is possible on each screen. "Hmmm... I wonder if the recordings can be sorted differently in SageTV Recordings..." I think a "How To" manual (SageTV for Dummies, perhaps?) would be a completely different sort of document & could be even longer. But, the 'getting started' section may be expanded for some other basic tips at some point.

A manual usage tip: don't forget that the PDF document is searchable & all the menus are cross-linked, so you can browse the manual menu by menu, almost as if you were selecting menu items in the UI to go from one screen to another.

See: What did you find confusing about SageTV?

That thread mentions looking at creating a form of Help or series of Tips that can be viewed from within the UI to try to comment on things that can be done, but which might not be obvious.

some things need to be standing there naked in front of me stomping on my foot to take notice.

I don't mind mentioning page numbers so people can find more info, but this would be going too far.

- Andy

[malbec]

Andy,

Seriously, I hope you didn't take any offense. The manual, your comments, references to sections, etc. is very welcomed, very helpful, and top notch. I guess I am just one of those guys that opens the box, puts the item together without reading the instructions and invariable has parts left over I have no idea how to use.

All that said, I think this has been enough to encourage me to shut up until I spend a little more time with my nose in the rule book.

Thanks again for all you have done to make it as user friendly as it is.

P.S. If it could be Angelina Jolie standing there...

[nick_l]

1. Easy way to remove one show from the recording schedule.

1a. Easy way to stop/delete a show that is currently being recorded.


loving my sage experience so far.
Nick

[dbfresh23]

The biggest problem of all is that people seem unable to use that cool button at the top of every page in this forum. The label may be a bit hard to understand for some people but that search button actually does search this forum.

That said, I do hate PDF as the manual format. I'd much rather see something web based. Taking it a step further would be a display of recent searches that other people have done or a most searched for type listing.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by dbfresh23

That said, I do hate PDF as the manual format. I'd much rather see something web based. Taking it a step further would be a display of recent searches that other people have done or a most searched for type listing.

There's a bit of a legacy problem here... the manual is in Word DOC format. I once asked in this forum if anyone knew of tools to convert to html format & also spent time looking at conversion tools. I found some decent tools that would probably work nicely if you started a doc from scratch; however, a lot of the current formatting works great when converted to PDF, but looks really bad or doesn't convert at all when going to something browser based. I guess I need to connect with someone who knows more about handling these types of large documents so they can be converted to both PDF & web format...

- Andy

[Humanzee]

I don't know if all these count as features so much as general comments, but here goes.

1. SageTv as a company should attempt to hire the top customization, STV and plug-in developers full time, or at least bribe them with free software and hardware so that they keep up their good work.

2. The SageTV website should have a "submit feature request" button somewhere, so that all of these wonderful ideas can be tracked and so that we know they actually get seen by the developers for sure. (I.e. like bug reports) The forums are great, but we dont get much official comment from the SageTV folks about what sorts of things they can and will implement, vs. what things they wont implement or can't for legal or financial reasons.

If these requests were posted we could all then theoretically place our votes for or against each feature and generate a top ten list of feature requests/demands. Feedback Rank etc.

3) I don't know what Sage's continuing revenue model or available man power is like but I would seriously consider contributing a couple of dollars a month for the privellage of being a part of the beta program. That is, if I knew that my dollar was funding a developer who was solely working on our suggestions, and stv improvement.

Ok a few feature requests

4) Conditional and Boolean favorites. I.e. Record "Auto Racing" but not "Nascar" or Record the favorite "Mr. Rogers Neighborhood" on any channel except "43" at any time except 2:00am. or Record Keyword "Baseball" but only when it also contains (("Mariner%" and "Yankee%") or ("Mariner%" and "DiamondBack%")) Etc.

5) Recordings stored in file system subdirectories named by show titile\channel\what ever custom configuration I choose.

6) RSS news feeds for these forums, so we can view and post from within SageTV.

7) Automatic update notification

8) Additional Aspect Ratio "Zoom" or "Custom" for those odd situations where a show is broadcast at 16:9 but only has content in the 4:3 portion of the screen and that content also happens to be in letter box format. I.e. Black Bars and Black Columns.

9) Allow configurable minimizeation to tray or exiting of the Sage GUI at Sleep so that I can use my own Windows Screen saver instead of the sage one. Problems re: FSE etc.

10) Open the Wiz.bin to some prying eyes.

11) Pod Casts / Streaming Audio / Streaming Video clips/ on demand. I saw MCE can tap into bloomberg to get streaming news on demand. Kinda neat. A YouTube and Google Video plug in would be nice eh?

12) Recording Analysis. Similar to commercial detecting, but used to report statistics for Program length, bit rate, file size, content aspect ratio, channels of audio, content resolution. Would be nice for Automatic Aspect Ratio switching or Scaling to fit our screen. Automatic audio video renderer selection. Better disk usage statistics / predictions. Who knows what else.

13) In guide or on screen signal quality or strength for OTA tuners so that we can fiddle with our reception outside of the channel setup menu.

14) Undelete. Ability to reserve a certain amount of available space for "recently deleted programs" in a seperate cache or video library. I.e. "Oops I didn't really mean to delete that program just now. The wife is going to kill me." Available or X days or X minutes or if X amount of disk space is avaialbe.

15) PDA Mini Client\Remote Control. Software for your phone or PDA so that you can use it as a video-less client or remote control for your SageTV Server or Client. Via Bluetooth\Wifi\IrDA. I frequently want to muck with settings while the wife is watching something. This way I could create a play list, or edit a favorite or schedule a recording with out disturbing the current playback. Or actively change the channel\select the next program from my recording directory all from my hand held\phone.

16) Full Placeshifting Client for PDA

17) Package the PlaceShifting license with both the client licesne and the extender license. I am never going to own and extender, but I am going to build a client one day. Currently the arragement is just silly. It makes me feel like im being screwed with. If its is its own license thats fine, but I feel like the Extender / MVP folks are getting a freebee. If it were packaged with the client license I would buy it now, event though I don't have a client machine. That way even if I didn't decide to use placeshifter I would have the client license available for when I do build a client PC.

There are probably more features I could think of given the availabilbity of idea 2 above but for now I am tired and have probably written quite enough.

[Pork Chop]

Some good ideas.

I'd contibute dollars to fund addional development resource.

Its fair to say that you guys do a great job. We all want you to be financially successful and continue to invest in SageTV's development.

Perhaps Sage could setup a voluntary donation page or monthly direct debit facility.

PC

[Black Sky]

Hi all,
I recently went back to my 2nd attempt at building a SagetTV HTPC. I am technical but a novice at TV on a Pc.
At the risk of taking this topic slightly off track (might be best as a seperate but related topic) I'd like to look at how best we can get information on using and configuring SageTV.

Information on how to use and configure SageTV is in two places. - The manual and the online forum. IMHO the manual is good but I wouldn't call it a "User Guide" but instead a "User Reference". It explains what everything does, but does not really help a novice get a working installation going on their first attempt. Its information overload.

The forum is on a first look information overload, in the sense that pretty much every question you might have has probably being answered 3 times already by Opus4 and the other gurus here. Finding the solution to a problem can be difficult and involve much searching of threads, and sometimes there are multiple solutions to the same problem.

I suggest having a think about what information users require and presenting it to them in a more efficient manner. To start the ball rolling on this,

My top suggestion is as follows- You probably know the htpcnews.com forums. They have a section there called guides. Simple but brilliant idea.
SageTV forums should have the same thing.- A forum with some guides/how to's to get people up and runnign with SageTV. Such guides could be to start with

Guide 1: The User Reference Manual
Guide 2: SageTV & Hardware, Tuners, graphics cards, Tv-out etc
Guide 3: Populating the EPG data and using XMLTV plug-ins etc.
Guide 4: Guide to Codecs and their usage in SageTV, VMR9 v overlay etc.
Guide 5: Some diagrams of cabling and connections between Tuners, clients, MVP, and TV etc.
Guide 6: Common H/W issues - the most common problems and solutions
Guide 7: HDTV getting setup and working.
Guide 8: SageTV Customizations - what where, how to start your own.

Problems go under the normal discussion forums, approved solutions, tips etc, get updated into the guides on a regular basis by an Admin.
The "what did you find confusing about SageTV" shows perfectly what the main areas people need some guidance on are.

Not quite "SageTV for Dummies" guides, but not far off either.

Over the weekend I'll post an example of what I mean probably on the EPG forum. I have put together a "currently" 13 page doc on getting XMLTV to do what I want in SageTV. Reason I did it was that in 6 months time I will know what I did to get XMLTV working and what the different batch files do etc. then I though someone else might find it useful so am just cleaning it up a bit. The title says it all "A beginners guide to using XMLTV with SageTV".

Love the product, can't wait for the wireless MVP's.

[dblaine2]

To get the discussion back on track...

Several folks mentioned go get such-and-such customization to do whatever.

The thing is tho the thread started out with "What do you want to be in the next version of Sage?" I think these customizations need to become apart of the core Sage product. Many of the customizations have become routine to add whenever someone installs Sage.

For those ideas without a customization already in place by this forum, I think tracking suggestions is a good idea. I know Sage has no contractual obiligation to these but it would be nice to see if they are being considered on some sort of tote board.

[Opus4]

I forgot to add a comment that I've posted in the past: SageTV does not monitor the forum for feature suggestions, just like tech support doesn't monitor the forum for support issues. While such posts may be seen, SageTV has asked that feature suggestions be submitted directly to them. They are not going to be making a public list of all feature suggestions & their implementation plans for future versions.

Edit: Oops, I don't mean that to sound like you aren't allowed to talk about what you would like to see added; I just mean that SageTV may or may not notice such posts.

- Andy

[Humanzee]

Originally Posted by dblaine2

Many of the customizations have become routine to add whenever someone installs Sage.

That reminds me of another feature idea.

18) Customization Management implemented like the plug-in management is done in Firefox. That way its point and click to install or upgrade any plug-in's this would make re-installing customizations trivial.

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by dblaine2

Several folks mentioned go get such-and-such customization to do whatever.

The thing is tho the thread started out with "What do you want to be in the next version of Sage?" I think these customizations need to become apart of the core Sage product.

I don't agree with this. Judging by this thread, the Sage devs will be hard pressed to find time to implement even a fraction of the feature wishlist. Duplicating work that's already been done by third-party developers seems like a poor use of their time. They should be looking for ways to leverage third-party devs even more than they do now.

Customizability is what sets Sage apart from competing products, so what I'd like to see in future versions of Sage are big improvements to the customization tools:

* Better Studio features for abstracting and modularizing widget code.

* Better ways of separating style from function, so that third-party add-ons work across a broad spectrum of UI styles.

* Better tools for maintaining customizations across upgrades, and for automatically generating STVI import scripts.

We need more customization, not less. That's the only way that everybody's favorite wishlist items are ever going to get implemented, because the Sage devs simply don't have time to do it all themselves.