Am I the Only One....

[bastafidli]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

I'm at a time in my life where I just want things to work. I am about to get married in June. ... I need something that is rock solid that doesn't need constant attention.

This revelation saddens me.

That is exactly where I am. Within last 3 years I got stay at home spouse, two kids and job which really matters to me. I don't have time nor desire to mess anymore with gadgets that should just work. That's why I went with HD100 and SageTV on my CentOS. As a media center it is rock solid. The only times HD100 goes down is when some of my FLAC files crash it. The server never goes down. It plays my media with 99.99% reliability. So the only issue I have is with the usability of the software. I have some ideas how I would improve it and I like the possibility that if Sage wont do it, I can do it on my own. When I find spare bandwidth (which is not any time soon ;-).

In any case. I am very happy user and would be even happier if Sage would start paying some attention to the media center portion of their application.

I personally believe TV as if know it is on its last leg. Within few years every content ever made will be available online for a fixed reasonable fee (a la Netflix). TV will be only for live sport and cultural events and even those will be delivered over the network. Once the live transmission is over, they will be again available on the net. Once that happens recording something makes no longer sense. For that reason and because I have too much stored content anyway and because I just don't use live TV enough I am willing to completely skip that portion of the Sage.

The combination of music, videos, and photos for great price makes me stay away from Sonos and Squeeze boxes. I am in the phase of my life when I removed most of the gadgets from plain sights since they are just buttons to be pushed, knobs to be turned and holes to stick their little fingers to :-). I am down to TV, Sage, Dish receiver and Zvox (325 for my subwoofer and speakers). So far this setup is surviving the experimenting of the little ones to satisfaction of both parties :-)

[S_M_E]

Originally Posted by bastafidli

I personally believe TV as if know it is on its last leg. Within few years every content ever made will be available online for a fixed reasonable fee (a la Netflix). TV will be only for live sport and cultural events and even those will be delivered over the network. Once the live transmission is over, they will be again available on the net.

I'm not so sure about that. I think that movie theaters will disappear long before TV does. As far as netflix and hulu (etc) go, I'm not interested in either at this point in my life, so everyone is different.

[Taddeusz]

Yea, streaming over the internet is definitely the future but I don't see it happening any time very soon. The internet is still far too new and the TV market has too many hands in the pot for it to change quickly. Same with movie theatres. I don't even have a guess for the timeframe of them disappearing but it's going to be a while.

Until the movie and tv companies really realize the internet isn't just for nerds it's going to pretty much stay the way it is.

[bastafidli]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

Yea, streaming over the internet is definitely the future but I don't see it happening any time very soon. The internet is still far too new and the TV market has too many hands in the pot for it to change quickly. Same with movie theatres. I don't even have a guess for the timeframe of them disappearing but it's going to be a while.

Until the movie and tv companies really realize the internet isn't just for nerds it's going to pretty much stay the way it is.

I should probably correct my self saying "the last leg for the geeks like us on this forums" :-)

[SteveD]

Don't forget it a fun hobby, and there is always something new to try and to tweak

[TorontoSage]

I think you are looking at the world of TV and the Internet through your own lens rather than that of the world at large. I don't think you can conclude that TV is now on its last leg, because that is a very premature extrapolation of your favourable experience with SageTV which has carved out a tiny niche for itself in the marketplace.

Studies show that TV is a passive experience and many people want it to be so. The vast majority of people just want to flick a switch, watch the TV and veg out. When they want a more active or interactive experience then they go to their computer or laptop, or they open their laptop while they are watching TV. I am not denying there are people who watch TV on their laptop or computer through the Internet (a la Hulul, etc), but it is not the norm because the experience is greatly inferior to using a TV. Some might watch TV programs delivered via the Internet on their TV, using SageTV or the IPTV jack which is now starting to be included on some HDTV's (Panasonic has them now). But, given the quality is low, there is not mass acceptance of this manner of watching TV. Given the choice of watching a show on the Internet or on a TV, most people will choose the latter. And it will not change until the quality of the image vastly improves which will take fatter broadband pipes to the home at a reasonable price. Also, the user interface has to be as easy as flicking a channel. This will take a very long time.

The technical aspect of turning on a TV also cannot be neglected. TV's have the same degree of reliability as phones 99.999% (the 5 nines as they call them). It's probably even higher than that. I can't ever remember my TV not ever showing programming. Computers can't even come close to touching that kind of plug 'n play 'it just works' type of uptime and reliability. SageTV and many of the other media center devices don't even come close. Until that happens I don't think one can even conjecture when TV will be on it's last leg.

As for movie theatres, it certainly isn't a growth business and many people have taken to watching movies at home using video projectors and large screens, both of which have really come down in price over the last few years. But, for a lot of people, there is something to be said for getting out of the house and enjoying a movie on the big screen. And, movie theatres are still are able to maintain healthy revenues. Just like TV didn't kill movies or radio, and VHS and DVD's didn't kill movie theatres, I don't think any of the new technologies is going to kill a night out at the theatre (there's a simliar radio analogy but I can't recall it right now).

[TorontoSage]

Originally Posted by bastafidli

As a media center it is rock solid... So the only issue I have is with the usability of the software.

In any case. I am very happy user and would be even happier if Sage would start paying some attention to the media center portion of their application.

I don't quite understand what you mean by the media center if you access videos, music and pictures with no problem. Are you talking about the TV scheduling and recording software? I take it you must get all your videos from DVD's or Blu-Ray's?

Originally Posted by bastafidli

The combination of music, videos, and photos for great price makes me stay away from Sonos and Squeeze boxes. I am in the phase of my life when I removed most of the gadgets from plain sights since they are just buttons to be pushed, knobs to be turned and holes to stick their little fingers to :-).

Sonos is not inexpensive (almost $500 per amplified Zoneplayer that is connected to speakers) but the usability aspect of the product beats SageTV by a mile when it comes to music. It took me 5 minutes to set up out of the box and it's extremely fully featured and has never failed. Every Sonos user experiences how bullet-proof and easy to use the software is. The software really puts SageTV to shame. Also, you don't even have to have a computer on to listen to music. And, nothing beats walking around with an iTouch/iPhone in your pocket and being able to control your music library and send any music (including internet feeds like Pandora, Rhapsody, last.fm, Sirius, etc) to any room from anywhere in the house wirelessly either in fully synchronous or different feeds. Compare this to SageTV where you have to be in front of a TV or computer to manage the music and the features pale in comparison to SageTV. Each to his own. Not that I take the drug (or ever have) but Sonos is like cocaine. Once you try it, it's hard to quit because it feels so good. Maybe if I had implemented SageTV first and Sonos second things would be different, because I wouldn't realize I had a need to fill (as I'd be able to access my music files around the house, albeit in an inferior way with SageTV), but now that I have Sonos and am implementing SageTV all I can say is: "I don't know how to quit you Sonos" (to quote a line from a recent movie

But, each to his own.

Maybe the CEO's of Sonos and SageTV could get together and compare notes, since the latter worked for the former at Software.com before it was sold and their head offices are only a few miles apart in California...

[mayamaniac]

Originally Posted by TorontoSage

The software really puts SageTV to shame.

Due to it's vast feature sets and extendability, the complexity of SageTV is way more than Sonos. Sonos only does a fraction of what SageTV can do, so it better does it better than SageTV.

[TorontoSage]

Originally Posted by mayamaniac

Due to it's vast feature sets and extendability, the complexity of SageTV is way more than Sonos. Sonos only does a fraction of what SageTV can do, so it better does it better than SageTV.

And I think that will always be the case as they are totally different animals. Sonos is dedicated to delivering the best whole house wireless audio experience and nothing else (the name Sonos even means something like music in another language). Even if the two were companies were to merge not much would change with the user experience at all as there is nothing that you could do with the two technologies merged that you can't do as it stands now. Since I am going to feed the HD200 audio output into the Sonos amplified Zoneplayers in each room, I get the benefit of using the ceiling (or standaone) speakers to listen to either my music library, internet sources or the SageTV media center. Sonos ability to wirelessly stream doesn't really help with the audio portion of SageTV since TV is an application you listen to in the room that is local to the TV. You don't listen to the TV in a room that doesn't have one.

But, taking a page out of Sonos' book, what would be nice would be a wireless control of the HD Theatre or a wireless HD Theatre itself, removing the requirement to string cat5e/6 cable everywhere. Wireless transmission of HD has already been included in one of Panasonic's top end plasmas which is soon to be released, but only at a very short distance. Whole-house wireless HD transmission will eventually be ready for prime time, but right now it's a long way off. Also, HD video is heavily bandwidth dependent, so that may pose an additional challenge if one has a lot of TV's. But then higher bandwidth wifi routers will continue to be developed. Anyway, I could eventually see HD Theatre and Sonos functionality in one box. Right now I have that functionality, but in two boxes and two remotes/controllers.

As for two remotes/controllers, it would be nice to only have to use one control device. Sonos recently ported their controller software to the iTouch/iPhone as a free application (and their sales went up 20% in the month after). SageTV should be able to do this quite easily, but maybe they don't see a demand for it as people are conditioned to using an IR remote with a TV and and the wifi aspect of the remote is only useful if you are in the room that the TV is in (as that's where you need to hear the sound).

[bastafidli]

Originally Posted by TorontoSage

I don't quite understand what you mean by the media center if you access videos, music and pictures with no problem. Are you talking about the TV scheduling and recording software? I take it you must get all your videos from DVD's or Blu-Ray's?

What I meant by it was that the usability of the media center is really subpar. E.g. Try to play single song on repeat (no luck). Try to see what song will play next or was played last (no luck). Try to see list of all your movies you have not seen yet (no luck). Try to access separate list of all your feature movies from all your family movies (no luck). Try to see screensaver slideshow of pictures in specific folder (no luck).

I can go on and on about things which once would consider pretty basic functionality or at least something which would dramatically improve the user experience with Sage. E.g. look at the screen design of the screens to browse your media (music, movies) and look at the first three lines on the top of the screen. What function do they fulfill? How much screen estate do you really need to fulfill such function? What about the bar on the right? Is it more helping or annoying when navigating your media? Right now the software is bare bone, it gets the work done, you can play the media you choose, but that is about it.

Yup, we get most of our viewing needs via physical media or via internet on our TV, not computer. We watch the dish when we have half hour to kill and want to vedge on the couch. Then it of course even doesn't matter what is on :-)

[TorontoSage]

Originally Posted by bastafidli

Yup, we get most of our viewing needs via physical media or via internet on our TV, not computer. We watch the dish when we have half hour to kill and want to vedge on the couch. Then it of course even doesn't matter what is on :-)

Where do you get on your HDTV, via the internet, shows with 1080i or 720p resolution (ie quality equal to that from an HD cable box or HD satellite dish)? Or, are you mainly watching Google Video, Youtube, etc. from the Internet on the HDTV?

[bastafidli]

As I mentioned, we are mostly catching up with news, nbc nightly news, today show, cnn ac 360, etc.

[TorontoSage]

So does that mean you only get it online via the internet and through the TV? Is it in high resolution like normal hdtv?

[bastafidli]

Yes, most of it is available via the feeds in Online media section of Sage. We do not own hdtv yet so I cannot comment on that.

[TorontoSage]

Ok well that explains everything.

The market demand is there for receiving time-shifted free programming in HD on HDTV's via the internet that is the same quality as HD that is received from the cable company or over-the-air antenna and in the same easy-to-use fashion.

The actual pipe doesn't matter, just what comes out of the pipe. It has to be the same quality, provide the same ease of use and 'just work'

We are very very far from being there.

[bastafidli]

I would argue we are actually much close that most people thing and that pipe actually matters a lot.

Look how much has technology evolved in last 10 years. I once read that most technological problems are problems of caching and compression. Compression has finally caught up with the advances of computing power and new codecs. Caching is in its infancy with the Internet edge-cache companies. Wait until cable providers and telcos get to caching. Unless there is some dramatic investents in infrastructure or technology the bandwidth in US will always be the problem. What can be done easily is to take the little telco cabinet at the end of your street, load it with few TB HDDs that intelligently cache what the neighborhood may want to watch. What will majority want to watch will go from the cache at the end of the street loaded in off-peak time. What will the outliers want to watch will be streamed life a-la Netflix which can even now stream HD like quality just fine. Dish wont be able to do it. Not sure about wireless. But telcos, you bet they can. And I am pretty sure they will be acceptable partners to media companies to work with.

Future is much closer than you think. Not next year, not the one after, but 5 years? I could bet on that. In any case, this got really OT :-).

[reggie14]

I know we’re getting off-topic, but I like the Internet TV discussion. Certainly most people don’t want to watch TV on their computer, and they probably don’t want to deal with a Hulu-like interface (particularly from 10 feet away). But, when Internet TV comes, it’s going to be with something like a cable box hooked up to a TV and a broadband Internet connection. The interface would probably be a lot like a TiVo interface. And at first I think there’s a good chance it would be nearly indistinguishable from a normal cable box interface. I also don’t think picture quality is nearly as important as TorontoSage thinks it is. Everything I’ve read suggests the general public really doesn’t care that much about HD. There is a surprising percentage of people that have HDTVs that are always watching SD without realizing it, and other people that can’t even tell the difference between SD and HD. 480p is probably good enough for the general public.

The biggest problem of Internet TV is figuring out how it can scale well. I agree with most of bastafidli’s points on that. There would probably be a lot of distributed caching of programming. Cable companies would cache nearly everything. Local boxes distributed around neighborhoods would cache most popular things. Cable boxes in individuals’ homes would cache the programs they’ve “bookmarked” (the equivalent of favorites in Sage). There would still be some notion of timeslots, at least at first. New programs would get sent out using some form of multicast transmission, allowing a large number of people to watch the show while using only a small amount of bandwidth. Systems would be designed to play back video off of individuals’ hard drives as much as possible. So, if you start watching episodes of an old TV show, the cable systems would start caching the next episodes on your hard drive using excess bandwidth (quality-of-service and packet prioritization become important here).

Perhaps more interesting than thinking about the technical details is thinking about the potential business models. I’m not convinced the all-you-can-eat Netflix approach would work. At least, not without advances with advertisements that make them more effective for advertisers, and more lucrative for content providers. I think my generation (people born after 1980) is more willing to adopt micropayment systems than older generations, largely due to the influence of iTunes. You can imagine various hybrid approaches too- new episodes might be available as advertiser-supported programming (with unskippable advertisements), but older shows would follow the micropayment approach, and really old shows might be available as part of an all-you-can-eat package. Related to that is the question of what people will be buying. Will they be buying a copy of the TV episode, or renting it? Certainly renting starts raising a lot more questions about DRM, although I think that’s probably inevitable either way.

[TorontoSage]

Originally Posted by bastafidli

I would argue we are actually much close that most people thing and that pipe actually matters a lot.

You are missing my point. People don't care what kind of a pipe they have so long as they get one they want through that pipe. People aren't in love with with cable HDTV. They only use it because of the experience it provides, which is ease of use, 99.999% reliablity, a fantastic picture and real time delivery if required. Internet video doesn't even come close today and I doubt it will in 15 years, let alone 5 years off. There are many things the Internet can do already that cable TV can't but matching the viewing experience is certainly not one of them and it will take a lot of factors other than technology and investment to get there.

[ONLYinHD]

Let's have a comparison of the "DVR" functionality of SAT vs Cable vs SageTV.

I've done just that over the past 2 years. I have had Dish DVR, FiosTV DVR, DirectTV DVR, and TIVO with each of those, and now have only SageTV. Here's why.

Features: SageTV wins hands down. Combined with MVPs or the Placeshifter client it is equal to TIVO in features IMO but a better DVR overall. The UI is much faster (I used to grit my teeth because of the time it took the TIVO to build the next screen). And the functionality of SageTV can be customized by me at any time, I just happen to like the SageMC add-on as is for right now. FiosTV/DirecTV/Dish dvr functionality is a joke compared to TIVO and SageTV. Just check out their websites or ads: "Our dvr will pause live tv AND record your shows" Wow! Aint that special.

Sharing: Did you ever try to transfer a show from one TIVO to the next? I have a pretty good network at home but I couldn't start a transfer and immediately begin watching in the other room; it would sooner or later catch up to the transfer and pause annoyingly for up to a minute or more before continuing to play. Movies were especially bad; pausing multiple times during playback - some fine experience there. I got tired of having each box be an island unto itself. I shouldn't gripe about TIVO, though, just try to transfer anything from a satellite or cable dvr to another room (good luck with that dream). Now that I have SageTV, I can watch whatever is on the server from any room in my house (7 for now), whenever I choose to do so (no waiting, no hassles).

Cost: SageTV wins hands down there as well. I bought 4 TIVOs, all with lifetime service, on eBay for a total of about $1200 (I think it was a bit more than that but let's just call it even). My entire SageTV setup was about $900. Both feature no monthly DVR fees/guide fees/rental fees whatever so either one is a good choice. Not so with the satellite tv providers and cable dvr. You pay a monthly fee for the "guide" or a monthly lease fee for the dvr box that is higher than renting a "regular" box. With DirecTV you can buy the box and own it (several hundred dollars) but you still pay a monthly fee. It's not just about saving $20 a month on dvr fees but that sure is a sweet bonus.

Convenience: I just threw this in as a lark. I gave up long ago trying to do anything like SageTV with the satellite guys or cable boxes. I looked into getting media players in the 3 rooms that do not have an xbox but the cost was significant (still needed a server and the boxes were over $100 apiece at that time). SageTV wins hands down here as well. I can now enjoy all of my recorded tv shows, movies, photos, home movies and music from any room in my house without setting up a separate box or hassling with complicated configuration or needing multiple remote controls. All my media are in one place and accessible everywhere in my house using the same familiar interface (Since every room has either a pc, mac, or linux computer or one of my 3 MVPs).

So, SageTV wins my tests in every category. Since I expect to keep it for 5 years before upgrading I will enjoy the extra features AND save money in the long run (and just love that nobody is reaching into my pocket each month with a fee for this or a charge for that).

[TorontoSage]

Originally Posted by ONLYinHD

Let's have a comparison of the "DVR" functionality of SAT vs Cable vs SageTV.

I pretty well agree with everything you've said. I did a comparison of SageTV vs using a matrix switch, IR receivers/blasters, and multiple HD cable DVR boxes at the head end and the price only came out slightly cheaper (but that's probably because in Toronto, Canada, with Rogers Cable, we only have to pay $2.99 a month extra above the analog cable fee to get digital cable with basic HD, regardless of how many cable boxes we have. Also, we can buy the SA 8300HD PVR for $350 each with tax when they happen to be on sale).

I don't have a full implementation of SageTV with HD200's yet, but will soon. What bothers me is all of the technical problems people have with SageTV and the HD PVR's on here.

I do love the interface and customization possibilities and love SageMC.