The future of Sagetv?

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by reggie14

But, keep in mind I spend all day thinking about worst-case scenarios, so maybe that just makes me extra pessimistic about things. That being said, I think your numbers might be a little low, though I don't necessarily have a good reason why.

Now I like you even more In a previous life I did that for a living and have the gray hair to prove it.

My numbers are a complete guess and I think they are low. My general point was that it really does not take a lot of money to keep Sage going strong. All you need is a small group of talented programmers who are driven to make the product successful.

I'm not worried about Sage going broke. If anything I worry more about the key people at Sage getting bored or being lured away by bigger money.

Tom

[stevech]

If, and we hope not, Sage falters, then how would our software get its guide data if Sage's contract for such evaporates?

I pay a stipend for and get and use, independently of Sage, guide data from "SchedulesDirect" a non-profit. Probably the same root data source as Sage. But I wouldn't be able to integrate that source with Sage.

But, perhaps this is moot.

As I said elsewhere, I tried Win 7 Media Center. It wouldn't last 30 seconds on the WAF-critique list.

Also, I saw no forensics mention of CTPVR. I guess it was just a one-man show, unable to get to critical mass.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by stevech

If, and we hope not, Sage falters, then how would our software get its guide data if Sage's contract for such evaporates?

I pay a stipend for and get and use, independently of Sage, guide data from "SchedulesDirect" a non-profit. Probably the same root data source as Sage. But I wouldn't be able to integrate that source with Sage.

I believe Schedule Directs comes from Zap2it which is where Sage gets its data. I also believe that you can use XMLTV to get data from Schedules Direct and there are lots of threads on XMLTV in the EPG forum on this board. Lots of Sage users from outside of North America use this to get EPG data into Sage so it is very doable.

I used to use XMLTV to generate guide data for my TiVo. For a very long time TiVo did not have guide data for Canada. So we had to hack into the TiVo, and "roll our own" guide data.

Kids these days have it easy...

[Polypro]

As long as there is a way to get guide data, your current Sage box should run forever...or at least until you die As fast as hardware changes these days, I still don't see Satellite, Cable, OTA or even IP delivery...and the way to get them into a current XP/Vista/W7 computer...changing that much. So with XMLTV, I'm not too worried.

P

[paulbeers]

As everyone has stated, if Sage were to go under today (which I don't see, but let's just say it did), I would still have a working system. With XMLTV imports I can still get my guide data and right now my system does everything I need it to and very well at that. It isn't like if Sage went under, they are going to come into my house and take my Sage server/clients/extenders from me! In fact if Sage went under today, I would probably hurry up and buy a bunch of extenders just to make sure my system ran for years to come!

[stevech]

How do you get ScheduleDirect's XML guide data into Sage?

[wayner]

I have never done this with Sage but check out the stickies in the SageTV EPG forum.

[mistergq]

As an owner of a small business, successful small businesses have a model of keeping overhead down. If you have 30 employees, your over head is much higher than 5 employees. Further, if 5 or 6 employees is all you need, then that is all you need!

[drewg]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

I just checked and there are 14,423 forum members.

Let's say half of them purcahsed Sage somewhere between 2002 and today. That's 7,211 licenses at $80 each for a total of $576,000. That's $82,285 per year.

I think you might be under-counting by taking a percentage of forum members. I have a co-worker who uses SageTV. He's never joined the forum, and had no idea that SageTV could even do half the things it can (like comskip, neilm web interface, etc) until he heard me talking about SageTV at lunch one day. The impression I got was that it seemed like the easiest/cheapest way to get decent TV support on his old XP PC, and he had no problems during setup, so he never even looked at the forums. So I think there may be at least as many quietly satisfied users out there as forum members.

Drew

[MattHelm]

And there are people like me, that have 3 servers, plus 2 Placeshifters, and 2 clients! All with me as the only person on the forum.

[kingwr]

I think the most important place for SageTV to go right now is get SageTV 7 out quickly with a new UI architecture that provides for rich user interfaces/templates to be designed and implemented in a simple structure (no layers upon layers of XML and STV, third-party extensions, and such), and that can be used consistently by plug-ins (i.e. I don't need a default STV version of my plug-in as well as a SageMC version of my plug-in). This will keep SageTV relevant in the future and competitive with Windows 7 and the like.

I know that's what's keeping me from implementing SageTV at this point.

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by drewg

I think you might be under-counting by taking a percentage of forum members.

I think it's an big under-estimate as well. Even if you do count the people who have several licenses. My point was that even in a "worst case" scenario Sage is probably not in financial trouble.

[cat6man]

sage really needs to get a beta or new hd300 out here soon............or they'll be overrun with threads like these

[voidstar]

In response to the original question of this thread... I've used SageTV on my WinXP machine for 2 years now. I have Hauppauge 1600 and HDHomeRun receivers.

To be honest SageTV has been one of the most frustrating programs I have ever used. If I dare change or update something, 9 times out of 10 I find that I am up until 2am trying to get something to work (usually a basic feature like the EPG). Mind you I'm a software engineer. The forum helps but is too full of cryptic terms that have special meaning only within this community.

Is there a future for SageTV? Well, I was able to configure Win7's media center with my hardware in a few clicks. 5 minutes with Win7 vs 10+ hours total for SageTV. Win7 looks a whole lot better also. If you don't mind Microsoft peeking at what you watch (I do, but most don't care) then MediaPortal, MythTV or XMBC are free alternatives that are as mature as SageTV is now. Stiff competition.

I've hung in there for SageTV but every time I make a change its a new problem resulting in hours of frustration that usually ends in someone telling me to read the manual, do a complete reinstall, or get different hardware. SageTV's future is in jeopardy unless they can smooth out the edges. Locking people into hardware/SageTV is only a short term strategy. Good simple software is what does it.

Back to fighting with the EPG again... it's only 1:30am...

[nick_l]

Originally Posted by kingwr

I think the most important place for SageTV to go right now is get SageTV 7 out quickly with a new UI architecture that provides for rich user interfaces/templates to be designed and implemented in a simple structure (no layers upon layers of XML and STV, third-party extensions, and such), and that can be used consistently by plug-ins (i.e. I don't need a default STV version of my plug-in as well as a SageMC version of my plug-in).

AMEN!! That's personally my biggest problem with Sage, along with the 75 pages of associated forum posts that are outdated/obsolete that I need to wade through to find out why I cant make something work.

Nick

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by voidstar

To be honest SageTV has been one of the most frustrating programs I have ever used. If I dare change or update something, 9 times out of 10 I find that I am up until 2am trying to get something to work (usually a basic feature like the EPG). Mind you I'm a software engineer. The forum helps but is too full of cryptic terms that have special meaning only within this community.

I wonder what's different with your setup. Most of us never have any trouble with the EPG.

Is there a future for SageTV? Well, I was able to configure Win7's media center with my hardware in a few clicks. 5 minutes with Win7 vs 10+ hours total for SageTV.

5 min is about what Sage takes me.

Win7 looks a whole lot better also. If you don't mind Microsoft peeking at what you watch (I do, but most don't care) then MediaPortal, MythTV or XMBC are free alternatives that are as mature as SageTV is now. Stiff competition.

Suppose it depends on the person. For many of us WMC isn't really competitive because of all it's limitations (DRM, crippled extenders), but it does look "better". And I dispute that the others are as mature as Sage, at least in the DVR area. It seems to be a challenge to setup XBMC for TV still. And AFAIK MediaPortal can be flaky and MythTV, well Linux is a non-start for many.

I've hung in there for SageTV but every time I make a change its a new problem resulting in hours of frustration that usually ends in someone telling me to read the manual, do a complete reinstall, or get different hardware. SageTV's future is in jeopardy unless they can smooth out the edges. Locking people into hardware/SageTV is only a short term strategy. Good simple software is what does it.

And for most of us that's Sage.

Back to fighting with the EPG again... it's only 1:30am...

There's got to be something odd with your setup (Firewall, router, VPN, something). I've never had a single issue with the EPG, it just works.

[wayner]

@voidstar - I must concur with stanger that your experiences are atypical. Sage is harder to set up than Win7MC but not that much harder. Win7 does look prettier but there are so many limitations - MS's lack of codec support for one. Win7 is the first version of Windows that can play Divx files out of the box but it doesn't play MKVs without installing codecs. MS always seems to be at least 5 years behind in support of codecs - sure you can add these in but that is a pain.

But Win7 is much prettier, you can't argue with that.

[voidstar]

I may be atypical in this forum but from my experience SageTV either works from the start or doesn't without hours of effort. Those that have problems probably gave up on SageTV and don't use this forum or in my case, are usually so tired after solving their problem that they don't bother with threads like this. Others that may have mild issues probably can't get past the SageTV specific jargon.

I still have "No Data" in my EPG after remapping all the OTA stations with IDs greater than 10K. How can you expect a user to understand that sentence! Let's be for real!

I wish I knew why I've been so unlucky. I like to tweak out the UI (SageMC custom menus, STVi, etc...) and when there is a problem I avoid reinstalling like the plague! Reinstalling SageTV requires me to remember what I did to get it the way I had it or I have to backup special files and edit cryptic property files. But this could introduce more issues by having bad jar dependencies or messed up property files. This is not a program for the average user!

I spent $80 on the Linux version (I currently use the windows media center version) so I could put everything on my server with a big drive. I then discovered the regular SageTV interface can't connect to my Linux server, I have to use the lesser quality (SageTV Placeshifter) client that doesn't look at all as nice with my 1080i/DXVA setup. Why! I wasted $80 bucks.

I've been a professional user-interface software developer for 20 years. The lack of human centered design in SageTV bothers me to the core. Relying on your user base to patch/add UI features is something I expect from free software not from products I pay for.

How could SageTV be better?
- Make it so I don't event know what EPG means!
- Don't require me to read the manual or the forum
- Make it look nicer (Like XBMC or WMC)
- Build a framework for plugins (And call them plugins! Not STVs or STVis)
- Let the interface connect to a plugin repository and have it automatically install them
- Allow people to have remote servers (regardless of platform) using the better SageTV client
- Let me have Dolphin, PCSX2, or Mame via plugins without breaking out of SageTV
- Let me have Netflix or Hulu without having to require on the kindness of plugin developers

One of the reasons companies go out of business is there inability to acknowledge the many small problems that exist in there software. Lost customers don't complain. Only annoying ones like me that like to suffer.

[Opus4]

voidstar: maybe you should start a new topic in the EPG forum about how to configure your channels. All you should need to do is preview the OTA digital channel to see what it is, then select the appropriate station name on the Remap Channel menu. That's usually it. Outside of that, there are FAQ entries about why you might not be receiving EPG data, including one about firewall ports.

- Andy

[wayner]

Voidstart - your suggestionf for improvement are excellent and I agree with almost all of them except that I have no idea what Dolphin, Mame or PCSX2 are.

In terms of the Netflix and Hulu - I believe that can be a licensing issue as these folks may not want you to be able to access their service.