I would pay $30 for Placeshift for iPhone/iPad

[jreichen]

Originally Posted by voidpt

Haven't dug into the fine details. But wouldn't it be possible for SageTV to make an official "SageTV Web Placeshifter". Made up of HTML5/video tags and stuff. I think Job's showed some New York Times HTML browsing with embedded video on the iPad. So if SageTV Server had a webserver that gave some structured navigating with the media contents. And it would re-code on server to H.264 format best for the device in question. Not sure about LiveTV viewing. Best part, this should be possible to make work for a lot of devices. And on the iPad, no restrictions, and no App needed.

Just some thoughs. Head is tired, end of Friday, need

Due to the way the current Placeshifters are implemented, a Web Placeshifter would require a new design. Placeshifters use one port for the video and another for the STV UI and user input. Plus one of the ports is UDP. This doesn't fit well with web protocols. A new "Placeshifter over HTTP" protocol would be required if the same user experience is to be expected. Having said that, I don't think that's necessarily the best model for a web viewing. The current web server has a good concept behind it but in practice is too buggy and doesn't handle seeking. It's not impossible, but the more I think about it, the more I think it would be good for Sage to at least provide some backend support in the server's core for anyone willing to work on the front end. To me it falls into the old argument that Sage should provide core support while plugin developers top it off.

Originally Posted by wayner

Is this only using a 3G connection or is it the same when you are connected via wifi? My interest in this is primarily wifi. I went to try this with my wife's iPod Touch laast night but it had old firmware so I had to update that which is a LONG process. I will try it tonight with Air Video.

It's the same with wifi.

Originally Posted by wayner

I think that this would drum up some good publicity and interest in Sage and could sell some SageTV Media Player licenses as well. Especially since you know the probability of a Win Media Center app for the iPad is <<0%. Think of the marketing opportunites "Watch Live or Recorded TV on your iPhone or iPad using SageTV!"

Absolutely.

Originally Posted by wayner

I didn't know that Air Video existed so I tried it. It works ok but it is kind of slow to watch shows since pretty much everything that I have in Sage (avi, mpeg, ts, mkv) has to be transcoded. Transcoding 1080i MPEG-2 files takes about 90% of the CPUs on my E8400. Transcoding H.264 files from the HD-PVR doesn't take as much resources but these seem to be transcoded down to a very low bitrate as they look crappy - and this is on a iPod Touch. I would hate to see how it would look on a much bigger screen like the iPad. All of this was done over 802.11g wifi.

H.264 can be very CPU-intensive and doesn't always run fast enough to do realtime transcoding. In my experiments with ffmpeg and the iPhone, the mpeg4 codec was more suitable for that.

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

I think the limitation here is bandwidth selection. Placeshifter has the dynamic bandwidth adjusment built-in. You'd have to basically choose which bitrate profile you wanted to use for the stream, and go with that, and HOPE that your connection can keep up.

That's a complicated thing to do and I'm not sure how Placeshifter does it. The iPhone's HTTP Live Streaming provides support for something close. I've experimented with that but ffmpeg doesn't have very good support for generating the video segments correctly.

[Fuzzy]

From watching it, it seems that Placeshifter routinely notifies the server of it's buffer state. If the buffer is getting too short (time wise, meaning not keeping up), then the the Sage Server tells the transcoder to start transcoding a lower bitrate... vice versa for a full buffer increasing the bandwidth. In practice it works well, though at times seems a bit conservative. This isn't something that could be done with just a web page. therefore, you'd have to 'choose' your bandwidth prior to it working (like the way netflix and others make you choose).

[bluenote]

I use Orb all the time to do this on my mobile phone under all kinds of situations, and it works really well. I do miss the interface (heh) of the STV though, and watched/unwatched statuses, and grouping.

Generally speaking if your connection is so unstable as to require dynamic correction (of a meaningful percentage amount) then you are probably going to have problems anyways...

Also, there are about to be a plethora of tablet style PC's announced, Microsoft's "Courier" and all the major players will be announcing them as well, so, if you can manage not to be seduced by the proprietary, expensive, and limiting, but beautiful and functional Ipad, you can get yourself something that CAN run placeshifter and be upgraded easily, etcetera, etcetera.

I nearly decided to buy one when I saw the Ipad video though.

Cory

[Fonceur]

Originally Posted by jreichen

Placeshifters use one port for the video and another for the STV UI and user input. Plus one of the ports is UDP.

If the placeshifter is just a client component, that means the Sage server itself is doing the transcoding, so with the right command(s) it should be possible to have Sage stream a file directly without needing vlc/orb, no?

[voidpt]

Originally Posted by jreichen

... A new "Placeshifter over HTTP" protocol would be required if the same user experience is to be expected. Having said that, I don't think that's necessarily the best model for a web viewing. The current web server has a good concept behind it but in practice is too buggy and doesn't handle seeking. It's not impossible, but the more I think about it, the more I think it would be good for Sage to at least provide some backend support in the server's core for anyone willing to work on the front end.

I'm with you on this. And I was not thinking about using any of the 'old' Placeshifter infrastructure. Except the internal recode stuff. The name 'Web Placeshifter' was just for familiarity. What I was thinking about was that the SageTV 'engine' could supply a 'standard' HTTP/HTML5 compatible video stream URL on a port against SageTV server that through it's parameters gave you the intended video. Then others could build on that. Again, I have not dug into the details on it all. So there are probably <x> number of challenges to overcome

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

I think the limitation here is bandwidth selection. Placeshifter has the dynamic bandwidth adjustment built-in. You'd have to basically choose which bitrate profile you wanted to use for the stream, and go with that, and HOPE that your connection can keep up.

Actually I have always done that on Placeshifter. Always felt that selecting a static bandwidth has worked better. And that inconvenience I could live with There will always be some sacrifice for having a web-solution. But number of devices that could use it would outweigh it for me.

[bcjenkins]

So with frameworks like JQTouch and api's like Stuckless' sagexapi someone with the right chops should be able to build the webapp out.

The questions are -

• Does someone have the product management experience to write up the requirements?
• Will someone be willing to project manage this?
• Do we have designers and developers willing to take on structured pieces of work?
• Is there anything in the SageTV licensing which prohibits profiting from efforts like this?
• The sagexapi is not bound by the terms of Studio, is it?

I don't know if this is a worthwhile venture, but it is not an easy one.

B

[jreichen]

Originally Posted by Fonceur

If the placeshifter is just a client component, that means the Sage server itself is doing the transcoding, so with the right command(s) it should be possible to have Sage stream a file directly without needing vlc/orb, no?

Ideally that would be the case but some work is required to get to the point where it's web-friendly and could support multiple formats required by different mobile devices.

I suppose being web-friendly isn't strictly a requirement for a mobile placeshifter application (I'm not very familiar with Orb but I believe it requires access to ports that may be blocked by some routers - correct me if I'm wrong), but it is important if it's going to work with the web interface.

[jreichen]

Originally Posted by voidpt

I'm with you on this. And I was not thinking about using any of the 'old' Placeshifter infrastructure. Except the internal recode stuff. The name 'Web Placeshifter' was just for familiarity. What I was thinking about was that the SageTV 'engine' could supply a 'standard' HTTP/HTML5 compatible video stream URL on a port against SageTV server that through it's parameters gave you the intended video. Then others could build on that. Again, I have not dug into the details on it all. So there are probably <x> number of challenges to overcome

I think you're on the right track. Sage has done a good job of supporting APIs for scheduling, conversions, listings, etc. Now it might be time for them to provide the same for serving up the media itself. I'd even be open to requiring a placeshifter license to connect to such a service if Sage is concerned about their revenue stream. I wonder what others think about that and if it's realistic to implement that when using a connectionless protocol like HTTP.

[wayner]

As I said in the first post of this thread - I would pay for this client over and above my existing Placeshifter license fee.

Right now we can get pretty much everything that is available in Placeshifter in the Web and Mobile Web plugins (btw - thanks jreichen). All that we need added is the media streaming functionality.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

I think the limitation here is bandwidth selection. Placeshifter has the dynamic bandwidth adjusment built-in. You'd have to basically choose which bitrate profile you wanted to use for the stream, and go with that, and HOPE that your connection can keep up.

That's how Webguide worked and I didn't have an issue with that.

(Background info - Webguide was a web server for XP MCE and Vista MC that included video streaming capabilities. MS hired the developer and appears to have killed it off as it does not work in Win7)

[inlvnv]

Another orblive user here, streaming just about everything from livetv to videos, music and pics. Although, if you've upgraded to latest orblive, no livetv over 3G. Video quality is not as good as AirVideo, but AirVideo doesn't play vob files and can't run as a service in my WHS box. I could see myself buying placeshifter for iphone if it can do native dvd playback like the client version. Now if I just can get this sage mobile web to work....

[simonen]

Good luck getting this one past Steve Jobs if you want it to work over 3G, might have to settle for WiFi only.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by simonen

Good luck getting this one past Steve Jobs if you want it to work over 3G, might have to settle for WiFi only.

I am pretty sure that Air Video allows you to stream video files from a PC to your iPhone over 3G (as well as wifi) so why would Placeshifter be any different?

[Fuzzy]

For those looking at using Orb with Sage Recordings. I'm working on a tool to help with the navigation of Sage TV Recordings from within Orb (or potentiall some other programs as well). It requires Vista or Win7, but it seems to be working so far. (Basically, it creates a 'Virtual Directory' of your recordings, grouped into Subdirectories by Title, with Episode Filenames.) I'm using SymLinks, which is why there's a vista/win7 requirement. Once I polish it out, I'll post it up for those interested.

[wayner]

@Fuzzy - that would likely be useful for Air Video as well since you play files from the directory structure which gets messy with the way that Sage typically works with hundreds of recordings all in the same folder.

[Fuzzy]

It just depends on how Air Video checks the files. If it cehcks the filesizes of the files before playing them (like sage does), then it won't work (I can't play the re-linked files in sage). However, Orb does not check this, so it works properly.

[wayner]

@Fuzzy - Give Air Video a try if you have an iPhone/iPod Touch if you have the chance. There is a free version but I bought the full version which is only about $3. I have only used it with my iPod Touch over wifi (obviously).

[Fuzzy]

Nope.. not an apple boy at all... you can make some symlinks to some video files on your system if you want, and give it a shot. use the mklink command at the command prompt (it has to be run as administrator).

[wayner]

OK - hard link or soft link or does it matter?

One more thing - all of my media files reside on my WHS server. Can I make a symlink on a Win7 machine that points to an original file which is on a network share or a UNC mapped file?

If the answer is use I guess one could use SJQ to automatically create symlinks in a a structure like this: RecordedTV\ShowName\EpisodeName - i.e. \RecordedTV\Seinfeld\The Contest

The only issue would be dealing with shows without proper Episode names.

[Fuzzy]

I'm using softlinks. Hardlinks would work with just about any program, as they DO report the proper filesize, however, they can only point to local NTFS volumes.

Yes, symlinks work pointing to UNC paths as well, when accessed from a local program. Symlinks don't work, however, when accessed over a network share. Therefore, Air video, or Orb, or wahtever, would ahve to be running ON the win7 system that has the symlinks on it, and would have to use local mapping (C:\) and not UNC paths.