Sagetv via iPhone/iPad thoughts/discussion

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by Brent

I have used the iPad to do the same things I use the mobile interface for (using the interface of course) such as manage recordings etc. Would be great if the interface were more of an app designed for the iPhone & iPad.

I guess that would mean 2 different apps since the iphone and ipad are different form factors.

Tim bray had a nice write up (you might have seen it if you followed the link my twitter post) on html5, flash, and native apps, which are also "web apps". Most apps that we install on our phone are web apps, and a sage client for the iphone/ipad would fall into this category as well, IF it requires a connection back to the sagetv server in order to work.

For me, it would seem to make more sense to create a "touch" version of the mobile web interface that "looks nicer" (which I think is what you are saying when you say, "designed for the ipad", since being designed for the ipad is really designed for a larger mobile interface, with pretty buttons.) The advantage of doing something like this in html5 is that instead of being designed for the ipad it would be designed for mobile devices, which include, iphone/ipad/android and potentially newer blackberry devices that support html5. (although you'll still need to deal with the physical screen fragmentation between ipad and iphone/android displays), but apps like gmail are already finding clever ways to "adjust" the application for the larget ipad form factor.

Streaming is video is still an issue, and that would have to be solved no matter if you are writing an html5 web app or a native web app, and the solution is probably very similar...ie, transcode on the fly, on the server, to some native format (h264??) that the iDevices can consume natively.

That's my thoughts on having sagetv native clients for for the iDevices

[Fuzzy]

On the video front, I wonder if there'd be a way to 'launch' Orb, or AirVideo, or whatever 'already works' streaming solution from a web interface, and have it start playing a specific file. This might be the 'simplest' method.

[Fonceur]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

On the video front, I wonder if there'd be a way to 'launch' Orb, or AirVideo, or whatever 'already works' streaming solution

That's also the kind of backup plan that I am keeping in mind, should all else fail on the Android... Though I'd rather hook to the placeshifter's existing transcoding engine...

[Fuzzy]

Oh, I certainly think tapping placeshifters engine would be great, simply for the variable data rates. I wonder if the protocols used for sending back buffer status and such could be gleaned from sage's open source mod's to ffmpeg.