SageTV V7.0.12 Beta is Ready!

[Narflex]

Howdy again all!

We have another beta release of V7 ready for you now. It's been too long since the last one...so there's lots of updates.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you're using a custom theme, revert to the default 'Standard' theme before upgrading to avoid issues due to changes in the theme system. Plugin themes can then be upgraded and re-enabled after that if they have a new version available that is compatible with 7.0.12

Couple new features in this one:

-Automatic rotation of JPEG files that have headers that indicate so
-MKV Chapter support
-Extended theme capability
-Absolute minimum font size can be set
-PGS (bluray) subtitles in MKV (only playback on HD extenders)
-Workaround for ATI driver bug in 4xxx series GPUs w/ EVR
-ZLIB data compression on the placeshifter UI channel
-Unlimited video buffering in placeshifter client
-Lockout of setup menus using parental controls feature

And the issue with 'metadata cross-linking' that was exposed by the BMT plugin is also fixed in here...along with lots of other stuff.

All of the high-level information on V7 can be found here:
http://forums.sage.tv/forums/showthread.php?t=48421

Be sure to read the above post as it contains important information regarding upgrade pricing and new features

As always, report bugs you find here:

http://sagetv.com/bugs.html

Here's the download links for V7.0.12:

SageTV for Windows
http://download.sage.tv/SageTV_V7_0_12Setup.exe

SageTVClient for Windows
http://download.sage.tv/SageTVClient_V7_0_12Setup.exe

SageTVPlaceshifter for Windows
http://download.sage.tv/SageTVPlaces..._0_12Setup.exe

SageTV for Windows Home Server
http://download.sage.tv/SageTV_V7_0_12Setup-WHS.msi

SageTV Media Center for Linux
http://download.sage.tv/linuxbeta/server_7.0.12.tar.gz

SageTV Placeshifter for Linux
http://download.sage.tv/linuxbeta/mi..._7.0.12.tar.gz

SageTV Media Center for Linux - Debian Package Installer
http://download.sage.tv/linuxbeta/sa....0.12_i386.deb

SageTV Placeshifter for Linux - Debian Package Installer
http://download.sage.tv/linuxbeta/sa....0.12_i386.deb

The release notes from version 7.0.11 can be found here:
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=49177

Below are the detailed release notes for V7.0.12:

SageTV V7.0.12 Beta 7/14/2010

Core Updates
1. Fixed bug where chapter offsets for BluRay playback weren't always correct
2. Fixed bug where adding a new CaptureDeviceInput that used a specific RF channel didn't work properly on initial creation in client/server or service mode.
3. Added support for handling Unicode characters when parsing the process output of another process. Used by format detection on non-MPEG content and also with the Utility API call ExecuteProcessReturnOutput.
4. Added support for extracting up to 2 genres from the genre tag in a music file. This will use the separator character of ';' or '/' to delimit the multiple genres.
5. Added support for automatic rotation of JPEG files when displaying them that have their EXIF orientation information specifying that they should be rotated. This works in all rendering modes and client types. This will apply to picture files imported into the library as well as any thumbnail images associated with those picture files. This ONLY affects display and does not actually modify the contents of the file.
6. Updated playlist importing process so that playlists are always analyzed after all the other importing is done to ensure the files exist in the database.
7. Updated playlist importing so that playlists that have missing elements are still imported; but the missing elements in them are just ignored.
8. Added system message for when a playlist is imported but segments are missing from the playlist. If all segments are missing, the playlist will not be imported and no message is generated.
9. Fixed bug where Smooth FF/REW didn't do anything during music playback. They now behave the same as Skip Fwd/Back.
10. Added property "num_logfiles_to_keep" which allows specifying how many log files SageTV should keep (default is 4)
11. Fixed bug where selection of the tuner to use when watching live TV didn't follow the same prioritization rules as for scheduling recordings. (live TV viewing only used merit previously; now it will also consider tuner input quality if merit is not set)
12. Added support for MKV chapters (you'll need to do a library rescan in Detailed Setup->Advanced to update any files that were already imported)
13. Changed caching logic for EPG providers/local markets so that if the data is empty; it is not taken from the cache but the server is queried again.
14. Fixed slowdown that could occur in the UI when URL based images are used. (had to do with java.net.URL.equals doing a DNS lookup in order to test equality)
15. Fixed bug where Image Widget rendering didn't use the right clipping region if animations were disabled
16. Added property "ui/min_allowed_font_size" which is client-specific and allows a way to set an absolute minimum for font sizes that are displayed in the UI. (also configurable in Detailed Setup->Customize)
17. Fixed bug where some fonts at certain sizes would have glyphs that were taller than the actual height in the font specification causing the bottom of the glyphs to not be rendered.
18. Changed display of AC3 and EAC3 audio formats in the UI when using GetMediaFileFormatDescrption so that they show 'Dolby Digital' and 'Dolby Digital Plus' respectively instead.
19. Fixed bug in format parser so we fail the detection completely on currently recording files if our internal detector fails but FFMPEG works (or we can get bad PIDs).
20. Added support for ID3 v2.4 tags
21. Added detection of PGS subtitles (bluray) in Matroska files; playback is only available on HD media extenders though
22. Hong Kong DVB-T frequency entries added.
23. Moved accented characters to the end of the numeric text input list for German (based on user recommendations)
24. Fixed issue with .scn files that had more entries in it than the maximum channel number.

Linux Updates
1. Fixed bug where we didn't always track the amount of data written into a recording file properly
2. Added '-o loop' when doing an ISO mount on Linux.
3. Fixed bug where format detection of non-MPEG files on non-Windows platforms could end up in an infinite loop
4. Fixed bug where multi-tuner capture devices only allowed using the first tuner on the device

Windows Updates
1. Added workaround for OSD/UI flickering issue with ATI series 4xxx GPUs when playing back SD material with the EVR video renderer. The property "ui/disable_ui_composite_surface" must be set to true to enable the workaround. (it's not on by default because it can have a negative performance impact on slower GPUs)
2. Fixed bug where SageTV could crash sometimes when using the 'SageTVPlayer' for online video playback and playback was stopped.
3. Fixed bug on Windows 7 when using an HDMI connection to the display and power cycling the display with SageTV at full screen would leave SageTV running in only part of the full screen window.
4. Changed DirectX renderer so that when it initially allocates itself after resuming from standby or the system tray; it will keep trying to build the 3D system until it succeeds if it had done it successfully in the past (before it would just give up and revert to software rendering if it failed).
5. Fixed bug with Direct3D renderer where text that was clipped didn't always have all the glyphs rendered along the baseline properly; some were shifted down by a pixel sometimes.
6. Added support for the TBS 6980 Dual DVB-S2 card
7. Fix: BluRay chapter qiuck switching causes memory used up in FIFO. give FIFO one more space to do clean up job.
8. FireDTV latest driver supported.
9. When playing non-MPEG2 container type media files that have MPEG2 Video inside of them, use the configured MPEG2 video decoder

Placeshifter Updates
1. Added support for ZLIB compression of the UI data channel in placeshifter. This will always be used if the client & server both support it. (currently the Linux/PC placeshifter clients & servers can do it)
2. Fixed bug in placeshifter client where cache files that were detected to be invalid were not removed from the cache
3. Optimized placeshifter client buffering technique so that it will buffer an unlimited amount of data rather than restricting it to a small size.
4. When using the placeshifter client in 3D mode, transfer the images before we start rendering the frame for UI so that it doesn't interfere with the video frame rate as much.

Extender Updates
1. Added support for using YUV textures on the HD200 and up when sending JPEG images to them for display (this already occurred for Picture Library files; but now it will occur for any JPEG file...YUV images use half the space/bandwidth of RGB images)
2. Transparency in the UI is automatically disabled for MVP clients now. It can be re-enabled by setting the server property "ui/allow_transparency_disabling_for_non_layered_clients=false". This only disables item level transparency; it does not disable per-pixel transparency that appears in image files themselves or as the result of a texture diffusion.
3. Fixed issue where excessively long metadata could end up sending an openURL command to the media extender that was larger than its receive buffer for it (fixes issue with the BMT plugin)

Studio/API Updates
1. Fixed bug where setting the metadata using the SetMediaFileMetadata API call wouldn't properly store \n, \r or \t characters in the created .properties file for that media file.
2. Updated Widget API argument conversion so that any Widget argument can be specified by its symbol and then will be automatically converted to a Widget.
3. Fixed bug where API calls executed on the client from the server did not setup a proper local UI context on the client.
4. Widget objects can now be sent over the client/server protocol; they will simply be converted to their symbol in the process. (all Widget API methods now can take a symbol in place of a Widget object argument as well)
5. Fixed bug in the client/server API communication where zero-length arrays of non-DB objects were always sent back as Object[] instead of matching the array type returned by the server.
6. Updated Database API calls GetFilesWithImportPrefix and GetMediaFilesWithImportPrefix so that their first argument can also be an array/collection of MediaFile objects instead of a MediaMask. This allows for organizing a set of files based on library import path prefix rather than only being able to retrieve the entire set of media file objects organized in that fashion.
7. Added Global API calls StartBackgroundFileDownload, CancelBackgroundFileDownload, GetBackgroundFileDownloadStatus, GetBackgroundFileDownloadStreamTime, IsBackgroundFileDownloadProgressivePlay and GetBackgroundFileDownloadTotalSize. These are similar to the FileDownload API calls that already existed; but instead of being restricted to one-per-UI; multiple downloads may be run simultaneously. They are 'keyed' of the target file where the download is saved. These are NOT persisted across application restarts.
8. Added Utility API function QueryServerMacAddress(String Hostname) which uses one of the network protocols supported by SageTV to get the MAC address of a running SageTV server. This can be useful for clients that want to use WOL functionality to wakeup a sleeping server.
9. Effects may now have alpha values that exceed 1.0 in order to cancel out alpha values that are less than 1.0 (i.e. you can turn something that has a fixed transparency of 0.5 into 1.0 by using an effect with alpha value of 2.0 on it). Nothing is ever rendered with more than 1.0 alpha after everything is taken into account (since such a concept is meaningless of course).
10. Fixed bug where MediaFile->Album argument conversion didn't work properly in the API
11. Optimized GetMediaFileForFilePath API call so if it's given a MediaFile argument it'll just return that object directly rather than doing MediaFile->File->MediaFile conversion of it.
12. Don't allow using a zero stationID in the AddChannel API call since that is used for special purposes in the core

Plugin System Updates
1. Fixed issue related to reusing media format objects that caused cross-linking of metadata if the metadata was altered by a plugin (fixes the issue with BMT and cross-linked metadata)
2. Added support for sending PlaybackStarted/Stopped/Finished events from SageTVClient instances to the server. These events will now show up on the server as well with the UIContext set to the context name for that client's connection. (The API call GetConnectedClients will return those context names for all connected SageTVClient instances)
3. Updated SetPluginConfigValue and SetPluginConfigValues API calls so that they return a String with the exception message if an exception occurred setting that plugin configuration value; they will return null otherwise
4. Added Plugin API call "IsPluginStartupComplete" which will return true after startup of all plugins has completed. Since UI startup and plugin startup are asynchronous; if an STV wants to ensure all plugins are loaded before it starts up it can use this API call to wait for that condition to be true.
5. Fixed bug with Plugin API call GetPluginImplementation where it would not work properly with the local UI connected in service mode.
6. Added support for posting system messages when plugin upgrades are available. Since system messages are always server-based; clients that need upgrades will have the server post the message, however duplicate messages are protected against.
7. Dump the exception nested inside an InovcationTargetException that can occur if there's a failure instantiating a plugin object

STV Updates
1. Online videos gets updates from download site's 7_0_12 update dir.
2. Don't use parent category name as part of online feed video list menu title. If the feed has a 'FullName' property, use that as the menu title instead of the 'LongName' property.
3. Stop animating PanZoom slideshow when at the end of the animation for an image.
4. When sorting list of photo files by filename where the images could be from multiple folders, sort by the full file path.
5. When leading articles are ignored for sorting, ignore leading articles when jumping to item starting with letter user entered.
6. Fixed parallel schedule view to default to 5 rows & changed default columns to 4.
7. Fixed issue where TV category BG colors could not be removed from extender clients if the server still used the category BG color and allowed removal of all category BG colors.
8. Changed photo browser date sorting so that the folder names are in order of the date of their contents.
9. Changed code putting folders at beginning of folder view list to use database access calls rather than IsFilePath().
10. Fixed use of panel scroll bar code under some tables.
11. When server restart is needed for plugin changes, warn user if MR or Fav is currently recording & ask whether to restart now or later.
12. Added missing "View Updated Plugin Details" option in Installed Client Plugins mode.
13. System Messages menu: Plugin updates can be installed by selecting the system message about the update.
14. For pan/zoom slideshow: if the image format can have transparency (gif, png), then draw a black BG fill behind the image.
15. Added parental controls option to lock setup related menus.
16. Consolidated parental code entry dialogs.
17. Updated Parental Control Restrictions menu to use v7 style buttons w/checkmarks for enabled items.
18. Detailed Setup -> Customize: added 'Automatically add converted videos to database' option; default: enabled.
19. Use a global context instead of static context when using the Home command to jump to the Main Menu so that a second cached version of the last Main Menu state doesn't get created.
20. Disabled Home command during the initial forced full Configuration Wizard run-through that happens the very first time SageTV is run.
21. When setting focus in a media browser & fixed center focus is in use, use EnsureVisibilityForVariable() to make sure the focused item is as near to the center position as it can get.
22. Fixed issue where info area sometimes was not updated when changing any music browser view or changing to the video browser playlist view.
23. Added Detailed Setup -> Customize option to choose whether Select opens the options dialog for a group & Info browses into the group or vice versa.
24. Added Select vs Info option to options dialogs for groups of videos & music.
25. Handle plugin config file path initial value of null.
26. Added support for MKV chapters.
27. Hide next/prev song & transport control icons in music browser's music playback bar when mouse icons are turned off.
28. Fixed photo browser font size property name.
29. Added "Display Folder Names on Thumbnails" option for the Photo browser when using multiple columns.
30. Fixed issue where two Back commands were issued after deleting all the recordings in a group.
31. Fixed issue where System Message check for STV update availability was still disabled when UAC was enabled on Vista & Win 7.
32. Changed property controlling speed of image crossfades & set new default value to 100 so that background image loading is less affected by the crossfade. (thumbnail loading is much faster on extenders due to this)
33. Removed BG shapes used as menu fill when overlay is used with video playing in BG & used the normal BG image instead.
34. Menu header's Back arrow is now displayed wider so it is easier to see.
35. Plugin Details: always show plugin creation and last modified dates, when they are available.
36. Installed plugins that have been removed from the repository no longer say there is an update available.
37. When modifying a Favorite, let user know if a setting change has not been applied because it would cause the Favorite to be the same as another Favorite.
38. Can add custom images to the "User Images" subfolder under a theme folder to replace some images w/o having to create a new theme.
39. Converted theme system to define all variables & values in theme.properties instead of in the STV.
40. Most font settings not adjustable in the UI are now themed.
41. Added option to configure the smallest user-readable font size at Detailed Setup -> Customize -> Font Size Limitation Settings. Default min size: 9. Current min size is noted in font size configuration dialogs.
42. Applied wrap around scrolling option to Favorite Details menu's channel limit dialog.
43. Removed extra calls to load album art that weren't needed.

[Opus4]

Note that the release notes mention that the theme system has been changed.

If you are using a custom theme, you may need to change back to the Standard theme until the author of the theme updates the custom theme.

Also, if the <SageTV install path>\SageTV\STVs\SageTV7\Themes folder contains a folder called "Standard SDTV", then delete or rename the "Standard SDTV" folder.

- Andy

[Opus4]

The following downloadable STV update is available for v7.0.12:

New STV version: 7.0.12.6, file set 2010071601

1. Added additional channel scan check to prevent Station ID of 0 & check for inability to add a new channel.
2. Removed "Turn this dialog off" option from video group options dialog, since the Select vs Info option is there instead.
3. Fixed places where Info didn't replicate Select command actions when Info is set to open group options dialogs.
4. Fixed issue where scrolling a table would initially display all the scrolling-into-view items using the focused text transparency level instead of the normal transparency level.
5. Updated Favorite channel limit dialog so that the text saying a channel has airings of the Favorite is not removed or updated until selecting Any or Refresh Channel List. (The markers for channels with airings reflect the channel-limited Favorite's conditions at the time of the dialog opening or the last selection of Any or Refresh.)

You can either wait for the system message telling you the update is available or get it at Detailed Setup -> Advanced -> Check for STV Update.

Based on testing earlier in the v7 beta, the downloadable STV updates should work on Windows Vista & 7 even when UAC is enabled, so a manual download & installation of this update should not be needed.


NOTE: A System Message about the update should also now work on Vista and Windows 7 when UAC is enabled. As a test for this STV update, if you have UAC enabled, please wait instead of downloading the update right away in order to see if a System Message about it is generated. Sometime within 24 hours from now, a jump to the Main Menu should result in the System Message notification.

- Andy

[Opus4]

The following downloadable STV update is available for v7.0.12:

New STV version: 7.0.12.7, file set 2010071801

1. Fixed issue where themes failed to load properties from parent themes.

You can either wait for the system message telling you the update is available or get it at Detailed Setup -> Advanced -> Check for STV Update.

Based on testing earlier in the v7 beta, the downloadable STV updates should work on Windows Vista & 7 even when UAC is enabled, so a manual download & installation of this update should not be needed.


NOTE: A System Message about the update should also now work on Vista and Windows 7 when UAC is enabled. As a test for this STV update, if you have UAC enabled, please wait instead of downloading the update right away in order to see if a System Message about it is generated. Sometime within 24 hours from now, a jump to the Main Menu should result in the System Message notification.

- Andy

[Opus4]

The following link is a patch for most digital QAM tuners on Windows (not needed for the HDHR):

DShowCapture.dll

To use this file: exit SageTV on the server PC, replace the existing DShowCapture.dll file in the SageTV install folder, then restart SageTV.

Other patches here.

- Andy