UTILITY: SageRemap v0.1a

[Fuzzy]

DISCLAIMER: This is a proof of concept level ALPHA tool. I'm not responsible for any damage it may cause! It requires admin permissions, and will delete the entire folder that it gets pointed at, so make sure it is only pointed at a folder used only for this purpose.

SageRemap is a utility I've cooked up to aid in accessing the SageTV Recordings from outside sage, in a more user friendly way. What it does, is create a folder hiearchy, containing Symbolic Links to the recordings. It will create a folder for each Show, and a link to each episode in that folder. You can then navigate the folder structure, or, what I made it for, point something like Orb at it to allow streaming from mobile devices.

Because it uses NTFS symlinks, it requires Vista or Win7. Also, because it uses the symlinks, it also requires to be run as administrator (since MS locks out Symlink creation). Also, it requires .NET 4 (simply because that's what I wrote it with - VS2010). It also requires the SageTV Web UI to be up and running, as this is where it grabs the list of recordings from.

The zip file contains 3 files. A single .DLL (used for creating the symlinks), a single .EXE (the program itself), and a .BAT (used for configuring the options, and launching the .EXE. I have some default parameters in the .bat file, and it will likely work out of the box for most (if run on the sage server directly). It is originally set up to access the web server at localhost:8080, using sage:frey as the credentials, and put the symlink collection in C:\SageVD\RecordedTV. (I then pointed ORB at C:\SageVD).

I have this set up as a Windows Scheduled Task to be run nightly (set to run at highest permissions, so the symlink permissions work). Though it's only been running a night or two as of this writing - it seems to be working okay.

This is very early in development, and it is more to figure out if the symlink redirection works for a majority of people. There is no error handling at this point... it's all VERY crude.

Still, I'd like to see if anyone ends up using this.

File is in the Downloads section: http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/down...do=file&id=390

[Jason]

Fuzzy-

Thanks for the G+ info to look at SageRemap! I went through and attempted to utilize it, but I ran into a few snags...

1. The user and password are parsed with no capitalization... so it fails as unauthorized... I will try to change the passwords to all lower case to see how it goes...
2. Reading your instructions, "It will create a folder for each Show, and a link to each episode in that folder." it seems that I may need to have it taken a bit further for use with XBMC in that the 'optimal' structure is something like:

[show]/[season x]/[eps]

-Jason

[Fuzzy]

Yeah, keep in mind, when I cooked this up, Sage didn't even include season information in itself... plus, I'm not one to care about season's being separated out. I had made this originally for browsing my recordings on my Droid via Orb, and show level grouping was plenty. I had intended to expand it further at some point, but honestly, my need for watching on my droid is pretty much non-existent at this point.

That said, I think the best way forward at this point would be to utilize the Phoenix VFS to generate the tree, and make the links based on that. This would move this into the sage plugin architecture, which is where it really should be anyways (downloading/parsing the XML is a lot of extra unnecessary work, in my eyes). With many looking for alternatives for viewing their content, I am planning on looking more into working with this some.. time permitting (meaning not for a while).

The hardest part of implementing this, is actually that making symlinks in win7 requires elevated permissions, so I'm not sure if I can even do it from within sage.

[Jason]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

The hardest part of implementing this, is actually that making symlinks in win7 requires elevated permissions, so I'm not sure if I can even do it from within sage.

The script that Bradvido88 posted on the XBMC forum works very well for importing the SageTV recording structure (JBOF = "Just a Bunch OF Files) into the more structured XBMC requisite (Folder-> Series->Season->Episode) and also does Symlinking... within Windows (Vista/7...).

Useage outside of a pure windows environment with Symlinks is a hit or miss proposition due to the OS differences in Symlinking... In the post, he states that the following command:

fsutil behavior set SymlinkEvaluation L2L:1 R2R:1 L2R:1 R2L:1

be used to enable the use of Symlinks.

My problem lies, now, in getting these Symlinks to be used in/on the ATV1. Fsutil is not a native command in/on the ATV1, which runs OSX (10.4.7 Build 8N5107), and I am by no means any sort of coder.

Does anybody have any alternative command that would allow the use of Win7 symlinks on an OSX machine?

[Fuzzy]

The SymlinkEvaluation only applies to how symlinks are handled when accessing the files (whether symlinks can point to network locations, whether network location symlinks can point to local resources, etc). My program was designed to set up a virtual folder on the same system as the recordings (sage server), and then share that folder with a local program (like Orb) to other devices. The other devices would not be accessing the symlinks directly, just streaming them through the sharing program, so evaluation isn't a problem. This setting does not handle the permissions required to create symlinks, which requires elevated administrator privileges. There is a policy setting that will enable other users to create them, but that policy setting is not available on win7 home premium - only prof and ultimate. This is why I've kept my program as a separate task, and run it from scheduled tasks, with elevated privileges.

[matt91]

http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/12/o...delivers-hulu/

now that there is Orb for android, I might be interested in trying this out.

[Fuzzy]

Orb for android has been out quite a while - that's what got me started on this last year sometime. I'm not sure what prompted this news story. I was streaming with Orb from my sage server last summer by just pointing Orb to my recording folders.. Then I started making the app to allow me to browse with more readable names.

[matt91]

I don't really know anything about it, but this appears to be called "Orb Live." maybe it has more internet-content features (hulu was specifically mentioned) than the original.

dunno...