Plugin: Sage Recording Extender 4 (SREv4)

[Slugger]

Originally Posted by wayner

@Slugger - with these streaming services how does it work if you want to watch a game a half hour after it starts? The last time I tried on GCL you were out of luck - you had to watch it live or else wait until about an hour after the game was over to watch it in PVR mode. Is that still the case or can you start watching a game from the beginning at any time, including while it is still taking place. Or does this differ depending on the sport?

Depends on the sport.

NFL: You can start the game from the beginning via the web and then cast it to the tv using Chromecast. This is how I usually do it. Admittedly, the NFL is the weakest of the streaming sports packages. But the savings more than offsets the inconvenience. GamePass is way cheaper (like well over $100 per season cheaper) than Sunday Ticket on the dish/cable, includes RedZone channel and is full HD. And I don't have to sub to a base package of satellite/cable channels that no one here watches.

NHL: The Android app for Rogers GCL is decent, including Chromecast support, but doesn't let you start an in progress game from the start. I picked up a Roku 3 on kijiji and found the perfect solution. The roku app lets you start in progress games from the beginning. The only catch is if you don't catch up to live before the game ends then you get cut off and have to wait until the archived game becomes available. Not a big deal as I just start watching 45-60 mins into the game and I usually catch up to live by the 2nd half of the 3rd period. Roku's Plex app is pretty decent as well, which was a bonus (since I moved all my existing Sage recordings into Plex).

MLB: Limited use of this, but I'm not too worried about it. As I said, we cut the cord 3 weeks ago so there's no turning back at this point.

Admittedly, streaming only has caused me to change the way I watch sports. I tend to stream the games live from the start and just have a second screen with me to occupy my time during commercials, etc. The move to Roku for NHL has allowed me to go back to the old way, which is nice, but I was also getting used to just watching the games live again with a second screen to occupy my time. I can live with a change in how I watch sports when I'm saving well over $1000 per year not having to pay monthly fees to Shaw. But I can also continue to just watch the archive the next morning before work, which I tend to do a lot for Oilers hockey games anyway.

p.s. Thanks for all of your plugins as I still use most (all?) on a daily basis including SJQ, SRE, SageAlert, Sage Web, etc.

I enjoyed my time with Sage and all the projects I worked on. It's funny, we cut the cord 3 weeks ago and I moved all recordings into Plex last weekend, removed the extenders from the tvs and shutdown the Sage service. It was weird the next morning when I didn't get an email from my nightly backup/service restart script. Instinctively, I logged onto the server to see what was wrong and then started laughing. Haven't had to restart the service for anything since I turned it off. No complaints from anyone about Sage not being available so it seems like that's probably it. I've already sold my entire stock of backup extenders and just have the 2 extenders we were using left, which I'll keep because you just never know, but honestly no one's missing satellite tv and I certainly didn't miss not getting an invoice from Shaw last week.

p.p.s I guess TiVo on the Cogeco box wasn't worth the cash or were there issues with it?

I looked hard at this, but I had the fortune of visiting friends who jumped on the Cogeco tivo bandwagon and I couldn't do it. Cogeco's deployment of tivo has been nothing but one technical glitch after another. Turns out tivo + SDV is nothing but a mess (checkout digitalhome.ca for the horror stories). The tivo constantly loses authorization to SDV delivered channels and the Super Sports Pack is delivered exclusively via SDV channels and so it's a mess. My friend has the tivo + SSP and was over there for a few Sundays during football and he doesn't understand why games are freezing or just become "unauthorized", etc. That was enough for me to stay away.

If I find the need to return to a pvr setup, I'll definitely be bringing Sage (or some other DIY solution) online. But I've been perfectly happy with my streaming sports + Netflix. New episodes of what I want to watch are on the network sites and with unblockus I can just stream from whereever I need to. I think we're probably going to add Shomi or CraveTV to supplement Netflix and then we should be set. It's only been 3 weeks but feeling like I should have done this long ago. Not paying Shaw nor Bell nor Cogeco nor Rogers a single dime for tv is a pretty sweet feeling.

[dtox86]

Sorry if this doesn't belong in this thread, but just a quick general question- is there a way to stop the plugin from creating the text .ts files for all the recordings, saying whether SRE monitored the show or not? Thanks.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by dtox86

Sorry if this doesn't belong in this thread, but just a quick general question- is there a way to stop the plugin from creating the text .ts files for all the recordings, saying whether SRE monitored the show or not? Thanks.

What files are you talking about?

[dtox86]

For every event that triggers SRE, it puts in my recordings folder a text doc with .ts extension. In the doc, it says:

SREv4_Monitored=true

And repeats that over and over- a couple dozen times within it for one particular recording. The doc names itself after the recording file plus a .ts extension.

Some other files created say SREv4_Monitored=false if the event's not monitored.

These docs keep getting created with a lot of my scheduled recordings and are everywhere, and since it doesn't give me any useful information or anything I'd just like to turn off them being created with every recording.

[Fuzzy]

I've never seen those.

[Slugger]

Don't know what's creating the file, but it's definitely not SRE. What SRE does do, iirc, is tag the media file object with a custom property at runtime using the MediaFileAPI.SetMediaFileMetadata() API call. So some other plugin (or core setting) is then dumping the media file's metadata to disk on your behalf. Not sure what's doing it, but I can definitely tell you it's not SRE creating those files.

[dtox86]

Ok thanks for the help.

[Tiki]

How big are these .ts files?
Are you sure they are text files? How are you viewing them?
.ts is the normal file extension for recordings from many capture devices.
Is it possible that you are actually looking at the recording files themselves and whatever you are trying to open them with is showing you the metadata tags inside the video?

[Fuzzy]

My guess is they are XXXXXXX.ts.txt files, and he has windows (as default) hiding extensions for known types, so it's showing as "XXXXXXX.ts 1Kb Text Document"

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

My guess is they are XXXXXXX.ts.txt files, and he has windows (as default) hiding extensions for known types, so it's showing as "XXXXXXX.ts 1Kb Text Document"

I think you re right... and I be the actual file, is a .ts.properties file. There is actually quite a few files that can be created, depending on which plugins are installed... for example for every recording, I see...

UndertheDome-TheKinship-13634554-0.edl
UndertheDome-TheKinship-13634554-0.log
UndertheDome-TheKinship-13634554-0.logo.txt
UndertheDome-TheKinship-13634554-0.ts
UndertheDome-TheKinship-13634554-0.ts.properties
UndertheDome-TheKinship-13634554-0.txt

The .ts file is there, but also, if ANY plugin writes to custom properties, then the .ts.properties file will also be created. The fact that he only sees the SRE entries, is likely that he doesn't fanart plugins, etc, or else he'd see all of that data as well.

Either way, there is an way to tell sagetv to turn on generating .properties... I usually advise against doing it, since if you do metadata/fanart, it will sometimes just disappaear. he'll have to google the property, since i don't know it off hand.

[dtox86]

Thanks guys, you seem to be right- I turned on file extensions in Win10 (good call Fuzzy) and the files being created are "showname-number.ts.properties" that can be read as text files. Not sure if I put notepad as the default app to open these types of files or if Win read them as text files itself. But the file name does appear in that code list stuckless listed.

Again, within the file the line:
SREv4_Monitored=true
Is repeated over and over.

I reinstalled all the plugins and even the Sage app to try to get rid of it, but they started appearing again, and a lot of them are being created with all the shows.

I don't have many plugins, and nothing for fanart or anything, I like to keep it simple. Could anybody please clarify though what I should do or what to google to tell SageTV to turn off generating the properties files?

There are just a lot of files being created, kind of needlessly I feel, and would like to try to cut them out if it's possible.

[Ghildebr]

Originally Posted by Slugger

Unfortunately, the change needs to be made in the plugin code itself and a new version built and released to the repository. The web service URL was never made a configurable option. (If someone fixes it and does a new release, making the service URL a config option would probably be a good idea as well).

Did anyone have a chance to make the above change and re-release the plugin? I am not exactly sure who can do this if Slugger no longer owns the SRE plugin in the repo.

[skiingwiz]

Originally Posted by Ghildebr

Did anyone have a chance to make the above change and re-release the plugin? I am not exactly sure who can do this if Slugger no longer owns the SRE plugin in the repo.

I somehow completely missed Slugger's post on the needed URL change. Thanks for pointing that out. I'll try to get this updated and released soon.

[skiingwiz]

Originally Posted by Ghildebr

Did anyone have a chance to make the above change and re-release the plugin? I am not exactly sure who can do this if Slugger no longer owns the SRE plugin in the repo.

I just submitted the updated plugin. Version 4.0.1 updates the URL and makes that URL configurable.

It should be available as an update from within SageTV shortly.

[Ghildebr]

Originally Posted by skiingwiz

I just submitted the updated plugin. Version 4.0.1 updates the URL and makes that URL configurable.

It should be available as an update from within SageTV shortly.

Thank you very much.

[Slugger]

I just received an email from Google informing me that all appengine apps apparently now must have a billing account associated with them, even if those apps do not exceed the free tier.

The email is a little unclear if free tier apps are actually affected, but they made it sound that way. If I am indeed affected, Google says they'll start deleting apps with no billing info starting in 7 days.

I will not be creating a billing account for the app. I don't monitor the app usage regularly (i.e. at all) and I certainly don't have any intention on paying anything to run it. I don't want to be caught off guard by changes to the free tier levels or whatever and then stuck with a bill at the end of the month.

If Google cuts off the app then I'm afraid that's it for SRE unless someone else creates a new web service and/or modifies the plugin to talk to something else for info.

I guess we'll know in a week or so for sure, but this is a heads up that the service might suddenly die in the near term.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by Slugger

I just received an email from Google informing me that all appengine apps apparently now must have a billing account associated with them, even if those apps do not exceed the free tier.

The email is a little unclear if free tier apps are actually affected, but they made it sound that way. If I am indeed affected, Google says they'll start deleting apps with no billing info starting in 7 days.

I will not be creating a billing account for the app. I don't monitor the app usage regularly (i.e. at all) and I certainly don't have any intention on paying anything to run it. I don't want to be caught off guard by changes to the free tier levels or whatever and then stuck with a bill at the end of the month.

If Google cuts off the app then I'm afraid that's it for SRE unless someone else creates a new web service and/or modifies the plugin to talk to something else for info.

I guess we'll know in a week or so for sure, but this is a heads up that the service might suddenly die in the near term.

How portable is the webapp for it to be moved elsewhere?

[skiingwiz]

Originally Posted by Slugger

I just received an email from Google informing me that all appengine apps apparently now must have a billing account associated with them, even if those apps do not exceed the free tier.

The email is a little unclear if free tier apps are actually affected, but they made it sound that way. If I am indeed affected, Google says they'll start deleting apps with no billing info starting in 7 days.

I will not be creating a billing account for the app. I don't monitor the app usage regularly (i.e. at all) and I certainly don't have any intention on paying anything to run it. I don't want to be caught off guard by changes to the free tier levels or whatever and then stuck with a bill at the end of the month.

If Google cuts off the app then I'm afraid that's it for SRE unless someone else creates a new web service and/or modifies the plugin to talk to something else for info.

I guess we'll know in a week or so for sure, but this is a heads up that the service might suddenly die in the near term.

Well that is unfortunate, to say the least

Originally Posted by Slugger

I would simply shove the source code for the web service on github and hand it over to whomever, but unfortunately that's just not possible. There is code I inherited that I simply can't open source as it's not mine to do so. Instead, a new service would need to be written. If someone decides to take this on, I could then contribute any monitors I've personally written (which would be all current ones in use). I'd even probably be interested in helping with the implementation of a new web service to replace the existing one. If someone's interested in heading down that road, let me know

In light of this, would you consider just open-sourcing your monitor code? It might give the community a better idea what sort of effort the web service would be. (As well as a feeling that there is already a 'head start' since all of the monitors are out there.)

[Slugger]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

How portable is the webapp for it to be moved elsewhere?

It's heavily vendor locked to Google's appengine APIs (specifically for all data storage and caching).

Originally Posted by skiingwiz

Well that is unfortunate, to say the least

In light of this, would you consider just open-sourcing your monitor code? It might give the community a better idea what sort of effort the web service would be. (As well as a feeling that there is already a 'head start' since all of the monitors are out there.)

I can post the monitors I created, but I might be able to do you one better. If someone has a place to host it, I could probably write a backwards compatible server replacement to work with the existing SRE client. I'd post all the source to github with the understanding that someone here will take it over after my initial port is done.

The service gets about 25,000 hits per day on days with an average number of monitored events. So about 750k hits per month. Each hit transfers <1kb of data so you're looking at about 750MB of data transfer per month.

I'd prefer Java hosting (the appengine app is written in java so that would make my port much easier), but could do a port in python or php (yucky). I can probably get away without a db backend as long as the host has memcached or something similar to do some larger scale caching, but even that's not totally necessary (but definitely helps with performance).

Anyway, if anyone wants to take me up on that offer, PM me. If I don't hear from anyone, I'll yank my monitor code out from the app and throw it up in a github repo some time in the near future.

[skiingwiz]

If someone had somewhere to host it, I wonder if AppScale would be any good. I've never used it, but it claims to be able to run unmodified App Engine apps.