Sage on life support

[valnar]

Based on the number of posts, and the fact making it open-source didn't correspond to an influx of new users, I can only assume all the efforts lately are just for die-hard users. This is a shame.

Without new users and some semblance of an effort to take over Kodi, Silicondust or any alternatives, I don't know what future SageTV could have.

Is this the beginning of the end....yet again?

[stuckless]

Every few months, we get the sage is dying posts And it's true, I do think that the community as a whole is shrinking vs growing. But, that being said, many people still use sagetv every day to record and watch to TV, and that's really what it's good at. And I'm not sure what additional work needs to be done in those areas.

Personally, as much as I love SageTV, I just haven't been able to spend the time to grow it. There are so many things that I'd like to do with sagetv, including enhancements to the MiniClient, etc, and even creating full native clients for Android/iOS (maybe using flutter.io or ReactNative). I think that even trying to do a cleaner integration with Plex or Kodi or Emby would be good, and I'd be up for that as well, but, it won't be this year (maybe later next year, I might be freed up to get back to sagetv again).

[will]

Originally Posted by stuckless

Every few months, we get the sage is dying posts And it's true, I do think that the community as a whole is shrinking vs growing. But, that being said, many people still use sagetv every day to record and watch to TV, and that's really what it's good at. And I'm not sure what additional work needs to be done in those areas.

So true! As long as the guide data flows and live TV is still published I see no reason why I would leave SageTV anytime soon.

Originally Posted by valnar

Without new users and some semblance of an effort to take over Kodi, Silicondust or any alternatives, I don't know what future SageTV could have.

I think the cable/satellite exodus is continuing at a pretty steady rate (I just cut cable two days ago ) but the ironic thing is, most people are just exiting to streaming versions of cable TV (e.g., SlingTV). Perhaps HD HomeRun Premium TV could be the saving grace to keep SageTV relevant for a while longer.

[Taddeusz]

I'm quite opinionated on this topic and am conflicted. I like SageTV and I really like it's integration with the branded media extenders. As much investment as I have in SageTV I know that it is dying.

I personally am transitioning to Plex for DVR. My reasons for this have mostly to do with the SageTV server software itself. Technology wise it is really starting to show its age. It was written at a time when "servers" were powerful and clients were relatively very weak. So it made sense to concentrate processing on the server. This has shifted and now clients are themselves quite powerful devices. It doesn't make sense now to have such server-side processing. Particularly for building out a UI.

This causes SageTV itself to be a very monolithic heavy piece of software. I run everything on unRAID as Docker containers. When I look at resource consumption of my various applications SageTV tops everything. I have 16GB of RAM and it is currently consuming 7.72%, 1.2GB. Compare that to Plex which uses less than half that at 3.22%.

Not to mention that other media organization applications such as Plex deal MUCH better with metadata. SageTV doesn't actually deal at all with metadata. That has to be tacked on with Phoenix and BMT. This just means that to make SageTV comparable to modern equivalents it has to be loaded down with a lot of add-ons.

I'm going to stop now. I can keep going on and on. I'm not really trying to convince anyone to abandon SageTV. I'm just giving my reasons for doing so given that it's been one of my personal passions for so long.

I really hope SageTV has some life left it in but for me that adventure has just about come to an end.

[FMAX]

I havent cut the cable yet, bundle prices with internet still keeping me in. The trend is for everything to be Streaming, so Sage Days are numbered. I am now migrating to Plex for movies for ease of use and streaming to devices. I also lost all my ISO's, 4TB worth, to Ransomware...SO now that I am starting all over I am using Plex.

Live TV, DVR Recordings with comskip, I havent been able to find anything that can compare. I will use Sage TV with Live TV & OTA mainly because the Commercial Skipping. Streaming and online viewing with Stupid reduced ADS killing me. The worst is when I'm watching baseball with my 4yr old and Halloween Horror Night commercials play!!

For Everyone hanging on and contributing to this community many great thanks, your work is well appriciated!

[tmiranda]

I just completed assembling a new Ubuntu machine yesterday and installed Sage on it. I've been "Sage-less" since moving in February.

Once I get Sage up and running I'll probably take a look at Plex but I've yet to see a recording engine that is as robust as Sage. I've also not seen anything else that I can customize to my liking as much as Sage.

I know I'm in the minority but I really do not like the "flashy" interfaces most DVR front ends have these days. They look really pretty at first glance but are difficult to navigate and don't tell me enough detail about what I am browsing.

[will]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

I know I'm in the minority but I really do not like the "flashy" interfaces most DVR front ends have these days. They look really pretty at first glance but are difficult to navigate and don't tell me enough detail about what I am browsing.

As someone who lives in terminals, I couldn't agree more . I want to find something to watch, not browse pretty artwork.

But when you don't know what you want to watch, sometimes the pretty artwork is nice.

[valnar]

I won't be getting rid of Sage either, but that cable bill....wow. OTA doesn't do it for me, it's basic cable. As long as no other option allows seamless integration with the HD-PVR, I'll be keeping Sage until I cut the cord. Nothing from Silicondust or Plex does encrypted channels, as far as I know.

I just wish there was enough interest to expand it further, but I understand that taking over someone else's code is not always easy, and definitely time consuming.

[samgreco]

I've been testing NPVR parallel to my Sage server for about 3 months now. With the idea that it would serve as a backend for Kodi.

Not cutting it. I've had the service crash inexplicably at least 4 times now. Kodi loses connection. Not pretty.

Meanwhile, my 14 year old wiz.bin, through 4 installations, just chugs away, never missing a show. That's why it so damned hard to let go of.

But I am determined to try a few others to see where things stand. And the reality is, that I am doing most viewing online. So as the balance shifts more and more to the online side, switching to another DVR at all is less of an issue. So I'll probably stay with Sage until I just don't need it anymore.

Although the HDHomerun Premium TV may actually extend the old school DVR a bit.

[Taddeusz]

One of the things that's making the switch from SageTV easier is that we dropped cable TV a couple years ago and haven't looked back. We aren't really missing that much. We also don't watch sports so there's no weirdness we have to worry about other than occasionally missing the news because some game goes over.

Plus, it's just TV. We've been slowly reducing our TV watching. As addicted as I am to TV and movies, at the end of the day spending time with my wife and kids is more important than consuming TV, even if it is the whole family.

[graywolf]

Originally Posted by will

As someone who lives in terminals, I couldn't agree more . I want to find something to watch, not browse pretty artwork.

But when you don't know what you want to watch, sometimes the pretty artwork is nice.

Exactly the reason we still use the SageTV3 UI plugin.
WAF much prefers the simplicity of it.

[dgeezer]

I think that part of the reason there aren't a lot of new younger users is that there is a basic shift away from conventional TV.

My daughter, a sophomore at NCSU, moved to student housing where they have cable TV. She and her roommates attached the cable from the wall to their TV and tried to watch tv. She said that they decided that this was "A stupid way to watch TV" and unhooked the cable. They hooked the TV to a laptop with an hdmi cable and never looked back.

[Flips]

I'l throw in my 2 cents... I have been using Sage for a long time (approaching 15 years). I have switched clients to android TV boxes using the miniclient. (My most trouble free client is the Shield) The miniclient is awesome on the android TV boxes. It makes it really easy to access Sage's basic interface. I like the wall view for watching movies, but it is just a little too slow through the miniclient.

Having said that, I spend most of my time in Kodi with the library managed by Emby. Having multiple clients Emby is a great solution.

I think the back end of Sage is great, robust and has all the features I need. There is a bunch of people working on metadata (emby) and UI on the Kodi team. I don't know that it would make sense for the sage community to complete with them. I would say that the sage community should leverage the niche they have in recording TV.

I haven't seen the PVR integration in kodi in person, but watching tutorials it doesn't seem too seamless. It would be ideal for the recordings to come in as imported files for emby that would seamlessly integrate with the Kodi UI. For live TV if the EPG is accessible that would be possible through Kodi that would be fine if that is a bit clunky. Or even jumping back to the miniclient.

There's a place where Sage can win and there's others where the hill is just too steep. I think the community should find the fights they can win and walk away from the fights they can't.

flips

[wayner]

I still use Sage extenders for playback and every time I try to use other products like Kodi or Plex they suck at being able to skip around shows. I primarily watch sports and I use the SkipFwd and SkipFwdx2 buttons continuously. The other software that is generally good for playback is fine if you just want to sit back and watch passively but it is no where near as good to quickly jump forward 10 seconds, or 2.5 minutes without pausing or crapping out completely.

[stuckless]

Yeah, every few months, I go through this process of checking out Emby and Plex, (not really Kodi, because I get frustrated way too easily with Kodi). I have subscriptions for both emby and plex. But I can never really seem to find the right usage for either. I guess, I can make either work, if I just change how I use the systems and that might happen at some point.

[Flips]

Originally Posted by stuckless

Yeah, every few months, I go through this process of checking out Emby and Plex, (not really Kodi, because I get frustrated way too easily with Kodi). I have subscriptions for both emby and plex. But I can never really seem to find the right usage for either. I guess, I can make either work, if I just change how I use the systems and that might happen at some point.

Why do you get frustrated with Kodi? I honestly wasn't that much in the Kodi camp until I found the kodi + emby integration. I only use it to play content from my server. I don't use any plugins outside of emby I don't customize the look or stream from anywhere. I only use the TV and Movies section.

It was a pain to figure out the emby integration, adding repositories, mapping sources, etc, but once you get it set up it works great. I like the recently added screen to view the latest recordings, or pick up where I left off in a series. That's the screen I spend most of my time in honestly. A feature we don't have with Sage. Intelligent sorting might do that, but when I need to find some specific I would have to go back to A-Z, so I would end up never using it.

flips

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by Flips

Why do you get frustrated with Kodi? I honestly wasn't that much in the Kodi camp until I found the kodi + emby integration. I only use it to play content from my server. I don't use any plugins outside of emby I don't customize the look or stream from anywhere. I only use the TV and Movies section.

It was a pain to figure out the emby integration, adding repositories, mapping sources, etc, but once you get it set up it works great. I like the recently added screen to view the latest recordings, or pick up where I left off in a series. That's the screen I spend most of my time in honestly. A feature we don't have with Sage. Intelligent sorting might do that, but when I need to find some specific I would have to go back to A-Z, so I would end up never using it.

flips

yeah, it's more that when I use Kodi, I can't seem to find what I want to do... and I end having to google it. I think the last time I used it, was when sagetv has issues with a video file, so I tried to use kodi. I had to end up googling how to add smb video source, since, after spending about 5 minutes in its menus, I couldn't find it. I actually came from Xbmc myself. I still have my modded xbox connected to my tv, although it's been about 4 years since it's been turned on. So, I keep trying to "like" kodi, I've just forgotten how to use it

As for SageTV, my 2 most used views are basically Unwatched TV and Unwatched Movies. Unwatched TV is my primary view, since, it's just a list of shows that have unwatched episodes. The thing that frustrates me about Plex, Kodi, and Emby is that they all lack the concept of custom views

[phelme]

as streaming becomes more balkanized (we all saw this coming) and IMO harder to navigate & schedule without a universal tracker (like trakt etc.), I'm not surprised that my wife and I still stick primarily to Sage. I haven't really looked at other recording back-ends, because everything just works currently for the DirecTV (via HD-PVR) and Comcast (via HDHomeRun) sources we have. I venture to Plex every once in a while just to check progress (and their office is in my neighborhood so I'm reminded of them constantly ), but rarely use it since the HD300 players were eerily prescient and still work great with most recordings (except for the occasional MPEG containers).

small rant, I don't know how people can stand what the Hulu and Netflix UX's have become. they're awful and just promote clicking on random shows, but it's apparently what someone wants.

maybe once 4K and HDR content becomes mainstream rather than a rarity that may get me to move on.

Originally Posted by dgeezer

I think that part of the reason there aren't a lot of new younger users is that there is a basic shift away from conventional TV.

My daughter, a sophomore at NCSU, ... decided that this was "A stupid way to watch TV" and unhooked the cable.

That generation needs to call it something else, because what they are doing isn't watching TV in my (ragged, dog-eared) book; they just stream.

[NetworkGuy]

Originally Posted by phelme

as streaming becomes more balkanized (we all saw this coming) and IMO harder to navigate & schedule without a universal tracker (like trakt etc.), I'm not surprised that my wife and I still stick primarily to Sage.

I agree, I stick with SageTV because it is one source of what I have watched and what is unwatched.

I tried using trakt and found it was too much trouble to have to manually update the watched status.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by NetworkGuy

I agree, I stick with SageTV because it is one source of what I have watched and what is unwatched.

I tried using trakt and found it was too much trouble to have to manually update the watched status.

It would not take much to create a Trakt plugin for sagetv. I've thought about doing this myself, because I want to see how well something like Emby could be used a s front end, but manually tracking watched statuses between 2 systems is more than I can manage