New product are coming

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

After all there are still people maintaining and writing COBOL.

That is my Day job and many nights too

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by SHS

Windows OS flat bold look

I hate the flat bold look of the new Windows OS. Give me XP with the enhanced features anyday.

[wnjj]

Originally Posted by stuckless

I think you are seriously missing the point. We all know that SageTV is the BEST PVR solution out there. But being the best, isn't going to be enough. If we can't attract developers, then, it's dead.

Today, we have a skeleton crew working on SageTV, but, I wouldn't call it active development. There is 1 developer working keeping the SageTV UI alive on something other than the HD300. The Android MiniClient is OK, but, if SageTV was relevant, someone would have have started work on an AppleTV version, or even some native interface on these cheap linux boxes. Where is that? Sure, you can run a full client... but, a running a full client was the very reason I left mythtv and xbmc and went to SageTV in the first place. We have what, 2 people working on windows 64 bit support (5 years later). 0 people actively working on the UI. 1 person working on plugins. 0 people working on anything new for SageTV.

I know it hurts to realize that sagetv is on life support, but, if you can't see it, then, we are in even bigger trouble.

You seem to remember that XP was somehow perfect, but, I had my share of calls from family using XP as well.

I wonder how relevant Microsoft would be today, if they said, "MS DOS is perfect, we are done, we don't need to do anything else".

Sometimes it's that shiny new UI that attracts people to your product. It's the first thing they see. It's one thing for us to be wearing beer goggles for SageTV, but people on the outside, looking in, see it for what it is.

Sorry, I didn't realize my post was responding specifically to SageTV and its future. I didn't intend that and was simply sharing my frustration with the seemingly endless need many have to constantly "upgrade" everything electronic in a more generic sense. I purchase products like a phone and computer to perform the tasks they're capable of when I buy them. I'd (just a personal preference) like them to continue doing what I ask of them without the drama of broken updates and re-figuring out where my menus have moved to (I'm looking at you Samsung Galaxy). While I can adapt just fine at least for now, some old folks don't find it as easy. In many of these cases it's about a "new look" without providing new significant features or at least ones that couldn't have been added to the existing look.

Again, this is all MY observation and personal preference on products I use. I realize that it is mine alone and obviously I'm in a minority when it comes to this or the marketing departments of a lot of companies would have to be wrong. I'm fully capable of understanding that updating/modernizing SageTV is probably exactly what it needs and said nothing to the contrary. I also get that keeping it around as a community means creating new features, content and probably even a new look and am happy to help where I can. In fact that's part of the reason I took on the 64-bit code. (dirty little secret: I'm not actually running it myself yet since my system is working fine). Updating SageTV is compatible with my (curmudgeon) opinions since there is an actual need to change beyond just "because we can."

It's likely that the rise of streaming has made recording OTA and cable less relevant to many. That's the case for my brother who just moved to where he cannot get OTA but has enough bandwidth for streaming. I'm in the reverse situation so everything we watch is OTA/SageTV. Is there any way to seamlessly integrate these streaming services even if it means working with the providers and subscribing to them? SiliconDust's cord cutting offering is a great compliment to SageTV if they can land and keep the big boys.

But even if the worst case happens and this community dries up, I'm hoping my system can keep chugging along doing pretty much the same thing it's been doing for 10 years, unless of course someone forces me to "update" my PC to something "modern" that won't run it.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by wnjj

Sorry, I didn't realize my post was responding specifically to SageTV and its future. I didn't intend that and was simply sharing my frustration with the seemingly endless need many have to constantly "upgrade" everything electronic in a more generic sense. I purchase products like a phone and computer to perform the tasks they're capable of when I buy them. I'd (just a personal preference) like them to continue doing what I ask of them without the drama of broken updates and re-figuring out where my menus have moved to (I'm looking at you Samsung Galaxy). While I can adapt just fine at least for now, some old folks don't find it as easy. In many of these cases it's about a "new look" without providing new significant features or at least ones that couldn't have been added to the existing look.

Again, this is all MY observation and personal preference on products I use. I realize that it is mine alone and obviously I'm in a minority when it comes to this or the marketing departments of a lot of companies would have to be wrong. I'm fully capable of understanding that updating/modernizing SageTV is probably exactly what it needs and said nothing to the contrary. I also get that keeping it around as a community means creating new features, content and probably even a new look and am happy to help where I can. In fact that's part of the reason I took on the 64-bit code. (dirty little secret: I'm not actually running it myself yet since my system is working fine). Updating SageTV is compatible with my (curmudgeon) opinions since there is an actual need to change beyond just "because we can."

It's likely that the rise of streaming has made recording OTA and cable less relevant to many. That's the case for my brother who just moved to where he cannot get OTA but has enough bandwidth for streaming. I'm in the reverse situation so everything we watch is OTA/SageTV. Is there any way to seamlessly integrate these streaming services even if it means working with the providers and subscribing to them? SiliconDust's cord cutting offering is a great compliment to SageTV if they can land and keep the big boys.

But even if the worst case happens and this community dries up, I'm hoping my system can keep chugging along doing pretty much the same thing it's been doing for 10 years, unless of course someone forces me to "update" my PC to something "modern" that won't run it.

I fully get it. We live in a disposable society. Our phones are on 2 year plans and designed to be obsolete in 2 year, even though they are perfectly fine. I'm running Google Pixel (the first one). It's off plan, and I see no reason to upgrade to a new phone. But, I'm happy that there is a pixel 2 and a pixel 3, even though I don't need it, since, it means there's still a commitment to furthering the product. I feel the same way about TVs. It felt that as soon as I bought a TV, it was already obsolete. I'll likely never go out of my way to buy a 4K tv. "Built to last" is not something that exists in our corporate society today. There is no pride is building something that will last, since it only hurts the corp bottom line. That's just where we are, and it's likely never going to change.'

Sometimes I get frustrated with the state of SageTV. Sure, when Google bought it, there was a bit of "sky is falling" attitude that you'd expect, but Jeff managed that fairly well, keeping EPG alive, etc. When Google went Open Source, I truly believed SageTV would be on a huge resurgence. I created the Android MiniClient, and truly believed that someone would be picking up the torch to build something for AppleTV/iOS. The sad reality is that the MiniClient isn't that complicated, although, I could have never created it without the help of Jeff. 90% of it is really simple, but, there are some nuances that really needed explaining. I'm not a video person, but, again, I fully expected that a video developer would swoop in and just start solving all the video issues... that never happened.

I'm thankful for the few die-hards left that are still doing something here. And long after this forum dries up, many of us will continue to run SageTV, which is a testament to the product, but, the fact that this forum dries up is also a testament to the product's inability to attract new dev talent, which in turn could have attracted new users.

In an alternate reality, in which Google didn't buy SageTV, I think the SageTV we see today might be very different than the one we were given in the V9 OpenSource. I think there'd be a new "flat" UI, and I don't think that Jeff would not have created it on a whim, but he's smart enough to realize that he needs to attract new users to stay alive. SageTV would be a subscription service, since, there age of buy it own it is long gone, and software companies need the continuous revenues to stay alive... esp smaller ones. But, Jeff, being Jeff, would have grandfathered all of us into a lifetime subscription. We'd have Android and iOS clients, with a mobile STV, and because it's built by people that know OpenGL (unlike me), it would likely far outperform the Android MiniClient and even the HD300 that we have today. In this alternate reality, SageTV adapted and iterated, and is very much alive, and very different. In an alternate reality, I might even be an employee of SageTV, since I was really close to contacting Jeff and applying just before they got bought out (sigh... so now I'm depressed that this alternate reality isn't my reality )

[graywolf]

Guess some might call me “unadaptable” since I prefer the look of the Sage3 UI (on our hdx00s) but do like the features of gemstone (different sorting for groups and items in groups to name one). Always been more of a function guy than appearance.
My personal phone is a flip phone. I don’t text, do social media, etc. it does what I want it to do, make and receive calls. On the rare occasion I need to look up something or get directions when not at my pc then I us my company provided iPhone

Trying to find time to test out the 64bit Sage to see if it helps the clocking issue on one of the machines when scrolling thru the recordings, or setting manual recordings, or adding padding.

[SHS]

Originally Posted by BobPhoenix

I hate the flat bold look of the new Windows OS. Give me XP with the enhanced features anyday.

LoL when you used them ever day if have an iOS and Android devcie

[jpwegas]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

Glad to see nothing has changed in software development since I left the industry 20 years ago:

Update the UI because it "looks old". Spend 18 months on the update and 2 weeks after it's released some new "modern UI" comes out making yours instantly obsolete.

Codebase gets too big and complex to manage? Start over on the latest and greatest architecture/platform. Spend 2 years ironing out bugs and finding ways to work around quirks in the new platform you have adopted. When your're finished fixing bugs spend another year adding functionality that the old code had but you left out of the new code to get it to market sooner. When that's all done you discover you have a big complex code base that needs updating.

Yup, this still happens all the time sadly.

"Let's re-write this product in the new hotness and spend the next 4 years rediscovering all the bugs we fixed, edge cases addressed, and odd business rules that were addressed and working in the old code base. In a few years the product the customer sees will be almost what they have now!"

--John

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by jpwegas

Yup, this still happens all the time sadly.

"Let's re-write this product in the new hotness and spend the next 4 years rediscovering all the bugs we fixed, edge cases addressed, and odd business rules that were addressed and working in the old code base. In a few years the product the customer sees will be almost what they have now!"

--John

If you work for a large corp, you'll realize that this almost never happens, which is sad. I read an article a couple years back (I think it was by the founder of Netscape), and he said that if you want to make money by creating companies that larger corps will buy, just watch for whatever company they buy, and then start a company doing the same thing. The reason is that once a large corp buys a company, the innovation of that product stops. SageTV was no exception. It died the minute that Google bought it. I'm sure that wasn't Jeff's intention, and he probably didn't believe that would happen, but that happens more often than not. Either the product is killed, or, it simply lives on, being a dated product that really never gets anything "current".

The "rewrite" is necessary to keep a product alive. Sure the "customers" (existing ones) are the losers here, some of them, at least. If we lived in a world where we didn't need a new "language" or architecture, then we'd still be doing punch cards, because, why would you every consider a "new archtiecture" for computing? I'm sure when C came along the Assembler developers were like, "this is a fad, it'll never catch on, you only need assembler. C is slow". I lived though the same Java phase, of "Java is slow, it'll never catch on. It's just another language that will die. You only need C". (I was that person that hated on Java, since I was C developer, and the world only needed C).

What took sagetv 17 years to create, could likely be re-done in a new architecture, in 2-3 years, and then have another lifespan of 10 years (and then require a rewrite). Why? because the architecture of today, vastly different than it was 17 years ago. Most legacy codebases are littered by code that is solved by simply using an off the shelf library today, but, in your code base, you have some proprietary library that only you understand, and you still have to maintain, and add features to, etc, etc, instead of simply building value.

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by stuckless

What took sagetv 17 years to create, could likely be re-done in a new architecture, in 2-3 years, and then have another lifespan of 10 years (and then require a rewrite). Why? because the architecture of today, vastly different than it was 17 years ago. Most legacy codebases are littered by code that is solved by simply using an off the shelf library today, but, in your code base, you have some proprietary library that only you understand, and you still have to maintain, and add features to, etc, etc, instead of simply building value.

Even new features in the language can make a huge difference turning a huge block of code into a single line. Map, reduce, and filter are doing this to nearly every language.

[jpwegas]

Originally Posted by stuckless

If you work for a large corp, you'll realize that this almost never happens, which is sad. I read an article a couple years back (I think it was by the founder of Netscape), and he said that if you want to make money by creating companies that larger corps will buy, just watch for whatever company they buy, and then start a company doing the same thing. The reason is that once a large corp buys a company, the innovation of that product stops. SageTV was no exception. It died the minute that Google bought it. I'm sure that wasn't Jeff's intention, and he probably didn't believe that would happen, but that happens more often than not. Either the product is killed, or, it simply lives on, being a dated product that really never gets anything "current".

The "rewrite" is necessary to keep a product alive. Sure the "customers" (existing ones) are the losers here, some of them, at least. If we lived in a world where we didn't need a new "language" or architecture, then we'd still be doing punch cards, because, why would you every consider a "new archtiecture" for computing? I'm sure when C came along the Assembler developers were like, "this is a fad, it'll never catch on, you only need assembler. C is slow". I lived though the same Java phase, of "Java is slow, it'll never catch on. It's just another language that will die. You only need C". (I was that person that hated on Java, since I was C developer, and the world only needed C).

What took sagetv 17 years to create, could likely be re-done in a new architecture, in 2-3 years, and then have another lifespan of 10 years (and then require a rewrite). Why? because the architecture of today, vastly different than it was 17 years ago. Most legacy codebases are littered by code that is solved by simply using an off the shelf library today, but, in your code base, you have some proprietary library that only you understand, and you still have to maintain, and add features to, etc, etc, instead of simply building value.

There is definitely a balance between moving to newer technology and supporting the existing product. I'm not saying to not move forward. It's just that over the last several years, I've seen a lot of situations where developers want to rewrite something for no good business or technical reason. It takes focus away from improving the value you're trying to build for the customer. It often will ignore the business lessons learned when you built the previous version of the product. And by the time you've replaced the product, you've fallen behind your competitors.

--John

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by jpwegas

There is definitely a balance between moving to newer technology and supporting the existing product. I'm not saying to not move forward. It's just that over the last several years, I've seen a lot of situations where developers want to rewrite something for no good business or technical reason. It takes focus away from improving the value you're trying to build for the customer. It often will ignore the business lessons learned when you built the previous version of the product. And by the time you've replaced the product, you've fallen behind your competitors.

--John

While not always evident for non-technical managers sometimes the benefit will be in the ease with which value can be added in the future. Often times maintaining an old codebase has more future cost than the cost of a rewrite to a new language or platform.

Just as an example, the company I work for has an old VB6 Windows Forms application that is central to workflow. While it technically still functions the workflow our users are forced to apply is far from ideal. We could continue to use this application but at the end of the day continuing to use it actually hurts our bottom line because it is inefficient.

[jpwegas]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

While not always evident for non-technical managers sometimes the benefit will be in the ease with which value can be added in the future. Often times maintaining an old codebase has more future cost than the cost of a rewrite to a new language or platform.

That is very true. My point was that unless you write the code once and never touch it again, it likely has several years or more of adapting to your business, your processes, and your customers. A rewrite can lose some of that real world learned knowledge, because it's often subtle things that were added after the initial planning requirements. When planning for rewrites, I often see teams discount this cost to move forward and be overly optimistic about how long it will take to "recapture" that knowledge, even when the move to a new technology is justified. It doesn't mean that it's not worth the effort, but teams need to be aware of it.

--John

[wnjj]

The tough spot we're in with SageTV is that it has so much legacy hardware support baked in and no matter how small a user base, someone will say suport for X should stay. If this were a modernized commercial product, things like "sorry, no longer supported on Windows XP" and "we're dropping capture card Y" would be more likely. The narrower the hardware diversity, the cleaner the code.

It would be nice if everyone could agree on a few good choices for hardware and things like file formats. Think of how much simpler that would be.

[Malfunction]

How about having support for various encoders install like a plugin? There would be less unused baggage that way.

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by Malfunction

How about having support for various encoders install like a plugin? There would be less unused baggage that way.

Agreed. And Windows 7 should be the minimum version now. There may still be some people on XP but those technologies are so old now. SageTV shouldn't be beholden to maintain that kind of backwards compatibility. Microsoft itself certainly doesn't.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by wnjj

It would be nice if everyone could agree on a few good choices for hardware and things like file formats. Think of how much simpler that would be.

I'd approach it as, you are never going to get 3 people to agree on hardware, so, pick 1 and start there. The discussion of "starting over" is no different than an external player coming into this field. They can approach it as, "There's no point in us doing this, because SageTV exists, NPVR, etc, and we could never match their capabilities with a first release", or, they can approach it like Plex did, and say, "we're here, this is the first offering, and it supports XXX". Over time they add in something new, and then something new, etc. Everyone has a diferent tipping point, and they just stay behind until "feature x" is there. For me, on Plex, I'll never go there until I get commercial skip like it is offered via sagetv plugins. For someone else, their tipping point is higher or lower, but you'll never satisfy everyone out of the gate.

Originally Posted by Malfunction

How about having support for various encoders install like a plugin? There would be less unused baggage that way.

I think this is the most important aspect.

[Taddeusz]

Has anyone ever setup SageTV's JVM so that a visualizer like VisualVM can be attached to it? I don't now how to use VisualVM to figure out memory leaks but this seems like a sensible thing to do.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

Has anyone ever setup SageTV's JVM so that a visualizer like VisualVM can be attached to it? I don't now how to use VisualVM to figure out memory leaks but this seems like a sensible thing to do.

The unRAID container used to have a configuration option that allowed for remote debugging. I used it a couple times.

Th challenge with tracking down a memory leak in SageTV is that you need to isolate the scenario that something is using a lot memory vs it's not letting it go, and is that happening Java or Native code. Tools like VisualVM can give you good information of how much memory String is using or Map, but, it's harder to turn that into a concrete memory leak analysis.

I run SageTV for about 90 days between restarts, and most of those restarts are actually because I take unRAID updates and I need to restart. A couple times a year, I get an Out of Memory, so I suspect there are leaks, but, those leaks could be in Plugins instead of the core sagetv.

I wonder how often you'd get an OOM if you were just running SageTV, no plugins, no fanart, no web server, no rest apis, etc.

Fanart itself consumes a HUGE amount of memory. eg, a 1920x1080 background is approx 8mb uncompressed in memory. Most backgrounds can be larger than that.

The MiniClients (ie, Android, HDx00, Placeshifters) also consume HUGE amounts of memory. They render everything on the server, and they usually contain multiple buffers of the screens for animation performance. Multiple HDx00s causing an OOM is not necessary a memory leak, since, they are needing that memory. But if a placeshifter goes to allocate a screen and it can't get the contiguous memory region, it'll get an OOM.

Sometimes I get an OOM during the recording, and I often wonder if there isn't something the native code that isn't releasing memory, but because I typically go 90+ days without getting an OOM, I suspect it's a small leak, if it's there.

[Taddeusz]

I know this isn't directly related to SageTV but...

Keep in mind I'm not really that knowledgable about Java programming. The reason I brought up VisualVM is because I was suspecting a memory leak in the Guacamole client that I've been maintaining as a docker for Unraid. It turns out it doesn't appear to have a memory leak but it does bother me that it seems that GC only happens every 40 minutes just sitting idle. The heap grows from about 35MB to about 895MB before it does GC.

It's my experience that the JVM never seems to release memory back to the system. That its heap keeps growing even if the program running inside isn't using the whole thing. That to me is problematic.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

I know this isn't directly related to SageTV but...

It's my experience that the JVM never seems to release memory back to the system. That its heap keeps growing even if the program running inside isn't using the whole thing. That to me is problematic.

Java can release memory back to the OS, but, it doesn't do it often, because the process of allocating and deallocating (and resizing) is expensive. It assumes that if you needed this much memory once, you'll need it again. Java sort of manages memory that way I manage having 2 freezers in my house. My wife ask for a bag of fries, and I go to the basement and get it from the freezer and the put it into the upstairs freezer. When she's done, I don't move the bag back to the basement, I just keep it upstairs, since I figure, if we needed the fries once, we'll likely need it again, so I keep upstairs, but until I need it, it stays downstairs.

This stackoverflow q&a does a decent job talking about this.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/...k-memory-to-os

It appears that JDK12 might actually enables this more aggressively and return memory more often to the OS.