Things I Want To Be Able To Do

[Mahoney]

I'm not sure where this should be exactly, as some of it may be "future wish list" material, and some of it may be "set your system up properly" material! It's not really a "please answer" post, as quite a lot of these I have a vague idea of how to find out for myself, just haven't had time to do it; more a "comment if you're interested" one.

1. Have VCR style FFWD/RWD
2. Have scene/track/period skip for DVD/Music/TV play respectively
3. Be able to designate certain channels as radio channels, and go direct to them via the remote
4. When in the radio channels, channel up/down scrolls through only those channels
5. Edit the music track info and categories
6. Play audio CDs
7. Use a BlackGold Digital receiver to get UK freeview channels
8. Record channels I have defined as radio channels as MP3
9. On pressing a button on the remote, fire a USB cable to send a pulse of +12V down its cable, which I would wire to the 8 pin on a SCART connection

All this needs to be within the SageMC 16:9 STV, as that's the one I like.

1) I can do via nielm's plugin, though it's not perfect; hopefully Sage 3 may fix this?

2) I'm not sure if the problem is that I'm using the Media Centre remote sending standard windows messages; is it sending the same message from both the FFwd and the skip buttons? As they both seem to do the same thing, using both nielm's plugin and standard Sage operation.

3) This I really, really want so that SageTV can be a proper stereo replacement; I have a feeling Cayars STV lets you do something like this? Can I achieve this using nielm's menu plugin in SageMC?

4) No idea how I'd do this...

5) No idea how I do this; does it just work from the ini files that Media Player 10 kicks out? Or does it go to its own location to work out what the files represent? One of my albums I have ripped looks fine on the Windows file system, looks right in Media Player 10, but seems to have got the track names scrambled in SageTV. And the categories are random.

6) Probably in Sage 3

7) These are used in Windows Media Center 2005 machines in the UK; so is there a high chance that SageTV would work with them? Obviously unsupported...

8) Any chance of this in Sage 3?

9) I want this so that I don't have to use the TV remote in order to change to Ext2 every time I turn the sodding TV on! No idea how easy it might be to achieve this...

[nielm]

Have scene/track/period skip for DVD/Music/TV play respectively

When viewing a DVD / playing back music, channel up/down does next/prev chapter (for DVD), or next/prev track (for music)

[Mahoney]

Thought of a couple more!

1) When I am watching a video/TV and go into the menu, so I'm viewing the menu with the video still playing and visible behind it, I'd like the play button to remove the menu so I'm just watching again. I daresay I can do this via Girder, just haven't worked it out yet!

2) I'd like the "Green Button" on my Media Centre remote to restart the Sage client if it's down and bring it to the front if something else is open in front of it. Again, I daresay I can do that in Girder.

3) When I press info when watching live TV it shows me the details of what I'm watching at the top and how far through the recording I am at the bottom of the screen. At that point I'd like the left and right buttons to scroll through the previous/next programs on the channel, and the up/down buttons to scroll through the previous/next channels in the same style, so I can see what else is on, without it changing the channel. Pressing OK would then change to the current channel, or set to record an item if it wasn't currently on. No idea how to achieve this, or whether it's possible.

[Mahoney]

Thanks nielm - that's really useful to know.

[nielm]

1) the 'TV' command does this (no idea which remote you use, and whether this command is already mapped).

2) yep -- girder only... I have a complicated set of commands so that 1 button does: Starts Sage (if it is not running), or unsleeps it (if it is asleep) or brings it to the foregrounds (if it is not), or sends the TV command (if it is the current app)

3. It's in Cayars STV, and possibly an older mlbdude STV... Or you can map a button to send the Guide command to go directly to the TV Guide screen.

[Mahoney]

2) yep -- girder only... I have a complicated set of commands so that 1 button does: Starts Sage (if it is not running), or unsleeps it (if it is asleep) or brings it to the foregrounds (if it is not), or sends the TV command (if it is the current app)

Thanks again - cheeky, I know, but if you get a minute could you post your GML for this? Sounds like just what I would like to do.

[Mahoney]

Thought of a few more!

1) In SageMC you can choose to keep 1, 2, 3 ... all recordings of a series. I want to record a news style program, so I want to keep the latest version of it - unfortunately if I set it to keep 1 it keeps the oldest. Be nice just to know that however long I go away for, when I watch "Rugby News" I'm getting the latest edition.

(Incidentally the XML I'm getting from Alan Birtles' UK XML grabber isn't too hot in that it doesn't seem to know when things are repeats, which is a pain...)

2) I want to reorder the channels as they appear in the guide; I've seen an explanation of how to do this somewhere on here, so just need to go and find it again...

3) I want to change the default recording device for live & recorded TV when a channel is available on more than one - it's using the aerial at the moment which is crap quality. Again I know that the info is on here somewhere, just need to dig it out.

4) I want to do the LCD status out thing to tell me what I'm watching on an LCD in the computer. Again, info is on here.

5) When I set up a keyword series, I'd like to be able to tell it to ignore some things it brings up! For instance, I'm very interested in the legend of King Arthur and its origins. So I've put "KING ARTHUR" in as a keyword series. And now I'm getting endless recordings of some crap kid's show called "King Arthur's Disasters". Which is what you'd expect, given the keyword - but I'd like to be able to highlight this particular show and do some kind of exclude series on it.

6) Explore interactive and how it works

7) Add comskip

[nielm]

1) In SageMC you can choose to keep 1, 2, 3 ... all recordings of a series. I want to record a news style program, so I want to keep the latest version of it - unfortunately if I set it to keep 1 it keeps the oldest.

Change the Auto-delete setting (not sure how SageMC calls this)... If AutoDelete is Yes, then the latest x will be kept.

I will try to generate a GML group when I am at home

[Mahoney]

Excellent - thanks again!

[Mahoney]

Another few...

1) Find out how SageTV uses the XMLTV format, what attributes/nodes Alan Birtles' UK grabber gets, and see whether I can get things working a little better in terms of knowing about Movies (can't browse movies in SageMC at the moment), knowing about first runs and re-runs, and knowing when a show is the same as something already recorded or scheduled to record.

2) Get the server set up so that I can schedule recordings over the net

[Morgan111]

Originally Posted by Mahoney

3. Be able to designate certain channels as radio channels, and go direct to them via the remote
4. When in the radio channels, channel up/down scrolls through only those channels
8. Record channels I have defined as radio channels as MP3

Don't forget Commercial Skip on the radio recordings!!!

[Mahoney]

I haven't got commercial skip working on the TV yet. Not sure if my processor will cope, frankly - it's a 1Ghz Athlon.

But yes, I'd like to get it to work eventually and for the radio would be lovely too!

[Crashless]

By radio channels, do you mean television channels that are audio only that your service provider offers? You don't mean actual radio do you?

I'm confused.

[src666]

One of the things I miss the most from my ReplayTV is the direct jump ability. It was possible to enter a number of minutes to jump forward/back, and also to jump X minutes into the program no matter where you were.

[nielm]

Originally Posted by Mahoney

1) Find out how SageTV uses the XMLTV format, what attributes/nodes Alan Birtles' UK grabber gets, and see whether I can get things working a little better in terms of knowing about Movies (can't browse movies in SageMC at the moment),

See the links in the XMLTV page on the wiki for category translation: movies need to have a category of 'Movie'.

knowing about first runs and re-runs, and knowing when a show is the same as something already recorded or scheduled to record.

This should be automatically handled, if the information is in the source data, and you use an XMLTV plugin that handles it (again, in the wiki, plugins 2 and 3 in the list work well with UK data).

XMLTV is not perfect -- to determine that something has already been watched, it has to match the same title and episode name exactly. FirstRun/ReRun info is at the whim of the RT website, and it is not very reliable...

[nielm]

The attached GML contains 2 Girder groups that do:

If Sage is not running
-> then start sage
-> else if Sage is sleeping
   -> then unsleep sage
   -> else if Sage in focus
      -> then send the TV command to go to the full screen TV.
      -> else restore&focus Sage

One group does this for SageTVClient.exe, the other for SageTV.exe

It needs the SendMessage plugin, and if the XPOSD plugin is available, you get a nice message when Sage is being started up.

The remote event needs to be learnt on the action:
"? Is SageTVClient Running" or "? Is SageTV Running"
and there are command line events: RunOrPopupSageTVClient and RunOrPopupSageTV

[Mahoney]

Nielm - thanks yet again! Got this working over the weekend, very nice.

[Mahoney]

Crashless - yes, I mean audio channels that I am getting via a TV set top box, providing content that is also available by radio. I don't think SageTV supports any genuine radio capture cards, does it?

In an ideal world I would have a DAB digital radio capture card and Sage would manage it and record to MP3, but gven that DAB doesn't seem to have taken off in the States I can't imagine that's just around the corner. Besides, I can't seem to find a DAB capture card...

[parkimar]

Hi,

with regards the radio channels, if you can get the guide data for these, you can include them in your list of channels and access them in the same way as any other channel.
Bleb.org can be used to get some of the radio listings.

Cheers

Mark

[Mahoney]

Yes, thanks - I know, but I'd like to be able to use the system with the TV off. That means I need some way of telling SageTV that these channels are audio channels, and then have a button on the remote that takes me to one of those audio channels (like the Live TV button) and allows me to scroll up and down secure in the knowledge that I will only encounter audio channels. And I'd like it to record them in MP3 (or at the very least the lowest video bitrate MPEG-2) - as it stands you can set recording qualities for a tuner or a show/series, but not for a channel.

(As an aside, the ability to put channels in some kind of category would be good generally - so you could have sports channels, movie channels, documentary channels etc - like Sky already does. Restrict channel hopping to within that category and voila, you have the functionality I want!)

Generally SageTV falls significantly short of my desire for it as a complete replacement for all other boxes. To achieve that it needs to be fully usable with the TV off for audio playback in the same way that a stereo works - ie via an LCD using a remote control.