Girder and SageTV

[Brent]

Originally Posted by rerooks

I guess what I was looking for was enough information to determine if Girder was a solution for me or not. What I wanted to be able to do is to control my cable box from my HD extender.

The HD Extender USB ports are not active at this time so that would not work.

The SageTV USB-UIRT module seems to only be capable of typing in the channel numbers. It would be great if it could do something like go up one channel and down one channel, as I think it would tune faster. I would also like to be able to tune in and record a PPV show.

I am now thinking that Girder won't do that

You can do almost anything with girder including channel up and down. But as I mentioned above, you need to have girder installed on your server PC in this case and have the usbuirt girder plugin installed and then build your gml file. An example gml file can be found here

[stanger89]

Yeah, Girder won't be much help, it's capable of doing what you want, the problem is you'd need to have girder and the UIRT installed on the server, and then have the USB-UIRT run to the extender so that it can recieve IR directly.

The Extender can't pass raw IR commands to Girder for it to process.

If you really want to do that, it will probably require a customization to the STV your running which would send custom commands either directly via Sage or to girder on the server.

[CollinR]

You can do this 2 ways.

1. Dynamic menus, you can make custom menu items that execute macros in EventGhost or girder.

2. You can use the OnScreenRemote STV to have basically many custom menu items on a single screen formatted to look like a remote control.

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The problem with channel +/- is SageTV's recording engine has no clue that you have changed the channel on the STB. I HIGHLY suggest you not do this but rather investigate the control method to see if you can speed it up. Really you need to change how you watch TV, live TV sucks and it is disabled in my house. Just setup your favorites well and watch what you want when you want to rather then when broadcast.

The PPV stuff should be easy to accomplish using either method.

For the PPV channels be sure to limit the number of tuners that have access to it so you can predict which tuner will be in use and which STB you will need to send the commands to. You can do this by making a lineup based on a close zipcode and only that lineup has the PPV channels enabled. Now you know PPV is only accessed by 1 tuner. Adjust that tuner to have the lowest priority so it will be the last one in use making PPV available for most of the time.

Now you would have to get EXEMultitunerplugin working (I am tring to do that now, without much luck ). You would need to build your macros so when EventGhost (or girder) sees the incoming channel change request it appends whatever commands are required to make the purchase. Probably somthing like a Right and an OK. This would allow Sage to schedule PPV shows without you having to kick them off from live.


I'm not a girder user so I have no clue of it's power but EventGhost allows you to add custom scripts into the GUI created macros. This would be required to differenciate the PPV channel changes (if %CHANNEL% is between 800 and 825) from normal channel changes that do not need the additional Right> command. Really though depending on your cable box you might be able to get by with adding a Right and a OK to the end of each channel change.

[rerooks]

I read the feedback from everyone. I am still trying to digest it. I thought I looked at OnScreenRemote, but that it was not quite working yet. I did a quick look at EventGhost, but I haven't fully appreciated what it and Girder can do. I have a couple of more projects on Sage to get working, and then I will revisit this.