A Detached Client?

[jchiso]

Is there a way to use SageTV Client solely as a media playback interface? I would like to be able to add media from various sources to designated local Library Import directories and have the client play back without being connected to a SageTV server.

I realize I could do this with a SageTV system and a "virtual" network encoder, but I would prefer to use just a client since this system will not be acting as a PVR or encoder.

[Opus4]

Not really - the client is expecting to get all of its info from the server.

- Andy

[ben_gb]

This would be a useful option... there are a couple of instances where having the client being able to play stuff from a local (to the client) drive would be handy.

One is if I'm travelling, I usually copy some MPGs to my laptop (which has SageClient). Of course I can play them back with Windows Media Player, but it would be nicer if SageClient could play these local files too.

Also, on another occasion a friend brought a (data) DVD-R disk over with some MPGs, but I couldn't find a way to play them back directly from the DVD-R (which has a DVD drive) on the living room client. In the end I had to copy them to the Library directory on the server, but this rather took the sponteneity out of the situation! It would be handy to be able to open the local CD/DVD drive as a directory to browse & play files from if there is a data disk in the drive.

(The DVD-R thing happened some months ago, so possibly this facility has been added to newer versions..?)

Ben

[briands]

This would be a cool feature for the carputer set too. Then you could use SAGE as the frontend in your car. You'd just need to develop a "sync" strategy.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by ben_gb

It would be handy to be able to open the local CD/DVD drive as a directory to browse & play files from if there is a data disk in the drive.

You can go to Media Center -> Browse Media Files -> Play a Selected Media File, but the client still needs to be connected to a server to run properly.

- Andy

[Deadbolt]

Originally Posted by jchiso

Is there a way to use SageTV Client solely as a media playback interface? I would like to be able to add media from various sources to designated local Library Import directories and have the client play back without being connected to a SageTV server.

I realize I could do this with a SageTV system and a "virtual" network encoder, but I would prefer to use just a client since this system will not be acting as a PVR or encoder.

This would also be sweet because you could use it to watch shows with comskip working properly.

[GKusnick]

As an experiment, I loaded a bunch of recorded shows onto a USB drive and brought it along with me on vacation to watch on my laptop using SageTVClient. Before leaving I used nielm's XML file generator to export the show info, and wrote some custom STV code to create a "Portable Recordings" menu that displays show info from the XML files instead of from the server database.

Once I got where I was going, I set up a VPN connection to my SageTV server back home and was able to fire up the client and try to watch some shows on the portable drive.

It worked, sort of. The client took a long time (a couple of minutes) to initialize, but it did finally come up with a functioning UI and I was able to browse the shows on the USB drive using my jury-rigged menu.

Playback was good once it got going. However seeking forward and backward in the recording was less than stellar, giving me a spinning Sage icon almost every time. Even just hitting the Pause button, which I thought should be instantaneous, often gave me five or ten seconds of spin before finally pausing the playback. It's as if every button push on the remote was being bounced off the server before taking effect on the client. I'm not sure why this should be necessary, since the playback was all local, from a local file.

So the answer is that it can be done, if you can set up some sort of connection to the server, but the system's responsiveness to commands is not what you would want or expect.

Based on that experience, I'll add my vote for some sort of built-in Sage-To-Go feature in the client that would let it play back local content without having to handshake with the server on every button push.