New SageTV Interface

[Rob]

Originally Posted by nielm

One final point and I will shut up...

Nielm, you are one of the people who have more than earned the right to speak up. You certainly do not need to shut up.

[mlbdude]

Wow, interesting thread. Glad to see this topic coming up again. I guess you could say I was an advanced user of SageTV. I loved the technology but could not stand the UI. People seem to forget that usability and form are functions and features. Besides watching TV you spend most of your time in the app going through the UI.

I started SageMC in a last ditch attemp to bring more life into SageTV for my household. It was a great experience and I had lots of fun doing it. At the same time I installed MCE and started using it. The family instantly took to MCE and did not want to use SageTV so for me it was a personal challenge to make SageMC compete with or beat MCE. After spending countless hours, weeks, and months on the project I finally gave in to just using what worked well, looked great, and felt great - MCE.

I had a discussion with the SageTV folks many years ago about their UI. We did not see eye to eye on this one for sure and they obviously still feel that way. On one hand I can see some of their strategy. What if they did make a great flashy and good looking UI? Would the purpose be to lure some of the MCE users to SageTV? Frankly, MCE is great and I would be hard pressed to see the average MCE user leaving it. The core audience of SageTV are extreme power users that have very specific technology requirements. It could be that feeding that user base would involve extending the technology and not the UI.

Maybe by enhancing the UI the only benefic Sage would get would be to capture or re-caputre the limited users like myself? Maybe it is just not worth it.

[Goodspike]

Originally Posted by nielm

Not without editing the STV in Studio (post separately in the studio forum asking for this if you want to try it but don't know how)
Setup/Help/User Interface Guide explains the icons. On a first time setup I believe you are prompted to follow this tutorial.

The problem with UI design which is multipled a thousand times in 10ft UI's (because the screen real-estate is much much smaller) is screen clutter: where do you put all the controls related to a screen without making it a mess. Also 10ft UIs for complex programs are realtively new (whereas WIMP has been around for decades now, and there are several studies and style guides for it)

Going back to the including Archived files in Sage Recordings, this is in the rightClick/Esc/Options popup menu, along with all the other sorting/filtering options: where else could it be? How could it be made more obvious? I have no clue!

People say that Sage's UI should be more simple. The problem is that making the UI more simple will hide a lot of the configurability (such as the above filtering/sorting options) that makes Sage powerful, and then people don't find these things because they are hidden.

I'm talking about being intuative, not simple. Just an example, in Wordperfect you can easily setup a table. In Word prior to Word 2007, you'd have to go to a help file.

[takeshi]

Originally Posted by mlbdude

The core audience of SageTV are extreme power users that have very specific technology requirements. It could be that feeding that user base would involve extending the technology and not the UI.

This is an excellent point. Everything has to reach some sort of compromise even for entities like MS with its vast resources. Honestly, if SageTV was a lot like MCE I'd probably just use MCE instead. That's not to say that the UI can't/shouldn't be improved cosmetically and functionally in SageTV but they do need to choose where to focus their resources and attention. For me, functionality is a priority and customization are my top priorities and that's precisely why I use SageTV.

[JUC]

we miss you mlbdude!

[src666]

Originally Posted by takeshi

This is an excellent point. Everything has to reach some sort of compromise even for entities like MS with its vast resources. Honestly, if SageTV was a lot like MCE I'd probably just use MCE instead. That's not to say that the UI can't/shouldn't be improved cosmetically and functionally in SageTV but they do need to choose where to focus their resources and attention. For me, functionality is a priority and customization are my top priorities and that's precisely why I use SageTV.

True. For me, the prime drivers for using SageTV are:

1. Essentially unlimited tuner support
2. True Client/Server, although with good extenders this becomes less important
3. Open file format

That's it. Any product that offers those features is in the running. Granted, SageTV has a LOT more to offer than just those 3 features, but so do a lot of other products out there. If MythTV had worked on my hardware, I'd be using that today.

From this point forward, most people will be introduced to PC/DVR technology by Vista's Media Center. I'm excluding Apple's Apple TV/iTMS combo because it has no DVR functionality. And until they need to add more than 2 SD or HD tuners, Vista will serve them well. Most of them won't care much about open formats or client/server, so the tuner issue is going to be the primary problem they face. If and when they need to move beyond Vista's limits, they will have to choose between a hack to their system or a new product.

That's when Sage's UI becomes a huge burden. For average users, it just doesn't come close to competing with MCE/Vista. You have to make the transition attractive for more than just technical users.

Maybe Sage has decided that the hardcore techie is their only audience, and they don't care about average users. Maybe they don't expect to get any of the users who run into Vista's limitations. It's possible that they are happy being a very marginal player in the market. If so, then fine.

But if they want to play in the new market, they have to know that some large fraction their potential customer base is going to be coming to them with preconceptions and expectations based upon Vista, or Apple TV, or Tivo. There won't be as many people who have never seen a DVR before. And (IMO) the current UI just won't attract those people in the future.

Oh, and let's not forget that SD is going away in 2 years, and CableCard is the elephant in the room that just cannot be ignored, no matter how flawed it is as a technology. Unless Sage has a strategy for dealing with that issue (bye-bye open file format), then this whole conversation is a moot point in the long term.

[briands]

What about a NO UI option... where one could run SAGE in service mode with NO UI, but exposing the TV DB to another frontend application?

Users could use their favorite MediaCenter front end and just link to the sage DBs for Guide, Schedule, recordings, favorites, etc.

Integration to Xlobby or others would be very nice.

[dealsdyker]

Originally Posted by lotusvball

That is my real stock GUI. With custom menu STVi, a different background and different highlight bars.

How can we get that GUI? Is it downloadable or did you just do it for yourself?

[Goodspike]

Originally Posted by briands

What about a NO UI option... where one could run SAGE in service mode with NO UI, but exposing the TV DB to another frontend application?

Users could use their favorite MediaCenter front end and just link to the sage DBs for Guide, Schedule, recordings, favorites, etc.

Integration to Xlobby or others would be very nice.

That's not so far fetched. When I first tried Sage I was planning on watching everything through my MyHD card.

Unfortunately, although Sage supposedly doesn't do any encoding to HD programming content, material recorded through Sage using a Fusion card will not play through a MyHD card, even though material will play if recorded using Fusion's software.

The point is though, that people may prefer to playback the material Sage records through something other than Sage.

[unkyjoe]

My 2cents worth.

I like the fact that Sage was so simple to setup, compared to Windows MCE.

I like the fact there is no DRM and I can watch what I record where I want to.

I like the MCE interface STB it does what I need it to do.

Now fix the stuttering and stability issues and all will be well.

I.E Make it as stable as a Tivo and my wife will be happy, mind you it runs about 2 weeks without any problems, but every once in a while it will get confused and need a reboot.

[mickp]

I'm probably risking a good flaming here but as an unashamed sagemc fanboi I can't resist adding some pics of the sagemc interface to this thread because I get the impression that a few people reading this thread still won't have seen sagemc;





http://www.daleks-of-god.net/btv/sagepics/sageGuide.jpg











I work in IT and should know better, but still go first to take a look at the screenshots of any product that I'm considering trialing/purchasing/downloading etc. I can't help it

I only downloaded and re-evaluated sage as a possible replacement for btv after Rakesh at Snapstream made it clear that they wouldn't ever include dvb support into the product and that there was absolutely no future for non US customers with ss.

Sage has superior features such as full integration (no separate media program to play music and watch videos etc), multi platform support, distributed servers, placeshifter clients, native mvp support etc. I knew this at the time I was using btv but shallow me couldn't get past the awful ((looking) imho) interface.

The htpc interface is a part of the decor and is more prominent (projected onto the wall) than any artwork, soft furnishings or other piece of technology in my living room. If when I'd been reading Sage press releases and browsing the screenshots on the site I had seen just a few pictures of sagemc I'd have jumped years ago.

As an experiment try going to http://www.sagetv.com and have a look around to see if you can spot any indication that there are alternative interfaces such as meekel and sagemc. Even going to support and then finding the tiny link to the community wiki site doesn't help much because you have to know what an stv is before you get an idea of what it's capable of.

I can understand that a complete re-design of the interface is something that might not be undertaken immediately by the Frey folk, but why is it such a dirty secret that sage is so well designed that talented, dedicated users can and have designed complete ui replacements for the product?

Why aren't SAGE revelling in the fact that they have this enormous flexibility? Where's the huge headline article on the front page that touts this capablitiy and highlights various user plugins to the public (with lots of nice pictures). Why isn't the release of a fantastic plugin such as Bob's video editor newsworthy on their front page? If nothing else it seems appropriate to publicly praise the contributions of it's developer community.

Is it pride on the part of frey that they don't do this?

If you are reading this post it means that you're a member of our secret sage user cabal and have somehow managed to make it to the forums. To get to this point you probably had to be impressed enough with the base product in the first place to shell out some cash. I'd bet that there are many users who don't ever come to the forums and have no idea what it is that they have purchased.

End the conspiracy of silence now!

Mick.

[mightyt]

Hmm ... There was a time when some "creative" non-developer types posted visuals of Sage UI prototypes. I am sure they were created in some Adobe program.

What was cool is that we were seeing UI ideas in non text format. In fact several were actually offered up as Sage STV's. Since then Sage UI options have dwindled down to SageMC, Meekell, Out of the Box Sage UI, and your own Custom Menus / Icons / Fonts (if you want to count that as another UI offering).

Guess what I am saying is I haven't seen anything "fresh" for a while. The desire for a new Sage UI is always talked about, but I wonder what new, "different" and creative UI ideas are there out there??

I like seeing structure and feature ideas, but as they say ... one picture is worth a 1,000 words ...

T.

[Morgan111]

One can also get UI ideas from looking at example themes like those from Meedio
or MediaPortal.

Anything developed too close to those should have consent from the authors. And some of them may be willing to share their graphics as long as they are given credit for their contribution.

[Goodspike]

Originally Posted by unkyjoe

I.E Make it as stable as a Tivo and my wife will be happy, mind you it runs about 2 weeks without any problems, but every once in a while it will get confused and need a reboot.

You might try a scheduled reboot daily. I do that and I don't remember the last time Sage screwed up.

[Goodspike]

Originally Posted by mickp

I'm probably risking a good flaming here but as an unashamed sagemc fanboi I can't resist adding some pics of the sagemc interface to this thread because I get the impression that a few people reading this thread still won't have seen sagemc;.

Thank you--I'm someone who hasn't seen the interface. That doesn't do a thing for me. You've saved me setting up SageMC to check it out. It reminds me of things I downloaded when I first started playing with my first HTPC. They were installed and uninstalled quickly. But again, as I mentioned, I'm a former Tivo user.

[Goodspike]

Originally Posted by mickp

Assuming this is the screenshot of viewing a TV program, how do you FF and REW with a mouse?

[mickp]

Originally Posted by Goodspike

Assuming this is the screenshot of viewing a TV program, how do you FF and REW with a mouse?

You don't at the moment you use your remote or keyboard (I'm a version behind at the moment tho so might be missing something). I'm sure that if people request it there's every chance that Dirk will find time to add a mouse transport tho.

Mick.

[mightyt]

Originally Posted by Morgan111

One can also get UI ideas from looking at example themes like those from Meedio
or MediaPortal.

Anything developed too close to those should have consent from the authors. And some of them may be willing to share their graphics as long as they are given credit for their contribution.

Yeah ... I always thought that Meedio had some pretty classy themes ... no shortage in numbers either ... If I remember correctly, when I looked at it I think you were able to plug in many themes and easily change between them at will.

I guess UI implementation can be almost as important as look and feel ...

Thanks, T.

[coryking]

1) SageTV is dirt cheap. $150 is nothing to make a $70/mo cable bill worth it.

2) SageTV is great because it is quasi-hobbiest. Unlike MythTV, it actually works out of the box but like MythTV you can tweak it quite a bit.

3) It isn't MythTV. MythTV... sucks. Big time. I almost lost the entire PVR battle to that mistake.

That said:

- As a usability profesisonal, I might suggest a simple card sort would go a long way to clearing up the menu structures. Go get your friends mom, put all the menu selections on individual index cards and have her group them as she sees fit. The results often suprise you.
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/c...finitive_guide

- Update the graphic design. The current one is too dark, dismal and depressing. SageMC was a breath of fresh air when I installed it. It was bright and cheerful. Sadly, it ran to slow on my ghetto old computer I use. I cannot wait to go back to it as the menu structure was WAY more clear and easy to use.

- The lady really liked it when she could change SageMC's background to whatever she wanted. The ability to personalize simple things like the background make all the difference.

- SageTV ALMOST lost the war when I bought it simply because it didn't make those "beep boop" noises that Tivo does. Yes. Simple things like that really do matter....

Bottom line? SageTV is awesome. It makes TV worth watching. However, the UI really could use a shot in the arm. Some simple usability techniques such as card sorting and a new set of graphics could go a long way to improving things. The former is dirt cheap, the latter is an investment...

[Goodspike]

Originally Posted by mickp

You don't at the moment you use your remote or keyboard (I'm a version behind at the moment tho so might be missing something). I'm sure that if people request it there's every chance that Dirk will find time to add a mouse transport tho.

Mick.

Well, as I mentioned somewhere above, the thing I like about Sage is its mouse support. I have no remotes setup, and the keyboard is usually put away.

Controlling via a mouse is "heads up," meaning you don't need to look away from the screen, and you don't need to have back-lit keys. And it's easy to tell where all two buttons are, and which is which.

IMHO, setting a computer up to use a remote is like setting up your coffee pot to be controlled by your lawnmower.