SageTV Placeshifter Completely Self Contained on USB stick

[jimmyb]

Well I have fallen in love with and am playing with portable apps for the USB flash drive. I have successfully installed and have been running PS on a USB stick, but now with the advent of PortableApps menu system: http://portableapps.com/ adding SageTV to the menu with Buri: http://hamachiwiki.com/Buri and my favorite remote VPN Hamachi: http://hamachi.cc/ I can now watch and listen to SageTV anywhere.

The main requirement for a true portable app is that it does not leave any registry settings or files on the host computer you are plugged into. Do not know if this will work in the corporate firewall situation, but give it a try and let us know.

Have fun and good watching

[itsanogo]

Oh that would be good news!
But are you sure it does not register anything in the registry?
Have you try it on a computer that never had SageTV installed?

Thank you,

[GKusnick]

I'm not sure I understand the solution being described here. Placeshifter can indeed be run from a USB stick in self-contained fashion (I've been using it this way since Placeshifter came out), but I don't see why you would need three extra apps to do it. Just copy your Program Files\SageTV\Placeshifter folder to your USB stick and you're done. To run it, insert the stick into any Windows computer, open up the Placeshifter folder, and double-click on SageTVPlaceshifter.exe. You do have to know the IP address or SageTV locator ID of your server, but you can keep that info in a text file on the stick if you can't remember it.

When run in this way, Placeshifter does not leave any traces in the host machine's registry (at least none that I've found), but it may leave a properties file, under Documents and Settings for the logged-in username, containing the IP address or locator ID of the server you connected to. If you're paranoid, it's pretty easy to delete this file manually when you're done.

A useful feature enhancement would be if Placeshifter could detect that it's running from removable media and if so, save the properties file back to the removable drive instead of to the hard disk. But apart from that, it's pretty portable right out of the box, without all that other stuff.

[jimmyb]

GK:The Buri / Hamachi was just a way to setup a VPN to your Sagetv server.

Itsanogo: Yes, I have tried it on NON Sage computers and it works well. No I did not check the registry. There are Registry apps that will remove your traces. Check the website www.portableapps.com forums for more info.

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by jimmyb

GK:The Buri / Hamachi was just a way to setup a VPN to your Sagetv server.

Fine, if that's how you like to do it. But people shouldn't get the idea that a VPN is required for using Placeshifter away from home. It's not, if you configure your router to forward the ports properly. Placeshifter alone should be sufficient for most users.

[Narflex]

It's also possible to put the JRE on the USB drive that the Placeshifter will use. If you create a 'jre' subfolder and then put all the JRE contents in there it'll use that one instead of loading the one that the registry indicates is the current JVM. Then there's really no requirements at all on the host PC aside from Win32 with DirectDraw7 w/ video overlay.

[itsanogo]

I tried Placeshifter on a brand new install of Windows XP Pro. Did not work because there was no Java environnement.

Narflex: I just created a "jre" folder into the Placeshifter folder on my USB stick. And all i have to do is copy my "j2re1.4.2_11" folder into it?
It would work? I am a little bit confused here...

Thanks,

[Narflex]

Give it a try. It should work.

[itsanogo]

It actually did not work. It still pop a message up saying: A Java environnement is not installed on the machine...

[GKusnick]

What directory structure did you create? If you did this:

Placeshifter
  jre
    j2re1.4.2_11
      (contents of j2re1.4.2_11 folder)

then I'm guessing it won't work. My interpretation is to do it like this:

Placeshifter
  jre
    (contents of j2re1.4.2_11 folder)

Have you tried that?

[itsanogo]

It works!
But i am not sure about its stability. As soon as i tried to view a show i recorded, it crashed!

Anyway, it worked. Good enough for me!
I mostly use webserver.

Thank you!