Content Organization?

[Cayars]

I'm still struggling trying to adjust to SageTV from BTV. I'm so frustrated I want to scream! One of the nice things about BTV was that you could tell it what folder/directory to record the show in. This made directory maintenance very easy as you could have a master directory for Kids show. An Adult directory, an NC17 directory, a PremierTV directory etc...

If I was able to only use SageTV for output as well as recording this might not be such an issue as it would be internally handled as it is for many of you. The problem for me and a growing crowd of people will be when you try and add external devices like the Hauppauge MVP, ShowCenter, D-Link Media Player, etc...

I have the MVP and ShowCenter devices and they worked pretty well with BTV because I had a decently laid out directory structure in place. I was able to password protect directories of questionable content to keep the kids from seeing things they shouldn't.

However, now with SageTV controlling things instead of me I'm having all kinds of problems.

I'm looking for any tips any of you might have on how to handle this type of situation. I'm sure that we will start seeing others soon with these same types of problems as more and more of the MVP type devices are sold. Any suggestions at all will be appreciated!

Carlo

[Matt]

I'm facing the same problems.

Part of the problem is, that SageTV (seems to) keep all meta information about recordings in the wiz.bin file, while the recordings are stored flat.

This makes it hard to use recordings outside SageTV. If you reorganize recordings outside of SageTV (e.g. in Windows Explorer), you'll loose all the meta information and the recordings become "dumb" imported videos.

I'd prefer if SageTV would:

a) use file system folders to store recordings (explicitly and implicity (eg. by channel, category, ...),
b) put as much as possible of the meta information into the mpg files (incl. EPG data or at lease references to it etc.) and
c) split wiz.bin into separate files, one for the cache (can be deleted anytime) and one for real programming information (could be XML)

Overall, the system would become more friendly to the outside world (tools other than SageTV) and upgrading/repairing etc. would be less painfull. Today, if wiz.bin is dead, a lot its lost...

-Matt

[mlbdude]

I suggest you guys fut in feature requests for this. Sage was designed to be a closed system like a Tivo, however unless they plan on making a client for every network device coming out they will want to do something.