IT seems awfully quiet in the beta department... until now

[Lucas]

I can understand it that some people use their SageTV boxes for other stuff thus moving to Win7.

I run Win7 on other PCs/laptops but SageTV stays WinXP for at least another 2 years until I either have the time to attempt the migration or all of you here do it before me.

I have DVB-S/S2 and my SageTV6 install handled DVB-S2 HDTV just fine.

I think the guy who went to MC will beback soon....

[MCE-Refugee]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

If you install the Native Recording Patch from here:

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=43579

and follow the directions about adding the Microsoft Video Decoder you should be able to watch those recordings just fine.

Thanks very much for the link.

I have installed the Native Recording Patch & now it all works properly for BBC-HD as do my Mac clients that didn't display the HD channel properly last time I looked although maybe that is just coincidental.

[CanadianEh]

*yawn* ...

[MCE-Refugee]

Originally Posted by CanadianEh

*yawn* ...

See my Avatar:-)

[john139]

title says all

* merged *

[GKusnick]

You'll find out when it goes into public beta. They don't preannounce the feature list of versions that haven't been released yet.

[sportera]

Has anyone leaked an estimated beta release date yet?

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by sportera

Has anyone leaked an estimated beta release date yet?

There are like 8 threads about this already....do we need another one?

And no, no release date, no idea what is in it other than a rumored updated gui. That's it. Sage does not pre-release info on when and what and anyone who does non-public betas are tight lipped (most likely had to sign a NDA).

[Stuntman]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

no idea what is in it

I just hope they fix that copyright date during bootup! It's a tricky thing, so I'm sure they are just making sure they do it right.. if they aren't careful, the year will go and change again!

[bigbill]

July seems like so long ago...

* merged *

[kingwr]

Is SageTV the programmer's full-time job, or is he/she doing this on the side?

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by kingwr

Is SageTV the programmer's full-time job, or is he/she doing this on the side?

It's not a hobby.. they are a real company, the programmers are real employees and everything. They have simply been bitten in the past by releasing information before a feature was ready, so they no longer do so. When it's released, you will see it.. not before then.

[john139]

how have they been bitten? feature progression should be relatively obvious. most competitors are out of business

what do we think will be in the next version?

[Fuzzy]

backlash when a feature that was talked about wasn't ready by the next release. and really, since as you mentioned, they have no comparable competition, they gain nothing by releasing this information, so why take the risk?

[john139]

customers are interested. info would please customers. as a developer, you should know which features will be ready or are ready. release those. keep the rest to yourself. basically, customer relations and good will

you should gain more than the risk of any loss

[Fuzzy]

i think a majority of people here are completely happy with their current systems. I don't think they are losing anything really with the silence. We know they are working on it, and it's not an abandoned project, and that really is enough. This thread, as long as it is, is mostly tongue in cheek...

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by john139

as a developer, you should know which features will be ready or are ready. release those. keep the rest to yourself.

That's a tricky thing. Software companies often have to pull back on previous announcements related to feature because they couldn't quite get things working. I don't think its so much the developer's responsibility to know for sure that certain things will be ready as much as its the community's responsibility to recognize that sometimes things won't go as planned. But I guess Sage feels like they got burned by the community over the delay of Studio, so they're legitimately worried that the same sort of thing could happen again.

Still, I don't see how a few screen shots could hurt... Which, by the way, applies to any Phoenix STV developers sneaking around here too.

[MeInMaui]

If Sage is in fact working on a new GUI, I can tell you from personal experience that it is a very time consuming process. Creating an interface is much more, shall we say, organic than programming new functional features. Not only must it work technically, but it must also work from a human perspective. That is not easy to pull off. Some ideas sound really good on paper but don't translate to a usable UI. This sort of thing can lead to significant changes along the way until you get something that works (again speaking from experience).

Even if v7 had no other changes than a new UI, I'm not surprised at all that it is taking so long. Judging by their track record, it should be well worth the wait.

Aloha,
Mike

Edit: Achoo! Is someone talking about me?

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by MeInMaui

If Sage is in fact working on a new GUI, I can tell you from personal experience that it is a very time consuming process. Creating an interface is much more, shall we say, organic than programming new functional features. Not only must it work technically, but it must also work from a human perspective. That is not easy to pull off. Some ideas sound really good on paper but don't translate to a usable UI. This sort of thing can lead to significant changes along the way until you get something that works (again speaking from experience).

So, I was kind of kidding with the screen shot comment, and kind of serious. I've heard that UI development often takes a sort of guess-and-check approach. That's kind of why I'd like to see screen shots.

A long time ago there was a thread devoted to discussing the UI of the main screen. People talked about what they liked and didn't like, and some people created mock-ups, or posted screen shots of other applications that they liked. And there was discussion about creating similar threads for other UI screens. Unfortunate, that thread died off before any moderately clear conclusions were reached, and nothing was really done about the other screens. I think at one point Brent thought about trying to write (or get other people to write) blog posts with UI suggestions, but that didn't really happen either.

While I have tons of confidence in Sage to implement really cool functionality in their products, I'm less confident in their ability to come up with nice-looking and usable interfaces. I was hoping that the user community would have more of an opportunity to comment on UI designs before development got too far along for things to be easily changed/tweaked. But who knows, maybe Sage has a decent-sized set of super-secret private beta testers that have been providing that input all along.

[Djc208]

Originally Posted by MeInMaui

If Sage is in fact working on a new GUI, I can tell you from personal experience that it is a very time consuming process. Creating an interface is much more, shall we say, organic than programming new functional features. Not only must it work technically, but it must also work from a human perspective. That is not easy to pull off. Some ideas sound really good on paper but don't translate to a usable UI. This sort of thing can lead to significant changes along the way until you get something that works (again speaking from experience).

Yes, even when I did database work, setting up the data structures was the easy part. Creating an interface that was powerful yet simple was very hard. In addition to the above there's also the fact that what seems obvious to you the programmer is often completely alien to the average user.

Plus there's the issue of having to either make sure the features work across all the different platforms (HD-100/200 as well as clients/placeshifters), or is flexible enough to adapt itself to the limitations of each.

Originally Posted by reggie14

A long time ago there was a thread devoted to discussing the UI of the main screen. People talked about what they liked and didn't like, and some people created mock-ups, or posted screen shots of other applications that they liked. And there was discussion about creating similar threads for other UI screens. Unfortunate, that thread died off before any moderately clear conclusions were reached, and nothing was really done about the other screens. I think at one point Brent thought about trying to write (or get other people to write) blog posts with UI suggestions, but that didn't really happen either.

But that thread also pointed out that there was a large diversity of what people liked or wanted. Some wanted the eye-candy and glitz of a flashy interface, and others preferred the original interface. I know that trying to make one interface that makes both groups happy is even harder than just picking one. And as MS and Apple have proven trying to use the same UI for everything just doesn't work.

I love SageMC on my TV with a remote, but IMO find the stock interface is better on a computer with a keyboard and mouse.

Besides, if we knew what was coming then we'd just be here wining about how it's taking too long, or complain about what they didn't do in the new interface, just go back and look at the HD-100 threads, or the HD-PVR. Heck the HD-200 wasn't even out before people were complaining about what it was missing.

In all I can't really blame them for not wanting to hear constant complaints in light of all the hard work they're putting in. You're going to get them anyway, why start early? Besides, they're good about improvements, so get it where you want it, then let the complaints guide your future improvements.