Improvements needed for Sage TV HD

[Flash2k6]

I have the Sage TV HD hardware device and I use it as a media extender for my movies/music.

Here are the things that it needs to have improved on.

1) Allow a USB flash drive to be used for the indexing of your media/content. I have 8 TeraBytes of music/video on my system, Sage TV can't handle it because the DB gets to be too big and it tanks the device. This forces me to only view media one way, by going to a file share and digging through the folder until I find what I want, then selecting it, rendering all of the search/quickplay/playlist features of the Sage TV device useless.

2) A continuation of the first issue .. because I can only play my media by using a file share, I am forced to play single files. This is extremely frustrating if I want to play an entire CD/Album where all of the MP3's are in a single folder. It would be nice if the device would auto-play the next file when using a basic windows file share as your media source. Or at least have a menu pop up that says "Play all". Just so I don't have to hit play on every single song one at a time.

3) Also related to the above, it would be nice if you could have the Sage TV device save/remember your file shares, so you can quickly go to them instead of having to manually type the server name or IP address into the box every single time... a "favorites" list or something that I can manually populate all of the IP's/names of my shares so I can just hop between them would be excellent.

Overall I like the device, it plays nearly every format I've thrown at it, with only 1 or 2 movies having "problems" due to the encoding I used ... if the above features were added, I'd have no complaints and use it even more but because of the file share/multiple play frustrations above, I use it purely for movies, and rely on other sources for my music media extension.

-F

[CollinR]

Get the server software all those issues would be resolved and more.

[Flash2k6]

Seems kind of silly to have to run additional software, when the box could be capable of these few items.

I will look into the server software (if it's free), but I really have no desire to run more software, to manage all of my media, when it's all just on a regular set of file shares.

-F

[MitchSchaft]

Of course it's not free :P

[Flash2k6]

So I downloaded the server software, and that doesn't do what I want either.

Let me explain the issue.

I have 7 media sources, physical servers spread around various places on my network. I want each of them to be imported to the Sage device (or sage server if that's the only way to do it) ... but the Sage device can't handle the database size, and the sage server won't allow me to mount network sources by IP address.

Sure, it can find my local windows workgroup, but 5 of my sources exist in a separate area that I have to access via IP, and their software won't accept smb://IP it won't accept \\IP It also won't accept the remote IP mapped as a local drive letter, it doesn't show up in the list, just my physical disks do.

So ... back to square one ...

-F

[MitchSchaft]

You need to use UNC paths. Type it in manually if it won't show up in the workgroup network list. It's just a matter of understanding how this stuff works. You should do some more searching and learning. There are plenty of folks here with large libraries.

[GKusnick]

If it won't accept UNC paths using IP addresses, try giving names to those addresses by adding entries to your Sage server's HOSTS file.

[Flash2k6]

Originally Posted by MitchSchaft

You need to use UNC paths. Type it in manually if it won't show up in the workgroup network list. It's just a matter of understanding how this stuff works. You should do some more searching and learning. There are plenty of folks here with large libraries.

I did use UNC paths, it doesn't work, but I've figured out why.

You can't just use a root IP address, ie: \\xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx you have to actually use a share name, ie: \\xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx\someshare

So it's running now .. I'll see how it goes.

-F