Where would YOU put Sage's improvement priorities?

[blade]

Originally Posted by davidk21770

I spend most of my time, watching series and having to slog through the limited sorting to find what I want is painful. I really want more flexibility on how recordings are presented and sorted. A single sort and grouping that applies to all is inadequate. I want movies in their own group (which I seem to have lost with v7???) sub-sorted by title; shows sorted by user (or a priority that I assign), then grouped into shows, with each show sorted by original air date.

I miss the movie group as well, but I can live with the current setup for now. In v7 there are All Recordings, Current Recordings, Archived Recordings, and Recorded Movies. I think all of these can be renamed.

I have All Recordings setup to include all of my recordings except for movies. The recordings are grouped A-Z by Tile and each grouping is sorted by original air date. All of my movies are in Recorded Movies. Not quite the same as having Movies as a grouping with the other recordings, but other than that it's the same sorting method I was using in v6.

[davidk21770]

How do you exclude the movies? When I looked at the new setup, I thought that I would be able to do that but didn't see how when I actually went to the config screens. I had hoped to see additional filters and levels of sorting... (Forced me back to melore .

[blade]

Originally Posted by davidk21770

How do you exclude the movies? When I looked at the new setup, I thought that I would be able to do that but didn't see how when I actually went to the config screens. I had hoped to see additional filters and levels of sorting... (Forced me back to melore .

It's explained in this thread.

[davidk21770]

Thanks, I didn't expect the filters to include "movies".
Now if it just displayed original air date with each show... .

[KrzCooter]

CC support when viewing remotely with PlaceShifter.

[blade]

Originally Posted by davidk21770

Now if it just displayed original air date with each show... .

You may already know this, but the original air date is listed on the recording detail page.

I don't really care about having the original air date listed in the recording list; however, I'd love to see the season and episode number. Those are more useful to me especially for shows that had 2 new episodes air on the same day.

[nebulink]

Just upgraded to Sagetv 7 beta. What a speed improvement on the extenders. I have always used SageMC but I am now using the default and love it.

So far so good.

Thanks!

[bkirk]

My biggest wish for SageTV is accelerated playback. Programs such a VLC have it, and I find it very useful. I understand that some sort of infinitely variable playback speed would be difficult, but a simple 1.2x option if you press play a second time would be a great start.

It would shave 20 minutes off of a 2-hour movie. Three 1-hour tv shows could be watched in only 2 hours (assuming 15 minutes of commercials per show).

I can achieve the same thing by recording everything w/ SageTV, watching with VLC, and then marking them as watched and deleting them from SageTV. It would be a lot more convenient if it could all be done in SageTV.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by bkirk

My biggest wish for SageTV is accelerated playback. Programs such a VLC have it, and I find it very useful. I understand that some sort of infinitely variable playback speed would be difficult, but a simple 1.2x option if you press play a second time would be a great start.

It would shave 20 minutes off of a 2-hour movie. Three 1-hour tv shows could be watched in only 2 hours (assuming 15 minutes of commercials per show).

I can achieve the same thing by recording everything w/ SageTV, watching with VLC, and then marking them as watched and deleting them from SageTV. It would be a lot more convenient if it could all be done in SageTV.

I think this may already be somewhat capable as an underlying system, but it depends on the decoders in use supporting the capability. There are Play Faster and Play Slower commands in the sage system, though I'm not totally sure what level of functionality they include.

[blade]

Originally Posted by bkirk

It would shave 20 minutes off of a 2-hour movie. Three 1-hour tv shows could be watched in only 2 hours (assuming 15 minutes of commercials per show).

I can achieve the same thing by recording everything w/ SageTV, watching with VLC, and then marking them as watched and deleting them from SageTV. It would be a lot more convenient if it could all be done in SageTV.

I understand some people prefer a "smooth FF/Rew", but it's not going to shave anything off the watch time because it's already possible to skip over the commercials.

I use comskip so the commercials are marked and Sage automatically and instantly skips over them. If I wasn't using comskip my second choice is the skip/jump forward. I have one FF key on the remote set for 90 seconds then the other for 8 seconds. I find that gets me through the commercials faster than the smooth FF/Rew with just a couple of key presses.

My last choice is the smooth FF/Rew, which Sage can do using the extender. I rarely ever us it. I've never tried it on a PC client.

[MeInMaui]

He isn't talking about smooth ff/rew. He's talking about accelerated playback, where the video plays at something like 1.5x normal speed with sound. I used to use zoom player as my video player from SageMC for this once in a while and it was a pretty cool feature. Of course I haven't used it in ages.

Aloha,
Mike

[Diginerd]

A while back I asked about the possibility of a Sage Linux distribution pre-rolled with limited, but very strong support for certain qualified hardware. Also for a VM image of it to let people try it out or bolt onto their existing setups.

Not really Sage's core business, but I got the impression if someone rolled such a thing and was willing to support it they'd be interested in licensing the code on a commercial basis (I may be wrong, but if someone wants to do it talk to Jeff!)

Personally I thing the highest priority "New" feature would be a full extension of the very minimal parental control system we have today.

Mutli user accounts with permission levels and access/visibility control is something that all of us who are parents I'm sure would love.

More basic but a useful step in the right direction would be the parental control lock HIDING (not just blocking playback) all media above (or without) mpaa classification.

For added goodness have each menu item/ screen have a property that defines if it can be reached when parental controls are active. For example if the parental lock is on then the online, settings, shutdown and scheduling menus aren't visible. If this extended to features too it would mean that you could disable "delete", "don't like" and so on.

What I find interesting in this approach is if instead of the current on/off effect of entering the parental lock when you enter the code you got a quick select menu offering U,PG,R,NC-17,X as the access level desired each would be able to have a differing set of features, menus and media pretty easily (I may well be very wrong in this assumption as I have little idea how studio works).

One last part of this would be able to set a timer (absolute, or time out)until the settings reverted a lower level (or even shutdown the box until the parental code is entered again). A couple variations on this theme would be "hours of access" for a given extender outside of which it needs a parental override.

I have an unused extender the kids would love in their room, but with the current parental controls there's no way I'd let that happen. If it supported a model closer to the controls on their pc then I would. Before someone suggests putting a soft client on the PC and leveraging the OS parental controls I would, but without working DXVA support I can't.

Apologies for the long post!

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by Diginerd

A while back I asked about the possibility of a Sage Linux distribution pre-rolled with limited, but very strong support for certain qualified hardware. Also for a VM image of it to let people try it out or bolt onto their existing setups...

This is the 'server-on-a-stick' item in the poll. It has been mentioned by sage (back around CES i believe), but has not come to fruition. One speculation is that they are focusing on Sage7, and once that's released, will roll it into a, SoS version. Only time will tell. Once that DOES happen, I can see a market for some hardware builders to market 'off-the-shelf' style servers, utilizing the SageTV provided SoS architecture.

Originally Posted by Diginerd

I have an unused extender the kids would love in their room, but with the current parental controls there's no way I'd let that happen. If it supported a model closer to the controls on their pc then I would. Before someone suggests putting a soft client on the PC and leveraging the OS parental controls I would, but without working DXVA support I can't.

Not to get off topic from this thread, but sage DOES fully support DXVA perfectly well when combined with DXVA capable decoders.

[vince100]

It's a bit surprising to me that the flashy UI got the most votes.

I have to say the most important is Cablecard support.

Next would be to get rid of the "pause" and implement a TRUE "Live TV Mode" like the one used by MCE, which would not only get rid of the "pause", but also enable fast response to channel changing, and enable the VBI support for analog close captioning. It seems to be incredibly hard for Sage, but the fact is MCE can do it, so can PowerCinema/KMPlayer/WinTV/Aver MediaCenter/Catalyst MediaCenter and a few other media players.

[Diginerd]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

This is the 'server-on-a-stick' item in the poll. It has been mentioned by sage (back around CES i believe), but has not come to fruition. One speculation is that they are focusing on Sage7, and once that's released, will roll it into a, SoS version. Only time will tell. Once that DOES happen, I can see a market for some hardware builders to market 'off-the-shelf' style servers, utilizing the SageTV provided SoS architecture.

Not to get off topic from this thread, but sage DOES fully support DXVA perfectly well when combined with DXVA capable decoders.

I chatted with them about the idea more recently than that. Not a core topic was the feeling I got.

DXVA I should have been clear about (and if you fancy help troubleshoot pm me Sage 7.11 Beta & h264 isn't playing nice for me and some others too.

Really good and flexible parental controls are the biggest concern for me. With 7 pretty much everything on this list is close to checked off.

[MitchSchaft]

I've been using the new Divx decoder with excellent results. It's now hardware capable. The other H264 decoders, I get a virtical and horizontal line through the screen for some reason. That problem went away when I switch to Divx's.

[garywhancock]

1. I would vote for a parental control system with way to group videos by user and category.
2. In addition a way to move files around between disks and or external disks with a category like offline. Specifically a way to easily keep metadata and or update meta data on imported files that came external to sage, such as converted videos. If I convert a mpg file to a m4v file externally with a program like handbrake and then move that file back in all metadata information about the show is lost.
3. More customization of the screens to get just what I want grouped together. Sometimes there is way to much information on a screen and others way to little.

[EnterNoEscape]

Not that this really contributes a whole lot, but being able to decode PlayReady DRM on the server and extenders would be an amazing step in the right direction towards CableCard support. I know this isn't an easy thing to accomplish and Sage is looking into what can be done. I would certainly be willing to pay extra for this ability.

[davephan]

Other. Offer a replacement hardware to the HD-PVR that is reliable for recording HD. Even if the cost was much higher, it would be nice to have a better choice to the HD-PVR.

Dave

[DFranch]

Originally Posted by davephan

Other. Offer a replacement hardware to the HD-PVR that is reliable for recording HD. Even if the cost was much higher, it would be nice to have a better choice to the HD-PVR.

Dave

The better choice to the HD-PVR is getting cablecard support. The monthly charges make the HD-PVR impractical for me at least. I have 4 HD tuners, that means I would have to rent 4 cable boxes. Cablecard support would give 4 tuners and you only have to pay for 1 cablecard. How much does that save per month. I stopped using Tivo because I did not want to pay them $26 a month for 4 tuners, I'm not going to turn around any pay that to Time Warner.