Just in case- Alternatives to SageTV

[mechling-burgh]

The big complaint about TIVO is the monthly bill after you buy it. I believe Ceton said the EPG data was going to be free. So no monthly bill also they will have extenders that won't cost the same as a full unit like TIVO.

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by SomeWhatLost

maybe I just am not looking at this correctly? how should I be looking at this?

Don't worry, be happy. Simple enough for me.

[wayner]

The main issue from my perspective is that you cant get anymore extenders or clients, except from eBay. So if you add a TV to your bedroom and you want to add it into your system what do you do? The other problem is if an extender dies on you. Luckily the HD 200 and 300 don't seem to have had any major issues.

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by SomeWhatLost

maybe I just am not looking at this correctly? how should I be looking at this?

I mostly agree with you. But, the HD extenders did create a form of vendor lock-in. In practice, the impact is/was relatively small (probably smaller than most, if not all, alternatives), particularly because of the going rate for HD extenders on eBay right now.

Still, I was never completely happy with the decision to move to proprietary extenders. I liked how I could buy the original extender in a local store. Of course, there were various advantages of moving to a Sage-specific extender, but I didn't like how the extenders went out of stock for extended periods of time, and how dependent it made us on small company that could disappear overnight. Whenever I said that people responded that Sage must be doing great due to [fill-in recent hardware/software release], but in the end that's kind of what happened.

For the HD100, it was probably necessary to move to a proprietary extender. There wasn't really another option. That wasn't necessarily the case soon after the release of HD100, at which point Dlink and Popcorn Hour streamers came out. Who knows. Maybe Sage tried to work with them, but I suspect the HD100 was successful enough for them that they didn't have much of an incentive to at that point.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by reggie14

I mostly agree with you. But, the HD extenders did create a form of vendor lock-in. In practice, the impact is/was relatively small (probably smaller than most, if not all, alternatives), particularly because of the going rate for HD extenders on eBay right now.

Still, I was never completely happy with the decision to move to proprietary extenders. I liked how I could buy the original extender in a local store. Of course, there were various advantages of moving to a Sage-specific extender, but I didn't like how the extenders went out of stock for extended periods of time, and how dependent it made us on small company that could disappear overnight. Whenever I said that people responded that Sage must be doing great due to [fill-in recent hardware/software release], but in the end that's kind of what happened.

Problem is, there just is nothing else. You can talk all day about how it's better to not be locked into proprietary hardware or software, but at the end of that day, if there's no "open" hardware or software that's worth a crap, or that can provide the same functionality, what can you do?

For the HD100, it was probably necessary to move to a proprietary extender. There wasn't really another option. That wasn't necessarily the case soon after the release of HD100, at which point Dlink and Popcorn Hour streamers came out. Who knows. Maybe Sage tried to work with them, but I suspect the HD100 was successful enough for them that they didn't have much of an incentive to at that point.

Sage had a lot of custom software running on the HDxxx's, so there would be a lot of issues using someone else's hardware.

First and foremost, if you don't replace their software with your own, you'd either have not nearly as good of an experience. Look at Plex on the Roku, it's neat it exists, but the experience is nothing like a "real" Plex UI because they're confined by the UI convention/tools of the Roku, so you get a very limited experience. Sage would be stuck with something similar if they tried to build a client into someone else's UI framework.

Or they risk getting into potential legal/licensing/technical trouble being a third-party company if they decide to install new software on someone else's box. I mean who's going to buy an "extender" from SageTV if they have to buy a PCH and then "DIY" install the SageTV firmware on it? Nobody but the most dedicated of SageTV users. The MVP was slick because it network booted it's UI off a server already, so Sage could just hop on that, but that's not the case with other boxes.

But anyway, my hope is restored after the past few days. It sounds like Jeff is still working on SageTV at Google, so I have hope there that something will come out of that that will be useful to us. And if that doesn't pan out, there's the very real hope (I'd say likelihood) that the Ceton Echo will make Windows Media Center a workable solution.

[drewg]

Santa brought us an Xbox360 for Christmas this year, so I finally got around to trying out 7MC on an extender.

Since I'm a Linux guy, I have Win7 running in a qemu-kvm VM on my linux server (VM has 1CPU, 1GB RAM). I'm using an HDHR for a tuner, and storing the videos to a network share. So far it works remarkably well in terms of responsiveness, but I hate that basically none of the media that plays just fine on an HD100/HD300 plays at all, I miss native output switching, the GUI is pretty, but not as functional as malore, etc, etc.

The one nagging problem I'm having is that *ALL* my recordings have a bad timeline. Eg, if I record a 30min show (without padding), and play it back, the timeline will not show 30min. Sometimes it ca show it as 34min (and even 45min on some recordings). This plays hell with seeking in the file (sometimes seeking forward actually moves you back for a little while). The problem follows the recording, and VLC shows the same (bad) length as WMC for the .WTV files. Mediainfo shows the correct length, and if I use ffmpeg to copy the video and audio streams into a .mpg, VLC sees the correct length. Any idea what this could be?

Drew

[Skirge01]

Originally Posted by drewg

Santa brought us an Xbox360 for Christmas this year, so I finally got around to trying out 7MC on an extender.

Since I'm a Linux guy, I have Win7 running in a qemu-kvm VM on my linux server (VM has 1CPU, 1GB RAM). I'm using an HDHR for a tuner, and storing the videos to a network share. So far it works remarkably well in terms of responsiveness, but I hate that basically none of the media that plays just fine on an HD100/HD300 plays at all, I miss native output switching, the GUI is pretty, but not as functional as malore, etc, etc.

The one nagging problem I'm having is that *ALL* my recordings have a bad timeline. Eg, if I record a 30min show (without padding), and play it back, the timeline will not show 30min. Sometimes it ca show it as 34min (and even 45min on some recordings). This plays hell with seeking in the file (sometimes seeking forward actually moves you back for a little while). The problem follows the recording, and VLC shows the same (bad) length as WMC for the .WTV files. Mediainfo shows the correct length, and if I use ffmpeg to copy the video and audio streams into a .mpg, VLC sees the correct length. Any idea what this could be?

Drew

Umm... off topic?

[drewg]

Originally Posted by Skirge01

Umm... off topic?

A bit, but it is a thread about alternatives to sage & problems therein.

I find it amazing that nobody has even commented on this in the green button forums. The Sage community is much, much better..

Drew

[bastafidli]

This week I have finally found worthy replacement for my use of Sage so I will share my experience in a little longer rant.

All started 6-7 months ago when I got rid of all my Sage gear. At the time of announcement I had SageTV Linux server running Sage with HDHR and HD100. I had minimal interest in recording TV so HDHR was used really rarely and only on OTA. After our move we have very poor OTA reception and I found out that I really didn't care that much about live TV to begin with so I stopped bothering with it.

We started with getting new Samsung LED TV with SmartHub and an iPad (later we added a second one). The TV is connected with 1GB wired network to 2 servers in the basement. One CentOS 6 based one for all offline media and second Win 7 one for gaming and windows based apps. For longest time I was using the TV's built in DLNA client AllShare with free Serviio server on CentOS to serve all our media. I had zero issues to play any media I had thrown at it. The live TV was replaced with streaming Netflix, Hulu and bunches of other online sources piped directly to TV either using various built-in TV apps (including browser) or through one of the connected servers. The 2 tablets are allowing us to consume news and live events anywhere and we ended up using them the most for this purpose. The AllShare interface wasn't the prettiest but together with Serviio it works remarkably well and reliably. The kudos goes to Serviio developers!

In the last few weeks we have transitioned almost completely to Plex. The Linux server version of Plex is readily available for my distro (CentOS 6) and many others. There is client app for my Samsung TV and many others (LG). There is remarkably well working app on IOS devices and many other types of devices (Android, Roku, Blue Ray players, etc.). Unlike Sage it took me 5 min to get it installed and working on Linux Server, TV and 2 iPads. It required zero command line or setting tweaking, it just worked and looked great. Out of the box it gave me full meta data with fanart and all the other niceties, which were so difficult to configure and get working reliably on Sage. Total cost was $4.99 for the IOS app, the rest was for free. Again, the kudos goes to Plex developers!

This basically concludes my search and now I am able to slide back into the consumer mode. This 6-7 month journey changed my views on how our family is consuming media. Once thing I came to realize by watching the market and also latest development on CES is that the TV manufacturers are so hungry to provide additional functionality to sell their devices, that TVs will (for me already are) primary medium to access and consume all media in living room. No more extenders, no more clients, just the TV. This works for me just fine since i have started from 0, for others who have investment to other TVs that may not work that easily. Manufacturers fill this gap with their Blue Ray players ( $75 and up, price quoted based on eBay prices), gaming consoles, etc so Sage and similar companies just won't be able to compete in this space. I believe the standalone extender market is dead.

As you can easily tell, the obvious gap is the DVR functionality which I gave up on. If I ever fill a need for once, I may look for server based solution integrated to my backend servers, but I doubt I would ever go back to the extender or client model. The TV-only mode for consuming media already made available for offline viewing just works.

I might be completely wrong, but I believe the Google acquisition of Sage will end up being fruitless. I believe the TV manufacturers are making the extender model extinct. Sage had a strong base in DVR market but at least to me that market is not that important anymore. If it becomes, then Ceton probably looks like the best option today for those who don't go with the provider's DVRs. I think the future in this market belongs to software. Hardware will be split between front ends produced by major TV manufacturers and backends consisting from regular servers and/or desktops and/or other devices (phones/tablets/etc.) hosting media. The software side is becoming much more competitive. The time Sage is off the market just helps everybody else to get that much better. I am excited that Jeff and the rest of the team have the opportunity to work on the product, but I am also skeptical about their prospects. Google has horrible track record with client software and the necessity to integrate their products into their search empire makes any such product less appealing for me. Jeff had once in a life time opportunity to cash up from his effort and I am totally excited for him that it worked out. After that anything is just a gravy. On the other hand I am also happy that after the 3-4 years when there was no alternative for me, now i have found several that just make Sage unnecessary.

The last opinion I make is about Apple. Apple hasn't really seriously got into the whole TV centric market. Once it gets there. it might be so much harder to compete for anybody and especially for Google.

[drewg]

Originally Posted by bastafidli

In the last few weeks we have transitioned almost completely to Plex. The Linux server version of Plex is readily available for my distro (CentOS 6) and many others. There is client app for my Samsung TV and many others (LG). There is remarkably well working app on IOS devices and many other types of devices (Android, Roku, Blue Ray players, etc.). Unlike Sage it took me 5 min to get it installed and working on Linux Server, TV and 2 iPads. It required zero command line or setting tweaking, it just worked and looked great. Out of the box it gave me full meta data with fanart and all the other niceties, which were so difficult to configure and get working reliably on Sage. Total cost was $4.99 for the IOS app, the rest was for free. Again, the kudos goes to Plex developers!

Consider yourself lucky. Not all TVs work as well as Samsung for DLNA / Plex.

Speaking from the LG side (60PZ960, current 60" flagship plasma), Plex is a non-starter for me because of limitations in the TV's playback. The TV can (ahem) "play" MPEG2-PS (eg, ATSC/QAM recordings), but cannot fast-forward or rewind in them. If I transcode to H.264, it works, but that is lossy. It also will not play back some common forms of downloaded video files (eg, *.flv) without transcoding to a different format. DLNA is slightly better, as I can at least ffwd at a whopping 2x in MPEG2 files, but its still basically worthless.

Also, the metadata system in Plex seemed less flexible than in SageTV. I gave up after at least in 1 hour or so of tinkering when I could not figure out how to correct its mis-naming of several BD rips (like the "episodes" on my kid's Mater's Tall Tales BD).

To me, SageTV with an HD300 combined with my BD player's Amazon VOD & Netflix is far superior.. It plays nearly anything I throw at it, far better than any other media playback system I've tried. At at least BMT lets me correct the metadata easily if my naming of BD rips is not perfect.

Drew

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by bastafidli

This week I have finally found worthy replacement for my use of Sage so I will share my experience in a little longer rant.

Like I've said before (or maybe I haven't actually, but I know I've thought it) if you care about only media (like you) or only TV, then there are lots of good alternatives to Sage, frankly I think there are even a number of better ones (though for TV there really isn't anything as powerful/flexible/easy).

The problem is for those of us who care greatly about both.

[jchiso]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Like I've said before (or maybe I haven't actually, but I know I've thought it) if you care about only media (like you) or only TV, then there are lots of good alternatives to Sage... The problem is for those of us who care greatly about both.

No real need to repeat stanger's point, but I should also mention that this may require a significant investment in TVs if you don't already own capable models. It does not really make sense to buy five new TVs and a couple of projectors to avoid paying eBay prices for extenders...

[wayner]

First off I agree with Stanger 89 - if you don't care about TV then it is easy to replace Sage. But if you need to keep TV, especially non-OTA TV, then Sage is hard to beat. This is especially the case if you can't get a CableCard - which is the case for everyone here in Canada. And Win MC has never even supported ATSC for Canadians (although there is a fairly simple hack to overcome this problem).

But if you are into sports, especially sports other than the NFL, then Sage is very hard to replace.

Secondarily, I have to think having TVs with built-in extender capabilities is trickier than having TVs with CableCard, but those never suceeeded. Surely there would be a huge benefit to replacing digital cable STBs, but for various reason this initiative failed (although CableCards are living on for DVRs and HTPCs). Anyone using Sage could get this working in no time, but that may not be the case for all of the folks who still use VCRs that are flashing 12:00.

But my biggest problem with smart TVs is that the technology is moving far faster than the lifespan I want out of a TV. Can a TV more than a year or two old run Plex? And what happens when SuperPlex comes out that won't run on your existing TVs. Are you going to spend $1000/TV to upgrade?

Smart TVs might make more sense when the technology slows down but right now extender functionaility becomes obsolete pretty quickly - often in as little as 24 months. I want my TVs to last for 10 years or so (my first HDTV was bought in March of 2002) so I want them upgradable as much as possible.

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by wayner

But my biggest problem with smart TVs is that the technology is moving far faster than the lifespan I want out of a TV. Can a TV more than a year or two old run Plex? And what happens when SuperPlex comes out that won't run on your existing TVs. Are you going to spend $1000/TV to upgrade?

This is my concern as well. I have little doubt that in the future the "TV" will contain all of the stuff I need to view content from lots of places, but it's simply not there yet. I'm unwilling to pay $1,000 for something that's going to be obsoleted in a year.

It will be nice once there's a clear winner in the "TV OS" space so we can go to the TV app store and download the apps we want.

[flavius]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

It will be nice once there's a clear winner in the "TV OS" space so we can go to the TV app store and download the apps we want.

That will be the day.

[bastafidli]

Originally Posted by jchiso

No real need to repeat stanger's point, but I should also mention that this may require a significant investment in TVs if you don't already own capable models. It does not really make sense to buy five new TVs and a couple of projectors to avoid paying eBay prices for extenders...

Actually it doesn't. The same capabilities are built in to their blue ray players as I have mentioned, which are readily available for rock bottom prices.

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by flavius

That will be the day.

My guess it that we'll end up with something similar to what we have in the smart phone market now, there will be 1 or two dominant environments and a few smaller ones. It wouldn't surprise me to see Apple and Google fight it out just like they're doing in the phone/tablet market. When you buy a TV you'll have to decide if you want an iTV or an Droid TV. I can't see the TV manufacturers trying to create their own OSs. Who knows, yesterday is history and tomorrow is a mystery

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

My guess it that we'll end up with something similar to what we have in the smart phone market now, there will be 1 or two dominant environments and a few smaller ones. It wouldn't surprise me to see Apple and Google fight it out just like they're doing in the phone/tablet market. When you buy a TV you'll have to decide if you want an iTV or an Droid TV. I can't see the TV manufacturers trying to create their own OSs. Who knows, yesterday is history and tomorrow is a mystery

Given the history of Apple... I seriously doubt we'll see the day that Apple licenses iOS for TVs. You might see an Apple TV that is a complete TV with iOS designed by Apple and made in china, but I can't immagine that we'll see other TV partners using iOS.

Android, on the other hand is a different story. If your a TV manufacturer maintaining your own OS... then might be some value there to jump on the android train and get access to the Market, etc.

I read an interesting article about how Samsung would be strongest player in this market. They sell something like 2 tv's a minute, and they far outsell any other TV manufacturer. So, they have huge potential in the TV arena. It could be Samsung and Android/GoogleTV fighting it out

[wayner]

And don't forget about Microsoft. Will they continue to push the Xbox360 (or its successors) as their route to the Living Room? Or will they also get into this game with a version of Win MC embedded into TVs which seems to have come to life at CES.

Kinect is the one big success that MS has had in recent years and this has applications in the media consumption space as we are starting to see.

By the way, TUAW has a very interesting article today on "Apple's plans for your living room" http://www.tuaw.com/2012/01/15/apple...v-itv-siri-an/

[flavius]

^ Good article that summarizes the challenges and problems.

It's the content, stupid. Making TV's run the apps we already have today wouldn't change a thing about that.