Alternatives to Extenders

[valnar]

Originally Posted by bastafidli

The Dune HD looks super interesting.

What is special about the Dune vs some of the other similar products? At least the WDTV Live Plus does Netflix and some other things too.

[Torkild]

A replacement for an SageTV extender would be able to do Live tv an enable recordings.

If it cant do that it is just a media player - and no extender after all.

Put SageTV HD300 firmware into an WD TV Live Plus (same chipset)

[graywolf]

Originally Posted by Torkild

A replacement for an SageTV extender would be able to do Live tv an enable recordings.

If it cant do that it is just a media player - and no extender after all.

Put SageTV HD300 firmware into an WD TV Live Plus (same chipset)

How would you do that? And would it persist when power downed (unplugged)?

[valnar]

Originally Posted by Torkild

Put SageTV HD300 firmware into an WD TV Live Plus (same chipset)

Originally Posted by graywolf

How would you do that? And would it persist when power downed (unplugged)?

Dang, I could care less about the persistence. If there was a way to have another manufacturer's product load the Sage firmware, even if it meant a PXE boot or something like that once in awhile, I'd be thrilled.

[drewg]

Originally Posted by valnar

Dang, I could care less about the persistence. If there was a way to have another manufacturer's product load the Sage firmware, even if it meant a PXE boot or something like that once in awhile, I'd be thrilled.

I'm a fairly competent *nix hacker, and when I get time, I'm thinking to pick up a WDTV Live+ to play with. It *might* just be a matter of copying over the sagetv specific stuff (most of the stuff in /app). Then again, there could be some kind of hardware handshake that locks apps to particular sigma OEM boards. Or SageTV could require a special graphics or IR driver, or something odd, which could make it hard or impossible.

The ironic thing is that I'm moving in the next month or so, and I was going to pick up a few HD300s, as we're moving to a larger house, and I was going to add some TVs. But, because of the move, I don't have any time to hack on things, as I'm neck-deep in sawdust doing renovations on my current house to try to sell it in this crappy market. Sigh.

Drew

[graywolf]

Originally Posted by valnar

Dang, I could care less about the persistence. If there was a way to have another manufacturer's product load the Sage firmware, even if it meant a PXE boot or something like that once in awhile, I'd be thrilled.

I could care less if just myself if persistent or not.
If not, then I would need to determine WAF and how easy/hard for family to do if I'm not around (work, travel, etc)

But yes, interesting "thinking outside the box" IF doable. I just don't know enough if it can be done or not, nor how to do it.

[Fuzzy]

I believe sage runs miniclient on the extender, for the UI, and passes the video to ffmpeg (which is most likely extended to handle the sigma chips decoding).

[drewg]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

I believe sage runs miniclient on the extender, for the UI, and passes the video to ffmpeg (which is most likely extended to handle the sigma chips decoding).

I think that is all built into the miniclient. From ps, while a show was playing in my HD300, all the obviously SageTV related procs are:

  904 root       0:00 /bin/sh /etc/init.d/S55sage start 
  913 root       0:00 /bin/sh ./runsage 
  917 root      12:20 ./bin/cvm -Djava.io.tmpdir=/tmp -Dsage.paths.logs=/tmp/log -Djava.library.path=. -Dsage.paths.cache=/rw/sage -Xjit:codeCacheSize
  996 root       0:00 /sbin/udhcpc -f -i eth0 
 1370 root     2015:5 /app/client/miniclient 172.31.193.10

According to ldd, miniclient depends on lots of shared libs, but most (all?) seem to be in /app/*/lib.

The real question seems to be if there is some kind of hardware handshake, or if this stuff could just be dumped onto a similar Sigma based box.

Drew

[graywolf]

Originally Posted by drewg

The ironic thing is that I'm moving in the next month or so, and I was going to pick up a few HD300s, as we're moving to a larger house, and I was going to add some TVs. But, because of the move, I don't have any time to hack on things, as I'm neck-deep in sawdust doing renovations on my current house to try to sell it in this crappy market. Sigh.
Drew

Staying IN state or moving out of state?
Just wondering since I'm in NC also, about 2hrs south of you.

[enthilzha]

I'll reboot one of my HD-300s with a packet sniffer running tonight and see what data it actually transfers. I'm assuming none of it is encrypted but we'll find out.

I'm going to hold off on this until we get more information from Jeff / Google RE: if there will be any 'official' (open source, alternate hardware etc) means of getting additional extender hardware to work on the existing Sage 7 setup -or- an announced migration path to whatever comes later.

[clayfree]

This might be interesting. They some people are using these for xbmc.

Giada Cube

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16856176002

[farfromuman]

I was going to pick up another HD300 for my projector room but all I really need is something that can play bluray ISOs and skip commercials on my Sage recorded MPGs with EDL - are there any mods to the WD box that allow that?

[guho]

I have one HD300 but as an alternative extender I love the mac mini starting with the late 2009 incarnation. I have it running w7 ultimate x64 using bootcamp and latest 275.33 nvidia verde drivers for the 9400m. I have buttery smooth HD video on the connected 46" 1080p TV. The cost (used) is not much more than the present elevated price of the HD300 on ebay. No noise and low power on standby. Previous mac minis with the intel GPUs did not produce 100% smooth HD 1080p video.

Late 2009 Mac mini under mac os x does not produce 100% smooth video for me using Mac Sage Client or PlaceShifter. Runs much better under windows for SageTV purposes.

[tchapin]

Would it be possible to create a channel for the Roku that would act as a extender / placeshifter?

http://www.roku.com/developer

[will]

Originally Posted by guho

Late 2009 Mac mini under mac os x does not produce 100% smooth video for me using Mac Sage Client or PlaceShifter. Runs much better under windows for SageTV purposes.

And they sure do look nice. Not a bad way to go!

I think this highlights one big thing SageTV lacks, an OS X v7 client!!! I sorta wish they focused on OS X over Linux (because Google probably wouldn't have bought them if SageTV was OS X/Windows)

[flavius]

I believe that has been done already, saw a message in this forum today. Also ran into a youtube video showcasing one of those channels (for GBPVR)...

[BobbyDing]

Just FYI....My local best buy has WD Live Plus for $80 this week, so I picked one up to play. Yeah, it's not an extender. But so far it has played everything fine, including ripped DVD's to ISO over the network. I don't think it does Bluray (yet). So in a pinch should my extender die I could still use SageTV to do the recording and access any pre recorded media on my TV's. It does all the usual online stuff pretty well, and picked up my playon server too.

Bobby

[david1234]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

I believe sage runs miniclient on the extender, for the UI, and passes the video to ffmpeg (which is most likely extended to handle the sigma chips decoding).

Will the miniclient play a DVD rip, or is it limited like Placeshifter?

[ThePaladinTech]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

I believe sage runs miniclient on the extender, for the UI, and passes the video to ffmpeg (which is most likely extended to handle the sigma chips decoding).

I thought the mini client was the linux version of placeshifter? If so how does it get around using a license when in an extender? or I should say: If so we need to figure out how it gets around using a license

[lfilomeno]

Originally Posted by Rob

I searched for 'NVIDIA ION Blu-Ray" and the first hit was a Toms Harware article that says it plays blu-rays fine.

I have not played any Blue-rays yet but I have success building clients based on Mini-ITX technologies and they played pretty much all formats I trew at (loading teh correct CODECS of course.) I have been working with mini-itx boards for quite a while (I am also a CarPc enthusiast!) I will be building another one for my daughter based on this board:http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/AMD...LUXE/#overview

The problem is: the SageTV license after the 21 day period expires! Check the board in the link above. I believe it should suit your needs.