Stay or Bail ?

[speck55]

Originally Posted by APillowOfClouds

I'm a programmer by trade and I've thought about it. But you really need someone that's experienced/talented in video processing. I've done industrial equipment control but not anything with mutimedia.

Originally Posted by gizmo3141

Any thoughts about starting some sort of open source project simply using SageTV as a good example of how it should be done. Sort of reverse engineer it...or build around the program as it exists to support users who have used it for so many years and have valid licence keys?

Maybe start a new support forum for those users in another space on the internet. After all, all were doing from here on in is supporting users who want to keep using SageTV as long as possible...

Just a thought...

I've offered in other threads to set up a forum and possibly an archival plugin repository for when Soogle pulls the plugs. Any domain name ideas? I've got plenty of spare, static, symmetrical, redundant space. I've been a licensed user for just shy of 3 months, but I'm eternally grateful to the community that helped me get stuff just the way I wanted/needed, and would be happy to give back by creating a place for the refugees.

Gizmo; I would be very very careful as to using words like "reverse engineer". I'd almost have to bet that word is preceded or proceeded by "strictly prohibited" in the EULA.

I agree with others that there has to be another project that some of us could partner up with - XMBC is very snazzy, and very skinnable, and I think if some of the enormous talent we have (hope they are still here) like Plucky, Fuzzy, etc, were to say put together a MyMovies plugin for XMBC, and we worked on the DVR/PVR side -- it'd be a nice open source project. We won't have the zero-footprint extenders, and all that jazz, but (a) Zotac mini PC's like the MAG with Dual Core Atom and ION chip are close, (b) if things were to really get going, and we have a PCB designer among us (I could probably get as far as breadboarding something, and getting schematics drawn, but as for laying out the board, I'm probably not your guy), it doesn't cost all that much to get a production sample from many of the PCB houses out there. Call it OpenExtend - load whomever or whatever's firmware you like on it -- hell, stick in an SD card and load WinCE or Windows on it if you want.

I personally wouldn't start out on an adventure to "re-grow" the SageTV platform. I'm not fond of the Java foundation - though it is incredibly cross platform, so are modern of C-derivatives, and probably can be optimized more tightly, but at the cost of more platform specific tweaks for each release.

It almost seemed as though a lot of the other projects (I've looked at a few since Soogle fiasco) kind of stagnated, maybe even in the shadow of Sage's awesomeness itself. (note: no sarcasm; I think it was one of the only products that had anything other than a "vision and vague plan" for whole-home-everything-media.) Perhaps it's time to get another forum going, and decide on a project to back, and do it. We would all have to look at each project's strengths and weaknesses, feature-completeness, etc.

[scoful]

I gotta say that while overall I haven't spent much money on SageTV itself (since it's really NOT the expensive part of my HTPC system) but I have spent a crap ton on my server, client PC's and encoder cards. To an extent I feel like I just bought a new car in the last year (V7 upgrade and the new server I built to accomodate it) and now I've been told that gasoline will only be available for the next year. I realize that I may be able to use 'alternative fuels' like Windows Media Center, but that's kind of like turning my Rolls Royce into a Honda Civic that now has to burn straight Ethanol and only gets 2 miles per gallon now. I too am concerned that ultimately SageTV will be dismantled for a piece or two of it's technologies (if that) and we'll have another classic example of a great product that catches one of the "Competition's" (GoogleTV) attention but eventually loses steam and is never to be seen or heard from again.

Microsoft has been notorious for this (except they usually don't buy someone out - they just generate buzz about their vaporware product that is going to be 'better' and crush the little innovative guy that came up with the ideas and after they're out of business the decide the project doesn't have enough profit potential and drop it).

My hope is that the 'Limited Support' for at least the next year for SageTV is only for the next year because their should be a full on release of GoogleTV with all of SageTV's wholesome goodness fully integrated into it (and then some) by then. So while the SageTV brand will disappear, it will really be a product upgrade. Many software companies drop back end support for legacy versions of products that use web based services - Quickbooks for example only allows Tax Table updates for payroll for about 2 1/2 years, so updates are mandatory to keep full operation of the product but you can still access what you've got (or operate completely if you do your payroll calculations manually). This is certainly fine by me. Products can't continue to be developed without a steady stream of income and while mandatory upgrades can sometimes cause problems (bugs, feature removal and especially the addition of irritating or useless features) I believe it's better than expecting a vendor to continue to support legacy stuff without any revenue generating source.

[herrdude]

Taken from the Globe and Mail (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe...rticle2097849/)

It has been a somewhat difficult first half of the year for the search giant. Earlier this month, Google’s attempt to purchase Nortel Networks’ massive patent chest fell short, after a consortium of companies led by Apple Inc. and Research In Motion Ltd. made the winning bid in a fierce, multi-day auction. The loss was especially significant for Google because, unlike many of its large competitors, the company doesn’t have a relatively large store of patents. And as the company becomes mired in more and more intellectual property lawsuits related to its Android operating system for mobile devices, such patents become increasingly important.

Just saying...

[d2tw4all]

Well my HDHomerun died and rather than continue to invest in this tech with an unknown future, the wife overruled and we are back to the Verizon FIOS DVR. No more Sage in this house. Sad day my friends, sad day indeed.

Tom

[Savage1701]

The more I look into "The Cloud" concept the more I am convinced of several things:

1. Most people think since Google gives its apps away for free, then there is no cost. They don't realize that it is they themselves that are being monetized in the form of having ads pitched at them. Google has managed to "own" assets without having to carry them on their books. People are their widely varied inventory, and that inventory is carried without cost or tax liability. Very smart.

2. Most people think that since "The Cloud" is free, the pipeline that carries it will be, at most, a nominal cost that will not increase the more they utilize it, and that the "diameter" of that pipeline is infinite. We know that's not the case with throttling and caps and such. Even if those did not exist, few ISP's, as I said above, could deliver the bandwidth and QoS every home in every neighborhood would need to watch a few HD channels at once. And really, why should they, without some sort of compensation? Love your ISP or hate it or don't care that much about it either way, but you still want it and need it.

3. I should have smelled a rat when Narflex wanted us to actively support a call to net neutrality. Sage's Placeshifters represented no real threat to any ISP or media conglomerate. Their weren't enough of them to really noticeably burden any ISP or internet backbone. In the scheme of things, Sage downloads virtually no data when it updates its EPG's or puts out a version upgrade.

Heck, ReplayTV used to dial up an ISP every few days in the middle of the night to get the channel info. It could get all it needed on a crappy 56K connection in a few minutes.

But that call to net neutrality plea was the canary in the coalmine. Someone like Google has a real, abiding need for neutrality or it can't market products that stream heavily to and from "The Cloud".

Combine that with the recent release of Sage 7 and the heated pace of updates and patches and betas released on us and I can't come to any conclusion other than it was Sage that bailed on us late last fall/early winter. If you think about it, it explains a lot with the radical changes in the interface and plugin managers and such, but especially the radical change in the interface.

We just did not realize we were paying for the privilege of testing hardware (read any reviews by users of their GoogleTV hardware in their forums?) and software for Google.

My point - we can't bail or not bail on something that bailed on us long ago. We're like that relationship where we are sitting there waiting for the phone to ring while the person on the other end not only will never call, but had the number disconnected long ago and was just using a forwarding service.

[sportera]

It has been a long time since I've posted anything in this forum. While reading through many of the latest posts, I decided to start playing with MC7 on my laptop. The key needs I have are simple in comparison to some of you. I don't care about Media Extenders at this point as my kids are grown and leaving home. My son does have an XBOX360 on his TV now so it will interesting to test that. What I have always like about Sage, over DVR's and TIVO, was the ability to record and process a commercial free TV in Hi Def (and plenty of it). Looks like I can now do that in MC7 with the MCEBuddy plugin. Also important to me is to have the ability to watch all the Sage recorded TS video that I still have on my WHS unit. I've tested Media Browser on my MC7 laptop and used it to link up with my WHS recorded TV library and watch this video within MC7 on my laptop. None of this was available years ago when I migrated from MCE to Sage. So these hurdles, important to me, seem to have been overcome and doable.

So I have decided to soon start building a high performance MC7 HTPC out of parts from both my existing WHS machine and Sage Client HTPC and say bye bye to an old friend that gave me a lot of what MCE could not provide for years. Yeah I know MC7 doesn't offer native bluray playback but I've read somewhere that you can launch TMT while in MC7 to do this. I could never get this to work in Sage. Also to note, I did open and watch an AnyDVD recorded bluray movie on my MC7 laptop recently so apparently I can still record bluray disks to the harddrive and watch in MC7.

So bottom line, while MC7 doesn't give the flexibility and some of the bells and whistles (I can live without anyway), it appears to be stable, isn't going away anytime soon, and apparently has come a long way in the years since moving away from it for Sage years ago.

It's been real, fun at times, and a pain in the ass more times than I would have liked through these last years. I'm going to miss this forum and guess I'll migrate to AVS forum and the MCE forums for future tips and info. For the record my vote is Sage will be totally gone sooner rather than later and I'm not waiting for the morning I turn on Sage and find the EPG gone.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Savage1701

2. Most people think that since "The Cloud" is free, the pipeline that carries it will be, at most, a nominal cost that will not increase the more they utilize it, and that the "diameter" of that pipeline is infinite. We know that's not the case with throttling and caps and such. Even if those did not exist, few ISP's, as I said above, could deliver the bandwidth and QoS every home in every neighborhood would need to watch a few HD channels at once. And really, why should they, without some sort of compensation? Love your ISP or hate it or don't care that much about it either way, but you still want it and need it.

I saw an interesting thing about that yesterday:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...570134518.html

Moreso than the obviously biased perspective (it's in Netflix' best interest for Internet access to be cheap and fast), is this little tidbit:

Cable and telecom companies argue that bandwidth is a scarce resource and that imposing caps and overage fees will relieve pressure on high-speed networks. Families pay more when they use more electricity, these companies point out, so why shouldn't households pay more if they use more bandwidth?
The analogy is a false one. Wireline bandwidth is an almost unlimited resource due to advances in Internet architecture. Adding more capacity is easy. The marginal cost of providing an extra gigabyte of data—enough to deliver one episode of "30 Rock" from Netflix—is less than one cent, and falling.

Combine that with the recent release of Sage 7 and the heated pace of updates and patches and betas released on us and I can't come to any conclusion other than it was Sage that bailed on us late last fall/early winter. If you think about it, it explains a lot with the radical changes in the interface and plugin managers and such, but especially the radical change in the interface.

We just did not realize we were paying for the privilege of testing hardware (read any reviews by users of their GoogleTV hardware in their forums?) and software for Google.

I don't buy that. Frankly, I don't think we'll see anything that works, or looks like SageTV from Google. I would litterally be shocked if we see a Google product that looks/works like SageTV and that's really what you're suggesting, that SageTV7 is essentially GoogleTV2 right?

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by Savage1701

The more I look into "The Cloud" concept the more I am convinced of several things:

1. Most people think since Google gives its apps away for free, then there is no cost. They don't realize that it is they themselves that are being monetized in the form of having ads pitched at them. Google has managed to "own" assets without having to carry them on their books. People are their widely varied inventory, and that inventory is carried without cost or tax liability. Very smart.

2. Most people think that since "The Cloud" is free, the pipeline that carries it will be, at most, a nominal cost that will not increase the more they utilize it, and that the "diameter" of that pipeline is infinite. We know that's not the case with throttling and caps and such. Even if those did not exist, few ISP's, as I said above, could deliver the bandwidth and QoS every home in every neighborhood would need to watch a few HD channels at once. And really, why should they, without some sort of compensation? Love your ISP or hate it or don't care that much about it either way, but you still want it and need it.

3. I should have smelled a rat when Narflex wanted us to actively support a call to net neutrality. Sage's Placeshifters represented no real threat to any ISP or media conglomerate. Their weren't enough of them to really noticeably burden any ISP or internet backbone. In the scheme of things, Sage downloads virtually no data when it updates its EPG's or puts out a version upgrade.

Heck, ReplayTV used to dial up an ISP every few days in the middle of the night to get the channel info. It could get all it needed on a crappy 56K connection in a few minutes.

But that call to net neutrality plea was the canary in the coalmine. Someone like Google has a real, abiding need for neutrality or it can't market products that stream heavily to and from "The Cloud".

Combine that with the recent release of Sage 7 and the heated pace of updates and patches and betas released on us and I can't come to any conclusion other than it was Sage that bailed on us late last fall/early winter. If you think about it, it explains a lot with the radical changes in the interface and plugin managers and such, but especially the radical change in the interface.

We just did not realize we were paying for the privilege of testing hardware (read any reviews by users of their GoogleTV hardware in their forums?) and software for Google.

My point - we can't bail or not bail on something that bailed on us long ago. We're like that relationship where we are sitting there waiting for the phone to ring while the person on the other end not only will never call, but had the number disconnected long ago and was just using a forwarding service.

Can you say "grassy knoll"?

1) Any app or site that supports itself thru advertisments and user registration does the same thing. Why single out Google? Because they bought Sage? Does your theory apply to every company Google has purchased?

2) Forget "the cloud" People think everything on the Internet should be free. This is why all the cable companies aren't doing IPTV. The infrastructure doesn't exist. And to ever get there will cost money. And lots of it.

3) Jeff's call for Net Neutrality had nothing to do with Placeshifter or Sage. It was a personal opinion of his that if net neutrality went away it would be a bad thing. And he wasn't the only one that had that opinion.

And to reference the release of Sage 7 and it's new features and plugin manager is ludicrous. WHat rapid pace of developement? The time between releases of Sage 7 betas and the time it took Sage7 beta to even reach public status was some of the longest cycles compared to any previous release. The interface from versions 1 thru 6 was the number one complaint from most of the users and new vistors to the site and kept many new users away. Search the forums for the complaints, the polls and number one requested feature. The plugin manager (or some way to easily install plugins) was right up there (maybe #2)request from users and polls.

And you're going to take all this information, accurate or not, and wrap it up into The Google Conspriracy and how Sage mislead all of its users and conspired with Google to have this sale happen and close down the business? Puh-leeze.

Gerry

[Savage1701]

Originally Posted by stanger89

I saw an interesting thing about that yesterday:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...570134518.html

Moreso than the obviously biased perspective (it's in Netflix' best interest for Internet access to be cheap and fast), is this little tidbit:




I don't buy that. Frankly, I don't think we'll see anything that works, or looks like SageTV from Google. I would litterally be shocked if we see a Google product that looks/works like SageTV and that's really what you're suggesting, that SageTV7 is essentially GoogleTV2 right?

Stanger, a couple of things - I don't think a cable co or ISP is any different than any other company - they have loss leaders and profit items. The extreme example being movie theaters that lose money on every showing but charge huge at the concession stand. I used to do vending. Believe me, the marginal cost of an ounce of coffee or fountain soda is nil relative to what you may be charged for it. Final selling price does not necessarily derive in a linear manner from product cost. Less extreme example - McDonald's will lose money on a burger because, on average, people buy a soda that has a ridiculously high profit margin. And the sizes amongst the sodas don't bear a linear relationship to the increase in additional ounces. They just don't. So too with cable companies.

And it is a fact that an RG-11 cable, typical of what goes from the pedestal to the house, and circulates around the neighborhood, can carry far less than the fiber hub it hooks up to. I've talked to people at my cable company that know this. They know they can NEVER give the channels that Dish or DirecTV can unless they lay more cable. Also, a very small percentage of people have the ultra-high speeds available to them. Sure, their will be ways to up the capacity of the coax or, for the luck few, fiber, but it will be expensive and you and I will pay for that equipment cost.

Second, I don't wear a tin foil helmet, but the pace of the updating, the radical paradigm shift, and the call to neutrality all point to a company that was being prepped for sale. My limited experience says these sorts of things take about year, maybe a little less, from approaches to haggling to due diligence to sealing the deal.

Third, no, I doubt that GoogleTV 2 will look like SageTV. But I'm betting Sage users who try it will notice subtle things. It will be "like Deja vu all over again" in some ways. The internet leaks on Google TV 2 (Fishtank?) already suggest real improvements. Given what they had on their hands with Google TV, that's a backhanded compliment at best. But more to the point, if you had used the satellite mapping service Google bought out about 6 years ago, I'm betting when you use Google Maps that you notice some similarities.

Again, I was a big believer in Sage. The extenders especially, and their tight integration with the server side. The ability to mod it. I still hope I am wrong, but I still think the bailing on us began a long time ago. It is really doubtful that Sage walked in on June 17 with a blank check and sealed a deal by midnight Friday.

[Savage1701]

Originally Posted by gplasky

Can you say "grassy knoll"?

1) Any app or site that supports itself thru advertisments and user registration does the same thing. Why single out Google? Because they bought Sage? Does your theory apply to every company Google has purchased?

2) Forget "the cloud" People think everything on the Internet should be free. This is why all the cable companies aren't doing IPTV. The infrastructure doesn't exist. And to ever get there will cost money. And lots of it.

3) Jeff's call for Net Neutrality had nothing to do with Placeshifter or Sage. It was a personal opinion of his that if net neutrality went away it would be a bad thing. And he wasn't the only one that had that opinion.

And to reference the release of Sage 7 and it's new features and plugin manager is ludicrous. WHat rapid pace of developement? The time between releases of Sage 7 betas and the time it took Sage7 beta to even reach public status was some of the longest cycles compared to any previous release. The interface from versions 1 thru 6 was the number one complaint from most of the users and new vistors to the site and kept many new users away. Search the forums for the complaints, the polls and number one requested feature. The plugin manager (or some way to easily install plugins) was right up there (maybe #2)request from users and polls.

And you're going to take all this information, accurate or not, and wrap it up into The Google Conspriracy and how Sage mislead all of its users and conspired with Google to have this sale happen and close down the business? Puh-leeze.

Gerry

To respond:

1. Yes. But NO ONE ever has done it as well or as profitably as Google, with the possible exception of Facebook. And few "give away" on the scale of Google.

2. I have forgotten "The Cloud" already as a matter of practicality. Millions of people have not been introduced to it. I agree with your points. We are saying the same thing. My mother-in-law was convinced she could get free first-run movies & series forever when Hulu came out. Gee, guess what? That's not the case and the good Hulu costs $8.00 per month. If I go to the business side of Charter, where I am assured of no download caps, 80% of rated speed at all times, and 4-hour trouble tickets, my 60Mb/s service goes from $100 per month to $190 per month. Business 16Mb/s is $80 per month. I think those may, to some extent, represent a more accurate cost of QoS data delivery without caps or throttling.

3. That's your opinion, unless you are Jeff in disguise. Your information about him is apparently as speculative as mine. I support Net Neutrality as well. That does not mean I support it because I am an altruist. That could be part of my motivation, but I also don't want my ISP, Charter, getting mad at Sage's ISP and blocking them. I support Net Neutrality because it is in my best interest for the money I pay to have the internet as I do now.

This issue cropped up several years ago with Vonage. Small countries with state-owned telcos had software written that would sniff and block Vonage packets. Some ISP's in the U.S. considered it as well. I think the U.S. cable companies let go of it, since as an ex-Vonage user I can tell you they are pretty much their own worst enemy in many ways. But my ISP had good reason to, as they push a VoIP package hard and heavy. "The Cloud" as Amazon, Apple, Google, and other heavy hitters envision it will make the relatively tiny Vonage VoIP packet issue seem irrelevant on the scale of data usage.

It's not a "Google Conspiracy". It's a trail of clues. The evidence continues to point to the "bail" side - No store. No client licenses. Ebay threats to license sellers while they let all the unscrupulous DVD software player software sellers go about their merry way, for one example. GoogleTV 2 coming this summer and how improved it is supposed to be.

Gplasky, if you want to be an apologist for Sage, go ahead. I'm being realistic about how businesses get bought out and what happens to their assets, (human, intellectual, and physical) depending on the acquiring company and its motivations. I'm not a conspiracy theorist. When we sold our vending company to another local one we were completely blocked from discussing the sale for all sorts of reasons for about a year while it happened. That's not a conspiracy, that's how business is done. But that does not mean certain factions of our customers, employees, and suppliers were happy about it. Some customers lost their favorite route driver. Some employees were let go due to consolidations that kicked in. But, again, the thread is "Stay or Bail". I still gotta go with "Bail" as soon as possible.

As I have said in the past, I hope I am wrong. I really do. But I see little to sway me to the "stay" side unless I had extra licenses and backup hardware, or access to them, or the store had re-opened with neat little Google logos on everything and announcements of "GoogleTV 2 Coming Soon To Sage" all over the place.

Let's see what happens in a couple of months when GTV 2 is out. Maybe Google with throw the GTV2 app into Sage as an add-on and re-open the store, but I doubt it. Or the opposite - Sage DVR features get tossed into GTV2 in a manner we can use with our server licenses. But I doubt that also.

[festus]

I run a seasoned, if low-end, install of Sage that started off 6 years ago as an Athlon XP and a PVR-250 for GB-PVR via MediaMVP. Sage was well worth the upgrade and I have run it since shortly thereafter. On the same server, it scaled to 4 GB storage, 3 analog tuners and 3 digital, and two HD extenders.

We're not heavy TV users so this has been largely for the kids. Comcast is turning off analog next week so I had bought parts for a new PC including a Ceton quad tuner. On the Saturday night that I was going to crack the boxes open, I found out about the Google buy-out. Thank you Amazon for accepting all of that hardware back.

The plan for now is to go a bit backward and tune a cable box to capture its output with composite cables after analog goes dark. This can keep the kids happy for a little while, but I don't see anything seriously offering as much convenience or usability for children's programming anywhere. I will probably buy AppleTVs when they get apps, but iTunes season subscriptions for shows are about $20 a piece, and that's not realistic for kids' programming. Netflix and Amazon have a lot of shows for them, but is there any extender that even does the simple things right, like tracking your favorites and remembering where you left off? If so, that's not well advertized.

I don't see anything out there that just gets out of the way to let you watch TV like Sage does.

[Savage1701]

Originally Posted by festus

I run a seasoned, if low-end, install of Sage that started off 6 years ago as an Athlon XP and a PVR-250 for GB-PVR via MediaMVP. Sage was well worth the upgrade and I have run it since shortly thereafter. On the same server, it scaled to 4 GB storage, 3 analog tuners and 3 digital, and two HD extenders.

We're not heavy TV users so this has been largely for the kids. Comcast is turning off analog next week so I had bought parts for a new PC including a Ceton quad tuner. On the Saturday night that I was going to crack the boxes open, I found out about the Google buy-out. Thank you Amazon for accepting all of that hardware back.

The plan for now is to go a bit backward and tune a cable box to capture its output with composite cables after analog goes dark. This can keep the kids happy for a little while, but I don't see anything seriously offering as much convenience or usability for children's programming anywhere. I will probably buy AppleTVs when they get apps, but iTunes season subscriptions for shows are about $20 a piece, and that's not realistic for kids' programming. Netflix and Amazon have a lot of shows for them, but is there any extender that even does the simple things right, like tracking your favorites and remembering where you left off? If so, that's not well advertized.

I don't see anything out there that just gets out of the way to let you watch TV like Sage does.

I agree if you want integration and such. You can buy extenders that will play what's on your Sage library, but if you are like me and have your Sage server in the basement equipment room, you either have to remote desktop in or go down to the room to make a change.

If you have a client license, you could dedicate a relatively older or inexpensive laptop as long as it had an HDCP-compliant HDMI port on it. But that's an expensive kluge. A dedicated HTPC costs time and money to buy/build and administrate and unless it's in a nice case, it looks awful under a TV. And what if you have several TV's? 3 HD300's cost you $450 and used a tiny amount of power. I doubt you could get a single serviceable HTPC for less than that.

[festus]

Originally Posted by Savage1701

I agree if you want integration and such. You can buy extenders that will play what's on your Sage library, but if you are like me and have your Sage server in the basement equipment room, you either have to remote desktop in or go down to the room to make a change.

If you have a client license, you could dedicate a relatively older or inexpensive laptop as long as it had an HDCP-compliant HDMI port on it. But that's an expensive kluge. A dedicated HTPC costs time and money to buy/build and administrate and unless it's in a nice case, it looks awful under a TV. And what if you have several TV's? 3 HD300's cost you $450 and used a tiny amount of power. I doubt you could get a single serviceable HTPC for less than that.

I fortunately do have one client license in addition to the 2 hd200 extenders so I should be able to keep a reasonable configuration going for a while. My concern is that there is no clear winner to replace Sage. I love the integration of the Apple ecosystem. iTunes Home Sharing is a very clean solution providing good clients in IOS and AppleTV, but there is a lot of transcoding and tagging work to be done (although in a rich UI for the tagging) in order to take my existing library with me (FYI, this does work great). ...however options for getting new material into the library or doing casual TV watching is a huge gap. ...so I am waiting on Apps for AppleTV before I go this route. Roku has the streaming services but not the local library support.

I would feel a lot better about Google's foray into TV with Sage if I hadn't seen the first cut.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by Savage1701

To respond:Let's see what happens in a couple of months when GTV 2 is out. Maybe Google with throw the GTV2 app into Sage as an add-on and re-open the store, but I doubt it. Or the opposite - Sage DVR features get tossed into GTV2 in a manner we can use with our server licenses. But I doubt that also.

We already have a good idea what GTV2 is about. The developer version is already out there and it's based on Honeycomb. If any remnants of what was once SageTV is going to show up you're probably not going to see it until GTV3. Probably a year or so away.

Gerry

[festus]

A short addendum to my earlier note. While I had planned to continue Sage with a cable box and SD capture, Comcast did not honor the verbal deal I had planned for. It looks like it's OTA digital only for now, so I'm definitely looking at my streaming options for more content.

Between Comcast forcing my hand for infrastructure conversion and Sage not being an appealing investment, it's a TV apocalypse over here.

[kcjack]

I have stayed out of commenting for fear that I would not know which end is up.

I will stay with Sage until the EPG data no longer works. I am one of those that am a cable/satellite dropper. Brodcast Tuners and Podcasts make up most of my programming now along with Netflix / Hulu / Vudu / Roku / and the streaming movie studio sites that have free content.

I have started thinking about going back to media center and MyMovies as I already have the metadata, but would have to go back to mediacenter for broadcast channels.

I have looked at the Dune family of extenders and have considered these as alternatives as I could still have both movie and Tv series show up at the extender.

Does anyone see this as a viable alternative to Sage or are some of the other suggestions in this thread better.

When looking at the specs on Dune extenders, they look comparable to what they will run (not price) and look to have a workable GUI that could be massaged and will still play Broadcast TV.

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by kcjack

I have stayed out of commenting for fear that I would not know which end is up.

I will stay with Sage until the EPG data no longer works. I am one of those that am a cable/satellite dropper. Brodcast Tuners and Podcasts make up most of my programming now along with Netflix / Hulu / Vudu / Roku / and the streaming movie studio sites that have free content.

I have started thinking about going back to media center and MyMovies as I already have the metadata, but would have to go back to mediacenter for broadcast channels.

I have looked at the Dune family of extenders and have considered these as alternatives as I could still have both movie and Tv series show up at the extender.

Does anyone see this as a viable alternative to Sage or are some of the other suggestions in this thread better.

When looking at the specs on Dune extenders, they look comparable to what they will run (not price) and look to have a workable GUI that could be massaged and will still play Broadcast TV.

You do know that sage has MyMovies support? I like it better than the WMC version.

[tvmaster2]

The reality of this is that we will likely never see anything like this again because there just aren't enough people who give a rats ass about a program like Sage to support it.
My wife doesn't - your's probably don't, nor does anyone who wants to spend a great deal of their free time tweaking, troubleshooting and testing.
Most people just hit the 'on' button, turn 'off' their brains and get on with it.
If there were a viable market for Sage-like products, there would be a factory in China, filled with coders having at it.
Add to that, the only time the ex-owner chimes in is to talk about beer, then my guess would be "That's all, folks"

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Savage1701

Stanger, a couple of things - I don't think a cable co or ISP is any different than any other company - they have loss leaders and profit items. The extreme example being movie theaters that lose money on every showing but charge huge at the concession stand. I used to do vending. Believe me, the marginal cost of an ounce of coffee or fountain soda is nil relative to what you may be charged for it. Final selling price does not necessarily derive in a linear manner from product cost. Less extreme example - McDonald's will lose money on a burger because, on average, people buy a soda that has a ridiculously high profit margin. And the sizes amongst the sodas don't bear a linear relationship to the increase in additional ounces. They just don't. So too with cable companies.

I think the point is, the reality of the situation has to "kick in", that bandwidth is not nearly as scarce a resource as ISPs would make it out to be.

And it is a fact that an RG-11 cable, typical of what goes from the pedestal to the house, and circulates around the neighborhood, can carry far less than the fiber hub it hooks up to. I've talked to people at my cable company that know this. They know they can NEVER give the channels that Dish or DirecTV can unless they lay more cable.

That is only partially correct. Cable companies are switching to "Swtiched Digital Video", where the only channels sent into your house are the ones you're watching, not everything. The coax coming into your house has approximately 125 to 180 RF channels, each of which support 38.8Mbps of data (QAM), that's 4.8Gbps of bandwith at a relatively conservative estimate.

There's no problem getting 100Mbps into peoples houses, it's the infrastructure feeding the neighborhoods that is the limit currently, and those limits are vanishing as fiber is rolled out.

Also, a very small percentage of people have the ultra-high speeds available to them. Sure, their will be ways to up the capacity of the coax or, for the luck few, fiber, but it will be expensive and you and I will pay for that equipment cost.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying

Second, I don't wear a tin foil helmet, but the pace of the updating, the radical paradigm shift, and the call to neutrality all point to a company that was being prepped for sale.

Sorry but that doesn't make any sense to me. There was no radical paradigm shift, and frankly I would expect development to slow (as it sort of seemed to in the late days of 7.1). I would not expect Jeff to roll out the massive changes in V7, or heck even some of the larger ones like the security model in V7.1 in an effort to "prep" for sale. It just doesn't make sense to me.

What it says to me is that regardless of what state negotiations were at, Jeff intended to keep developing Sage, something that clearly had no future as a Google product, for the current customer base. Google couldn't care less about any of the development done in V7 in my estimation.

Third, no, I doubt that GoogleTV 2 will look like SageTV. But I'm betting Sage users who try it will notice subtle things. It will be "like Deja vu all over again" in some ways. The internet leaks on Google TV 2 (Fishtank?) already suggest real improvements. Given what they had on their hands with Google TV, that's a backhanded compliment at best. But more to the point, if you had used the satellite mapping service Google bought out about 6 years ago, I'm betting when you use Google Maps that you notice some similarities.

I doubt GoogleTV 2 will be of interest to me.

Again, I was a big believer in Sage. The extenders especially, and their tight integration with the server side. The ability to mod it. I still hope I am wrong, but I still think the bailing on us began a long time ago. It is really doubtful that Sage walked in on June 17 with a blank check and sealed a deal by midnight Friday.

I'm sure it took a while, probably a few months no doubt. But I don't think you can look back at what SageTV did over the last year and see signs in SageTVof the then oncoming acquisition.

[davephan]

Originally Posted by tvmaster2

The reality of this is that we will likely never see anything like this again because there just aren't enough people who give a rats ass about a program like Sage to support it.
My wife doesn't - your's probably don't, nor does anyone who wants to spend a great deal of their free time tweaking, troubleshooting and testing.
Most people just hit the 'on' button, turn 'off' their brains and get on with it.
If there were a viable market for Sage-like products, there would be a factory in China, filled with coders having at it.
Add to that, the only time the ex-owner chimes in is to talk about beer, then my guess would be "That's all, folks"

The general public will never handle the complexity of a SageTV system. Many can barely handle using a TV remote control. If Google TV is dependent on streaming, I think it's future is probably DOA right now due to the bandwidth caps, unless it is designed for a 3" screen and lousy quality.

That's a pretty sad commentary, over two weeks and just one posting on beer. People are concerned about the future of SageTV and very concerned what happens if their media extenders quit working. I think the hope for SageTV's future is fading fast.

My impression from the post was "I'm still here". Instead of a five finger 'hello' wave, I imagined I was getting a one finger salute.

Dave