Silicon Dust DVR Coming

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by reggie14

Is it actually watchable? Even on my Droid Turbo I get choppy playback, audio/video cutouts, and AV sync problems on HD channels.

I found that to be true on my original NEXUS 7 If I play HD it gets choppy ... but that is no big deal as Comcast has an equivalent SD ... so on a small screen it is no big deal ... at least I am able to watch NBA TV and other DRM'd channels.

This is from the SD forum if they can accomplish this being that mini PC's are really down In price some cheaper than the HD300 ... this will definitely make this a winner for us Prime owners.

______________________________________________________________________
We are targeting Windows, Mac, and Android for protected content playback.

Today we can decrypt protected content on these platforms. The hard part is protecting the video path - this is different on each platform and will take further development effort to get right.

Nick

[sflamm]

How will this impact the future of SageTV?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...ed/description

* merged *

[mikejaner]

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=62080

[reggie14]

They added stretch goals yesterday. At $150k they'll work on Kodi support for copy-freely channels. At $250k, they'll work on support for other clients, like Roku, iOS, Chromecast, XBox, and Samsung devices. That's kind of disappointing, since it doesn't look like support for those other clients is a very high priority. I highly doubt they'll hit $250k, and I doubt they think they will either. Maybe a nice mpeg2-capable Android TV box will come to their rescue, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

[nyplayer]

DVR is officially happening! Funded.

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by reggie14

They added stretch goals yesterday. At $150k they'll work on Kodi support for copy-freely channels. At $250k, they'll work on support for other clients, like Roku, iOS, Chromecast, XBox, and Samsung devices. That's kind of disappointing, since it doesn't look like support for those other clients is a very high priority. I highly doubt they'll hit $250k, and I doubt they think they will either. Maybe a nice mpeg2-capable Android TV box will come to their rescue, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

$250K looks like it will happen Plex users have really stepped up.

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by nyplayer

$250K looks like it will happen Plex users have really stepped up.

Interesting. It's great to see the Kickstarter doing so well. I see the decision to go with Plex support for the 250k stretch goal was just made on Thursday. Do you know if a lot of pledges came in after that? I checked about a week ago and I thought they were a little below $200k.

But, I'm still skeptical. The cynic in me is saying Plex was the easy way out. It's a way to add basic support for a large number of clients, but won't necessarily provide a great user experience. Presumably it's going to come with some significant limitations. For example, I wouldn't expect copy-protected content to work in Plex. I also worry about other basic features, like live TV. Note that Thursday's post on Kickstarter didn't say anything about live TV- just recordings. Plex doesn't play nicely with live TV or currently-recording files. There's a third-party channel that tries to stream from SD tuners, but it's kind of glitchy.

Maybe SD can work something out with Plex to get better support for live TV. And if we're lucky, maybe a future/revised Sage channel could benefit from that.

[Skirge01]

Originally Posted by reggie14

Interesting. It's great to see the Kickstarter doing so well. I see the decision to go with Plex support for the 250k stretch goal was just made on Thursday. Do you know if a lot of pledges came in after that? I checked about a week ago and I thought they were a little below $200k.

According to Kicktraq the bump came between the 15th and 16th, so it would seem to coincide with the stretch goal.

[JerryB]

Originally Posted by Skirge01

According to Kicktraq the bump came between the 15th and 16th, so it would seem to coincide with the stretch goal.

There appeared to be two bumps, the first right after Nick announced that Plex won the poll to select the 3rd party client for the stretch goal and the second started yesterday right after Plex sent out their May newsletter which included a section on the SD Kickstarter to bring "Free TV" to Plex.

[reggie14]

I'm not sure if I should consider this a good sign or a bad sign, but Silicon Dust acknowledged the challenges with live TV and DRM.

Nick Kelsey, Silicondust USA Inc 3 days ago

@Alan Skinner - we have been talking through the Live TV implementation with the Plex team. There are some cross-platform things we need to be careful of and figure some platforms will be slow to change channel.

@Pat Goins - playback of protected channels won't be supported to begin with. We will investigate options once the first release is out and the dust settles.

And,

Nick Kelsey, Silicondust USA Inc 3 days ago

@David Barry @Josh Buers - we are still investigating if it will be possible to get live TV running with Plex.

My concern is that we're going to see mediocre support and features. DRM support through Plex seems exceedingly unlikely. Live TV looks very possible, and they could probably hack something together. But, based on my experiences using the Phoenix channel and the third-party HDHR channel, I could easily see this being ONLY live TV- no pausing/fast forwarding.

The initial demos don't look terribly impressive. But, I'm trying to remind myself of what SageTV was like in the very early days. (I'll note, however, that SageTV v1.4 implemented pretty much all of the core DVR features we've come to expect- it just looked terrible.)

I'd really like to see some way of playing back live/time-shifted TV my Android devices. But what I've seen so far doesn't give me a lot of confidence that this will be the solution to that. The View app runs terrible on my Droid Turbo and Nexus 9- still two of the most powerful Android devices out there, and both having 802.11ac support. Plex transcoding could fix this, except that I'm not expecting (good) live TV support right away.

[rerooks]

I am really excited about the Sage open source project. I am hedging my bets, though, and participated in the Kickstarter, though. I am getting another HD Homerun prime to run Sage in parallel.

I would like to see Sage offer some of the things that the Homerun said it will:

1. Ability to record copy protected content
2. Ability to run on the IOS (ipad and iphone)...I know that you can sorta get this working via the web browser, but it is slow)

...and they just passed $300K...

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by rerooks

I am really excited about the Sage open source project. I am hedging my bets, though, and participated in the Kickstarter, though. I am getting another HD Homerun prime to run Sage in parallel.

I would like to see Sage offer some of the things that the Homerun said it will:

1. Ability to record copy protected content
2. Ability to run on the IOS (ipad and iphone)...I know that you can sorta get this working via the web browser, but it is slow)

...and they just passed $300K...

3. and do not forget Multi-record... (Padding on back to back favorites same channel)

I do not see SageTV ever doing protected content on clients etc...

It all depends a lot on what comes first the HD Homerun DVR or SageTV open source. At least I know where the HD Homerun DVR is headed but I have no Idea when Sagetv will become open source and headed. It is easy for me to make a choice as all my tuners are from Silicondust.

[nyplayer]

Final tally.
3,969 backers pledged $370,280 to help bring this project to life