STV: Cayars17 Ultimate STV (Release 17 - Jan 18)

[ckron]

Sorry if my opinion ruffles any feathers, but they are like ?&*holes, we all have one.


I have been sitting here reading all this talk about charging for STVs, addons, plugins, or whatever we want to call them. This one thought keeps nagging at me the whole time. Isn't the program you are using, Studio, still a Beta test product? Also, isn't Studio the very program that was promised as a free release with version 2.0 of SageTV? Why should I pay someone for an interface I could create myself if I had Studio? Now, if I had Studio and someone created something I could not do myself because I lacked the skill, that would be different.

Sorry about the rant!! This is not meant to take away from everyones hard work and I think that a donation basis is apropriate, not charging for.

[Cayars]

Yes Studio is still a beta test product. I'm not sure what that has to do with anything however. Any/All interfaces from 2.0 and up have been written with Studio.

You need to discuss the release of studio with Frey. I'm not touching that one.

Did you write your own operating system or did you purchase that. Did you write your own DVD burning software or did you purchase it? Did you write your own word processor or did you purchase that? Do you write your own compilers? Do you write your own device drivers for your hardware? Why didn't you write your own PVR instead of purchasing SageTV?

It's a matter of convenience. You may or may not be able to write your own interface. I don't know your talents or abilities. BUT I think you missed the boat on what I proposed. I basically said the INTERFACE WILL BE FREE JUST AS IT IS NOW.

What I'm referring to as add-ons would not be written in studio. These would be custom written apps from the ground up to serve a special function. They would have hooks so that they could be used/controlled from studio. We're talking about functionality that doesn't exist with someone doing some hard work. With studio, you would then be able to use these pieces.

Here's an example. Right now if you want to transcode a file from MPG to DivX there is only one solution that has seemed to work at all (and there's problems with this anyway) and that is with an alaborate ffmpeg setup, batch files/scripting etc. There is support for this already in the Cayars stv. It more or less works but it's not pretty and you don't have very much control over any settings. The only thing you can do SageTV wise if click the "Compress" button in a file details page and have it add an AVI file to your library. You loose all show information, etc...

Now if I were to create a component (let call it that) that can be hooked directly into SageTV and be able to do transcoding easily and be able to give the user the ability to set single/multipass, Quant, bitrate, pre-processing, psychovisual, etc.. properties and allow you to create profiles that can be setup per series, channel etc and ran automatically is this not worth being paid for? Or should it be free because it's associated with SageTV?

BTW, what I just described is pretty much what Dr. DivX ($50) does but this would all be incorporated into the "PVR" giving you much greater functionality. If anything the price should be higher then Dr. DivX because we have a much, much smaller market. This is the type of functionality I talked about for $15-$25. It's chump change compared to the work involved.

So I hope this maybe helps differentiate what I was talking about. The STV as it is now would be free but if you want to add some power utilities then it would cost a few bucks.

BTW, I'm not out to sit here and write code just to get paid. That was not my intention. I'm putting in as much "donation" time as I can without the family suffering (getting complaints already).

The difference is that when you can take the wife and kids out to dinner once or twice a month and say it's was because of the... then it's easier for the wife to allow you to spend more time doing this. It would also help (eventually) cover the costs to do some of these. For example there is one set of tools that would allows some of these things to happen 10 times faster then if I wrote it from scratch. The library costs $500 for a one user development license. So it I were to just give everything away, I'd have to write everything from scratch where if i knew I'd get close to getting my money back then it's not as hard to swallow spending $500 to help other people out and start creating some of the things people have been asking for.

Also, like I said before the STV itself is free and will stay that way. If we could find a better tool to do transcoding and it could be added easily then I'd consider that an STV improvement since I didn't have to do very much to get it to work. A good example of this is the DVD ripper functionality that was added to the STV. That was pretty easy to add. I'd be quite happy to add anything like this that people could find (i.e. MP3 ripper) to the distribution. This makes me happy to do it and isn't very much work on my part. It's only when there isn't a solution to a BIG problem/issue that I'd volunteer to solve it for a few bucks. If you don't like it, don't buy it. It won't stop the cayars.stv from functioning in any way shape or form.

Oh, btw, somebody mentioned using open-source code in my programs. This wasn't what i had in mind. If I were to charge for something then it would be my code or using parts from a library that i have licensed/purchased. Strictly above the board stuff. On the other hand if we could find some decent open-source software that could be modded easily to add functionality to our systems then I'd be up for that too, and of course this would stay open-source/free.

I hope my intentions are clear enough.

Carlo

[Esrsa4]

Originally Posted by Cayars

BTW, I'm not out to sit here and write code just to get paid. That was not my intention. I'm putting in as much "donation" time as I can without the family suffering (getting complaints already).

The difference is that when you can take the wife and kids out to dinner once or twice a month and say it's was because of the... then it's easier for the wife to allow you to spend more time doing this.
Carlo

I just wanted to say hat's off for those of you working on STV's and other Sage Customizations and to your families who are understanding enough to give you the time and space to work on them. I have a wife and two kids and have a hard time just finding time to try out a new STV, let alone put one together (not that I have Studio anyway, but that is beside the point). So, I for one do not have a problem with a donating any money. Thanks for all your time and effort.

[ckron]

First off all, just let me say that you and the other STV makers are wonderful. I really appreciate the time and effort you have all put forth. I have a wife and three little ones (4,3,1.5), so I can of course empithize with the scarifices made. Thank you!

External programs that you write yourself are your property and you can, of course, charge whatever you want for that. i personally like the idea of donations and I for one would donate to you based on the value (to me) of what you created.

I think you might have missed my point about Studio. No, I did not write the OS I am using (although I have written some basic ones back in the machine code days). I have already purchased Studio with my license for SageTV. When I purchased SageTV, 2.0 was in beta and free upgrades to 2.0 final w/Studio were promised to all that purchased A license to 1.4 at that time. I got my upgrade to 2.0, but so far, no Studio. You are right, that is a matter to take up with Frey.

I must apologize for the fact that most of the anger and frustration that came out in my previous post was because of the Studio thing which is of course not your fault.

Keep up the good work and set up a donation method. I will be there for all you guys.

[rsagetv99]

This is just my opinion, but I think that you should try the donation route first and see how it goes. You could always start charging for your efforts if the donations don't work out.

I'm sure the donations would more than pay for dinner out a couple of nights per month... you don't mind McDonalds do you???

[mikejaner]

I agree with Carlo,

I would pay for addons which have nothing to do with studio. There is no reasong to expect for addons to be free. If they are free, then great, but I would not expect it.

My $0.02

[Hector]

It seems you're not making a distinction between the tools/skills to use them and the work.

I'm not sure beta has anything to do with it either. For example, development shops in Microsoft's beta program take advantage of functionality in advanced versions of Visual Studio and a host of other beta version tools that are not available to the general public on a regular ongoing basis.

Originally Posted by ckron

Why should I pay someone for an interface I could create myself if I had Studio? Now, if I had Studio and someone created something I could not do myself because I lacked the skill, that would be different.

I've been publishing software for 24 years and I am here to tell you that simply owning or even knowing how to use a tool does not a successful project make. Believe me I can use more programmers than I can possibly afford. If I buy you a copy of Visual Studio will you start writing and supporting apps for me for free?

peace . . .

[nielm]

Originally Posted by mikejaner

My $0.02

Mike, I think he is looking for bigger donations than that

[Hector]

Oh man now THAT'S funny.

Originally Posted by nielm

Mike, I think he is looking for bigger donations than that


Quote:
Originally Posted by mikejaner
My $0.02

[Cayars]

That was classic Nielm!

[Cayars]

Progress update for you guys. My system is completely hosed at the moment. I even lost close to 2 Tarabytes of movies. (:

Around 4am (being tired) I pulled a boo-boo while trying to diagnose my system problems. I notice one drive wasn't running in DMA mode and tried to fiddle/set/update the driver and things got progressively worse. I did a reboot and when SageTV came back up it decided to delete shows off the hard drives. I'm not sure why it did that but considering all the messing around I've been doing I'm not surprised something like this happened.

As luck would have it these were only MPG files and nothing happened to my Tarabyte of archived DVDs and DivX files which I spent a lot of time working on.

I've got snap shots of my operating system partition (using Acronis) and I'm restoring an older system setup back from march. My system was setup about as perfect as it possibly could have been so I figured I'd go with this. I'm not going to play with any drivers this time but install the current version and see if 2.1.10 now works correctly for me. <-- Any wagers???

Once I've got this back up and running I'll finish the release I was working on (different computer) but I need to be able to connect to the server to work on it.

BTW, ckron, I wasn't ragging on you in the other message. You just happened to be the first message of that nature.

[ToxMox]

Wow bummer man. I'm glad you didn't lose everything. Best of luck getting up and running.

[ckron]

Originally Posted by Hector

It seems you're not making a distinction between the tools/skills to use them and the work.

I'm not sure beta has anything to do with it either. For example, development shops in Microsoft's beta program take advantage of functionality in advanced versions of Visual Studio and a host of other beta version tools that are not available to the general public on a regular ongoing basis.



I've been publishing software for 24 years and I am here to tell you that simply owning or even knowing how to use a tool does not a successful project make. Believe me I can use more programmers than I can possibly afford. If I buy you a copy of Visual Studio will you start writing and supporting apps for me for free?

peace . . .

The difference being, I haven't bought and paid for Visual Studio. Where as Frey's Studio, I have paid for. You have absolutely no idea of what I might be capable of creating if I had studio. Why should a chosen few profit from using a tool that most, if not all, of us should already have in our greedy little hands.

[Cayars]

I still don't think you got my message. There would be no profit from studio (for me) only things done outside of studio. Actually I would use MS Visual Studio for the kinds of things I'm talking about.

Here's a prime example just posted that would benefit from an easy to use transcoding feature. As it is I can't help him because I don't use ffmpeg.

http://forums.freytechnologies.com/f...ead.php?t=8414

[ptaylor]

Sorry if this has been mentioned already, but I just installed this tonight and this thread has TONS of replies to look through...

Anyhow, it looks great so far. I am running into one issue though. I have the "View TV" option available and when I select it, TV starts as it should. I see the volume, FF/RW bar, and program description at the top of the screen. I can adjust the volume, FF or RW, and the appropriate UI elements pop up. The problem is that I can't change the channel. When I hit the channel up/down buttons, nothing happens at all.

Any clues as to what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks,
Paul

[Hector]

I understand that if you had Studio you'd build your own STV, I never suggested you couldn't do a great job. But what does that have to do with whether someone else should be compensated for their work? The tool is not magical, having it does not eliminate the work. Most people who get Studio will not be able to write a better STV, and some others that could might just prefer to pay $20. It's not like you don't have a choice. But in any case he has the same obligations to his customers/donators as any other software developer who seeks fair compensation. He takes the risk of working his butt off for nothing. Maybe his wife will run him out of town. Maybe he has a nice little side gig and gets more than a few dinners out a month.

As for expectation of being able to write your own STV on that point I agree. Where Frey messed up was announcing something too soon that they didn't yet have their arms around. Bet they won't do that again. An interface that allows a non-programmer to program is one of the holy grails and I'll be more than a little surprised if it's ever as easy to use as everyone thought it would be. We'll see, expectations are certainly high.

So sure it stinks we don't have Studio after hearing about it so far back but that doesn't make Cayars or any other programmers work any easier OR less valuable. Two completely different things.

peace . . .

Originally Posted by ckron

The difference being, I haven't bought and paid for Visual Studio. Where as Frey's Studio, I have paid for. You have absolutely no idea of what I might be capable of creating if I had studio. Why should a chosen few profit from using a tool that most, if not all, of us should already have in our greedy little hands.

[Hector]

"Not Studio. VISUAL Studio. Visual Studio"

"Oh . . . well . . . that's very different. Never mind."

"That's the news, good night and have a pleasant tomorrow".

Originally Posted by Cayars

I still don't think you got my message. There would be no profit from studio (for me) only things done outside of studio. Actually I would use MS Visual Studio for the kinds of things I'm talking about.

Here's a prime example just posted that would benefit from an easy to use transcoding feature. As it is I can't help him because I don't use ffmpeg.

http://forums.freytechnologies.com/f...ead.php?t=8414

[Cayars]

Originally Posted by ptaylor

Sorry if this has been mentioned already, but I just installed this tonight and this thread has TONS of replies to look through...

Anyhow, it looks great so far. I am running into one issue though. I have the "View TV" option available and when I select it, TV starts as it should. I see the volume, FF/RW bar, and program description at the top of the screen. I can adjust the volume, FF or RW, and the appropriate UI elements pop up. The problem is that I can't change the channel. When I hit the channel up/down buttons, nothing happens at all.

Any clues as to what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks,
Paul

From a remote or from the keyboard? If remote, which one? What do you have your mini-guide settings set to?

[Cayars]

Originally Posted by ToxMox

Wow bummer man. I'm glad you didn't lose everything. Best of luck getting up and running.

Got it up (hmm, that doesn't sound appropriate for this forum <wink>) last night on 2.1.10 and she's running GREAT! Just in time for West wing too.

[mls]

Regarding channel up/down... did a quick check with my systems. Works from all 3 of my remotes (ATI, StreamZap, and Hauppauge) and also works from keyboard (as long as Sage has focus of course).

However, I did notice there does not appear to be anything for a mouse user in the Enchanced OSD to do channel up/down.

Guess need more detailed info from ptaylor as to what is not working for him.