Sage Live TV

[Mike]

I was curious if anyone had seen issues with Sage Live TV and extenders. I spent some time over at the sage forums but havent been able to find anything as of yet.

I had some people staying with us and they are using a bedroom that has an extender that has not really been used much. They also wanted to watch live TV, which we never do. The issue seemed to be:

1. Main server is recording a show on channel A
2. User in an extender room tries to change the channel to watch something else. Movement on the screen works, but hitting the select/ok button does nothing. Bottom line - could not change the channel.
3. If you go to the server screen and try and do the same, it pops up a window saying something is being recorded do we want to change the channel).

One other question: From what I have seen so far, there are no firmware updates or the like for extenders at all. Is this accurate?

 

[bfisher]

Hi Mike - all of my TVs use extenders (headless server). We never watch live TV either but I did test it because my father-in-law was coming (he's a surfer and doesn't get the value of time-shifting). I have 4 tuners so it was tough to simulate, but I did get a pop-up warning (asking me if I should stop recording X) once a channel wanted to be changed and there were no tuners available to do it.

My extenders are all 3 months old or less, but I don't believe there are any firmware updates. Are you running 6.2? Also, I use SageMC for my interface (although I can't remember if it was being used during my test, or the default STV).

 

[Mike]

You know what, I don't think I updated to 6.2 yet and am still at 6.1.18 or something like that.

I'm going to see if I can arrange an 'outage' and apply the update tonight. It would be nice if that fixes it.

My extenders are not so new but not old (6 months to a little over a year). I thought I noticed some rev numbers on the bootup screen and thought there was a difference between the two rooms, but I have not gone back to verify that.

Thanks.

 

[CollinR]

Thats normal behavior, my basic is 1.25:1 tuner to client ratio. This is why Bruce had to juggle his system to get that error, he has enough tuners for the number of clients.

Some things you can do to bypass that error.

Turn video on menus to OFF < When that is on all clients require a tuner.

Press the stop button. This will stop the playback and instantly free that tuner, assuming you were not wathcing something also on the schedule.

Install the webserver and add in actions to kick your extenders off. This too will free tuners up, if someone is watching TV and then turns the TV off SageTV doesn't konw so it will just keep playing indefinately.

The automatic sleep timer, you can set a smart sleep timer. After a specified amount of time with no input from the remote, it will stop playback run screen saver and optionally execute a command. This command could be used to trip IR output to actually power down the TV.


Lots of ways around but generally 1.25:1 tuner/client works pretty well.

 

[CollinR]

Oh and you don't need a firmware update for the MVP, all that could do is allow a change in it's network boot or it's internal hardware. The MVP loads everything it needs functionally from the server so unless you modify the MVP's board you shouldn't need to change firmware.

 

[Mike]

Thanks. It sounds like that may be the culprit. I have one tuner hooked up. I have the splitter to have the usb-uirt to talk to more than one tuner, but haven't configured it.