How to view old SageTV files

[ckewinjones]

I'm a former SageTV user. I built a SageTV server (Windows 7) back in 2010 and we used it to record shows from our cable provider for about seven years (Comcast or Verizon coax -> CableCard -> Ceton InfiniTV card -> SageTV). Then we ditched cable TV and our SageTV setup no longer worked for us.

I'd like to be able to watch / listen to our SageTV content if it's possible. I've tried pointing our Jellyfin media server instance at our SageTV files, but it's working so poorly as to be unusable. It took Jellyfin almost 24 hours to import about 600 SageTV files, and the playback through Jellyfin on those files is terrible (slow to load, frequent buffering, etc).

Is there some way to transform the SageTV files so that Jellyfin can play them properly? Or should I install the open source version of SageTV? If I do the latter, can I install the Linux version of SageTV in a Docker container running on Ubuntu?

What is the best strategy here?

[JustFred51]

Sage recordings aren't saved in a proprietary format and should be playable, as is, with VLC, Windows Media player, or most any video player. Problems with slow loading or frequent buffering are usually traced to network or disk problems. A simple test would be to copy some non-Sage-recorded videos to where your Sage recordings are stored, and try to play them using various players.

[trk2]

I agree with JustFred with the caveat that cablecard streams don't often fully comply with their respective video formats. EnterNoEscape and Josh both had to pass the streams through FFMPEG, for OpenDCT and the Android client respectively, to correct errors that exist in the cablecard streams. The Sage PC client and extenders are tolerant of these errors (VLC should also be tolerant), but Android and other players are less so.

[ckewinjones]

Thanks, JustFred & trk2, for the information. I agree that SageTV recordings are encoded (in theory) with public standard formats and should "just work". But open, public standards are (A) not always fully and unambiguously specified and (B) subject to the vagaries and design decisions of the implementors. Often the behavior of the most widely used implementation becomes the de facto standard.

I will look up what EnterNoEscape had to say about these issues in the OpenDCT implementation as a starting point. Thanks for giving me something to work with.

[MechlingBurgh]

I was having a similar problem with jelly fin on a Roku TV. I had to add a graphics card to trans-code on the fly and it took care of the problem. Try using handbrake and convert one file to MKV format and and see if it plays any better.

[ckewinjones]

My server is based on an Intel i7-13700K which has pretty good integrated graphics, so it might be up to the transcoding job (though whether it is good enough to do it on the fly, I don't know). I'll check the Jellyfin docs on how to set up for transcoding (unless you have a link to info on this, or can describe it in a sentence or two).

Thanks.

[mickgeller]

Here's my two cents. Sage TV files are transport streams which Jellyfin may have troubles transcoding. Transport streams can be messy internally. Sage knows how to deal with that .

As noted above, Handbrake can be your friend. It's a one-time conversion that will clean up a lot of the transport stream related issues.

Furthermore Sage keeps video files in a flat file structure. Both JellyFin and Plex expect a directory for each show. They also expect movies to be segregated from TV shows. I've always found that this confuses Jellyfin and Plex as they try to figure out metadata.

If I were to retire Sage completely, I would do a one-time conversion on the files using Handbrake. I would then put them in a directory structure that Jellyfin expects. This includes renaming the files to make it easy to find the metadata.