SageTV Get Its Groove On with SlimServer

By Alexander Grundner | October 8th, 2006 Comments (0)

We just got word that Chris Koele has released a new Slim Player plugin for SageTV that integrates Slim Devices’ SlimServer software. According to the announcement on the SageTV forums, the software features full support for MP3, FLAC, OGG Vorbis, AAC, and WMA, as well as, internet radio. The only bummer is that it’s currently not compatible with Placeshifter or MVP.

Feature Highlights:

• Support for additional radio stream formats (not just limited to shoutcast streams).
• Browse for new internet radio stations and add them to your favorites list or playlists.
• Volume control icons
• Shows artist information like Biography and picture (like in simple web radio plugin) for both local and internet content.
• Shows tag info for local content.
• Like with simple webradio the playback is stopped whenever the Sage Media Player player starts and vice versa.
• Slim server has an facility to use plugins. I haven’t used many of them yet, but if a plugin doesn’t rely on graphic being send to the player there’s a good chance it will work with Simple Slim Player.
• Of course you can have multiple SageTV instances connect to the slimserver and have the same content available to all of them.

Known Issues:

• Accessing the squeeze network will hang Slim Player (and SageTV). I will try to add support for using squeeze network in a next version.
• When X icon clicked or ALT-F4 and SageTV is configured to go to sleep, will not stop slim player playback. Currently SageTV doesn’t forward this event to stv code.
• This plugin does not work with neither placeshifter or MVP.
• Multiple version of the apache commons httpclient jar file in the JARS folder of the Sage TV install dir can prevent the artist retrieval function from proper working. In that case make sure that only the commons-httpclient-3.0.1.jar remains.
• If you don’t hear anything and the volume slider is way up, check the colume shown on the right pane in the web interface of slimserver. Slimserver has it’s own volume control, independent of the system volume.
• Issue with muting and start of playback. The visual muted indication will remain muted if you start playback of a new stream. This is due to a defect in slimserver. Just click the mute button 2 times to synchronize it again.

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