Help migrating to Kodi (XBMC)

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by wayner

To derail the thread even more, I am currently implementing a Car Media server. It will be an old laptop running Plex Media Server that will serve up content to mobile devices in the car or play on the car's built-in AV system. This will be an old laptop with an external 2TB hard drive. I may also install SageTV on the laptop to use when we are on vacation as it gives a very portable SageTV solution.

I'm still trying to find a good aftermarket head unit. It's really sad but the MyFordTouch system in my truck is the best head unit I've ever used. Recognizes playlists, genres, etc, plays WMA Lossless.

Too bad all the 3rd party head units are crap as far as playing media, they all seem to assume you're using an iPod or streaming over BT.

[wayner]

I will likely use my iPhone6+ or a 7" tablet to control the playback.

[Skirge01]

Originally Posted by wayner

I have replaced the system drive in the laptop with a SSD for performance reasons but the media drive will be an external 2TB 2.5" mechanical drive. I will likely fasten it to the top of the laptop case with heavy duty velcro. I have been over the vibration/bump discussion in other forums and I don't think it will be a big deal, I think temperature may be a bigger issue as going from below freezing to room temperature (and vice versa) may cause condensation and other issues with the drive.

FYI - For the last five+ years I have had iPod Classics in my car. They have mechanical hard drives, albeit smaller at 1.8" and with less mass, but what's the difference between that and a 2.5" drive? And I have also occasionally used laptops with internal mechanical drives in a vehicle without issue.

I had to go back and make sure I typed 3.5" in my earlier reply. A 2.5" will likely have no issues as they were designed for use in laptops, which probably get abused much more than this one will sitting in your vehicle. 3.5" drives, however, were not designed as such and that was my concern.

[odledm]

Just curious... what version of Kodi are people running on their Fire TVs? SPMC or Kodi? And what releases (Gotham, Helix, etc.) Picked up a Fire TV last week and have been playing with Kodi on it. It is way faster than openelec on the RPi which is what I have been running.

[samgreco]

I've been running standard Kodi for a while now on my AFTV. I've been very pleased overall. My only complaint is using ServerWMC for LiveTV has been dicey. Very stuttery at times. On my Win7 client it's running perfectly.

Wish I could get my trusty SageTV server to work for a live tv backend.

[jchiso]

I'm running Gotham on a FireTV Stick. It does not perform nearly as well as my Pi installations. The one on which I have RaspBMC is lightning quick with the GUI and plays back flawlessly. I tried on the Stick this evening and it buffered like crazy. I can use the Pi as a backend for live TV from a Sage server, albeit from a Linux server writing to an NFS share ...

[7up]

FireTV has difficulty with mpeg2 HD deinterlacing in Kodi as a PVR client. For OTA, h.264 HDHR tuner might be one way to get around this.

[odledm]

So I finally got the SageTv addon working on my AFTV running SPMC 14.1. For 14.1 Koying put in some experimental deinterlacing features that seem to be working for me (granted there has just been some very quick tests for me) You may want to give it a try to see if it resolves your deinterlacing issues. So far SPMC 14.1 seems a little snappier than Kodi 14.1 but that could just be me.

[7up]

I had heard Kodi was going to be adding deinterlacing options that would work with FireTV but not surprised SPMC has it first. Thanks for the info, I'll have to check it out.

[stanger89]

Does anyone know how these "hardware" devices are in terms of video quality?

I did an interesting experiment last night. I have all my sources connected through a Lumagen Radiance, so I setup my HD300 and my OpenELEC box (i7 3770s) in the POP function, side by side and fired up the same content on both. What I found was that OpenELEC/Kodi noticeably more banding than the HD300 and that the colors, specifically those in the "red" family were slightly off. I'd say slightly less saturated, maybe slightly pushed toward green.

[7up]

Loaded up SPMC 14.1 last night. Deinterlacing is now selectable however the only option is Bob which wasn't great on my FireTV stick. Results might be better on a FireTV box.

[emveepee]

Originally Posted by 7up

Loaded up SPMC 14.1 last night. Deinterlacing is now selectable however the only option is Bob which wasn't great on my FireTV stick. Results might be better on a FireTV box.

The interlacing that is added is not the best quality on the FTV either, but it is a "gift horse" and it is an improvement. It's not a box designed for 1080i but if you can live with this, the FTV has other advantages.

The RPi2 and Chromebox with real h/w deinterlacing are much better IMO but it is a question of test, many people don't notice the problems with no deinterlacing and are still happy.

Martin

[7up]

Agreed, hopefully they can improve on the deinterlacing as having something is better than nothing. Does Fire TV have hardware mpeg2 decoding that isn't enabled or is there no hardware mpeg2 decoding?

[Olias]

Originally Posted by stanger89

I'm still trying to find a good aftermarket head unit. It's really sad but the MyFordTouch system in my truck is the best head unit I've ever used. Recognizes playlists, genres, etc, plays WMA Lossless.

Too bad all the 3rd party head units are crap as far as playing media, they all seem to assume you're using an iPod or streaming over BT.

+1. And to keep this slightly derailed...
I've been using a cheap 500GB WD USB hard drive in my Ford Fiesta for four years now. Using JRiver to sync my Sage FLAC based audio library to it with WMA lossless files. The voice recognition in the Ford is sweet.

Living in Wisconsin, it gets REALLY cold in the winter and can bake inside the car some summers. The hard drive has performed flawlessly.

[odledm]

7up,

After ranting to an acquaintance who works for the big smiley face, I was given a "wellll..." and a nudge nudge wink wink that the hardware supports it and if you hard code it to force it to use hardware decoding it should work for mpeg2. They suggested I take a look at some of the mythtv forums (which I have not at this time). Keep in mind they are a company that works on the slimmest of margins, so not spending the money to qualify mpeg2 hardware decoding is a cost saving method. Especially when the purpose of the box is supposed to be streaming content which would rarely if ever be encoded to mpeg2. Ironically, this is what pushed me over the edge to pick up the box and I passed along that feedback.

[7up]

odledm,
Great story, thank you for sharing. Adding mpeg2 hardware decoding to FireTV would be awesome.

[valnar]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Does anyone know how these "hardware" devices are in terms of video quality?

I did an interesting experiment last night. I have all my sources connected through a Lumagen Radiance, so I setup my HD300 and my OpenELEC box (i7 3770s) in the POP function, side by side and fired up the same content on both. What I found was that OpenELEC/Kodi noticeably more banding than the HD300 and that the colors, specifically those in the "red" family were slightly off. I'd say slightly less saturated, maybe slightly pushed toward green.

I just found this thread. Somehow I knew you would be the one who could answer this! I've searched the Internet for video-quality comparisons of these cheap embedded platform devices and can't find anything.

I'm moving into the Plex world mainly for sharing movies with friends, but in case Sage dies, it would be nice to have it available to me too. I always wondered how the HDMI on all these small devices (Raspberry Rasplex, OpenELEC on a NUC, etc) would look compared to the wonderful Sigma decoders in the HD300. I bought a Raspberry Pi2 and it's on its way to me.

I hope the video quality is decent. I'd hate to take a step back.

[stanger89]

Actually when I looked at it again, I'm not sure, bringing up colorbars (AVS709 patterns) it looks like my HD300 is the one that's "wrong". I suppose I'll have to dig into it some more.

[jchiso]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Actually when I looked at it again, I'm not sure, bringing up colorbars (AVS709 patterns) it looks like my HD300 is the one that's "wrong". I suppose I'll have to dig into it some more.

I realize one cannot make blanket statements about the chips in these low-end devices, but when I compared test material from a Pi Model B+ to the output from a Sencore generator (at 720p) I could not tell the difference, at least as far as colors were concerned ...

[stanger89]

Yeah, I'm going to have to check the settings on my Radiance again, maybe there's something funky going on between it, and my HD300.