Android/AndroidTV Placeshifter client (Discussion)

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by TechBill

Alpha 16 - Nexus Player

It seem to be loading it as a placeshifter because I am getting a 15 day trial message when I started it up instead of "Setup Wizard"

Is there a way to force it to play as a Client not as a placeshifter? The placeshifter is horrible and all choppy.

Bill

Originally Posted by TechBill

That what strange about it, the nexus player is on the same LAN network because it does detect the SageTV server at start up but once I connect to it. It goes into placeshifter mode. Not the client mode

Bill

Exit back to the startup screen, and then go into Preferences, and use the SendLog to capture the log and send it to me... I'll see what the logging says.

[TechBill]

Originally Posted by stuckless

Exit back to the startup screen, and then go into Preferences, and use the SendLog to capture the log and send it to me... I'll see what the logging says.

OK. I had to run out but I will do it as son I get home in about an hour

Bikk

[jm9843]

Originally Posted by odledm;581260.

First off, when selecting any recording to play it would continue to jump back to the beginning after about 10s and repeat. I could eventually get it to play by skipping ahead (I think I may have switched stream mode to pull, I definitely had the best success when I did that).

I saw this in an earlier beta. Disabling auto-skip in Comskip settings fixed it.

[TechBill]

Originally Posted by stuckless

Exit back to the startup screen, and then go into Preferences, and use the SendLog to capture the log and send it to me... I'll see what the logging says.

Here the log

Bill

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by TechBill

Alpha 16 - Nexus Player

It seem to be loading it as a placeshifter because I am getting a 15 day trial message when I started it up instead of "Setup Wizard"

Is there a way to force it to play as a Client not as a placeshifter? The placeshifter is horrible and all choppy.

Bill

This, placeshifter and extenders are all miniclients. Which means the UI is built on the server, and sent to the client to be displayed. How the video is sent to the client depends on location, but this client is not doing any transcoding, and is sending the file untouched to the client. Any choppiness you are seeing is the result of a problem in playing back the file, not a result if it somehow thinking you are remote.

[TechBill]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

This, placeshifter and extenders are all miniclients. Which means the UI is built on the server, and sent to the client to be displayed. How the video is sent to the client depends on location, but this client is not doing any transcoding, and is sending the file untouched to the client. Any choppiness you are seeing is the result of a problem in playing back the file, not a result if it somehow thinking you are remote.

Why am I getting a 15 days trial flashing all over on my screen? I don't have that issue with my fire stick


The choppyness occur during playback which I think is because server is transcoding the recording before sending it to client. My server is not powerful enough to be transcoding videos on the fly again which I don't have that issue with my fire stick

So for some reason I think it going to placeshifter mode even the nexus player is on same LAN network that the server reside on

Isn't placeshifter intended to be use for remote client or players?

Bilk

[Dargason]

I don't know about the fire stick, but I can confirm that I get choppiness (on some videos) and the "trial" on my screen with my fire TV. I think the trial thing is the way it is supposed to work, because the fire TV doesn't have a license the way an extender normally would. (Hd200 and Hd300 extenders have licenses 'built in', is my understanding.)

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by Dargason

I don't know about the fire stick, but I can confirm that I get choppiness (on some videos) and the "trial" on my screen with my fire TV. I think the trial thing is the way it is supposed to work, because the fire TV doesn't have a license the way an extender normally would. (Hd200 and Hd300 extenders have licenses 'built in', is my understanding.)

The trial only shows up if you are using SageTV7 ... if using SageTV9 then it does not show trial regardless what you use as an extender.

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...&postcount=641

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by TechBill

Why am I getting a 15 days trial flashing all over on my screen? I don't have that issue with my fire stick


The choppyness occur during playback which I think is because server is transcoding the recording before sending it to client. My server is not powerful enough to be transcoding videos on the fly again which I don't have that issue with my fire stick

So for some reason I think it going to placeshifter mode even the nexus player is on same LAN network that the server reside on

Isn't placeshifter intended to be use for remote client or players?

Bilk

A Placeshifter and MiniClient are pretty much the same thing from the software side of things. The Android MiniClient, like the HD300, can be a MiniClient or Placeshifter. The SageTV server really determines how it will work based on the connection type.

Choppy video is likely just because your client cannot decode it using a hardware decoder. ie, if you are playing mpeg2 video, it has to be software decoded unless your device support hardware decoding for mpeg2 video.

The HD300 is an impressive machine, and reproducing that on an out of the box Android cient will be hard, but that's goal. It's likely that some boxes, like the Sheild TV will perform better than others.

And, myself (and others) are looking that video processing. Maybe there can be some efficiencies there, but it's still Alpha, so there's a long ways to go.

[foolio]

Anyone know what kind of processor the android TV built into various "smart TV" are?

I've got this running on my new Sony 55" xbr810c. The UI is pretty smooth but the playback isn't as smooth as my note 4 phone. I'm guessing it may be lacking hardware decoding abilities?

It's pretty awesome to be able to run sage straight from the TV set though!

Originally Posted by stuckless

A Placeshifter and MiniClient are pretty much the same thing from the software side of things. The Android MiniClient, like the HD300, can be a MiniClient or Placeshifter. The SageTV server really determines how it will work based on the connection type.

Choppy video is likely just because your client cannot decode it using a hardware decoder. ie, if you are playing mpeg2 video, it has to be software decoded unless your device support hardware decoding for mpeg2 video.

The HD300 is an impressive machine, and reproducing that on an out of the box Android cient will be hard, but that's goal. It's likely that some boxes, like the Sheild TV will perform better than others.

And, myself (and others) are looking that video processing. Maybe there can be some efficiencies there, but it's still Alpha, so there's a long ways to go.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by foolio

Anyone know what kind of processor the android TV built into various "smart TV" are?

I've got this running on my new Sony 55" xbr810c. The UI is pretty smooth but the playback isn't as smooth as my note 4 phone. I'm guessing it may be lacking hardware decoding abilities?

It's pretty awesome to be able to run sage straight from the TV set though!

I think you might be right... I don't know what kind of hardware decoding the TVs have... I'm guessing h264 decoding, but not likely mpeg2.

Eventually I'm sure we'll get on the fly transcoding working, and in that case, if the server is powerful enough, that might be an option.

[Dargason]

I was wondering about that too... if I'm getting MPEG2 via OTA sources, wouldn't that imply that most TVs with OTA tuners can decode them?

My smart TV doesn't have problems playing them, and I'm pretty sure it has a dog of a processor so it can't possibly be doing it via software.

[Fuzzy]

It's entirely likely the MPEG-2 decoder for the ATSC/QAM tuner is completely unrelated to the processor used for the smartTV functions.

[Dargason]

That's true, but the point is that smart TVs must have some sort of MPEG2 hardware decoding, probably inside the tuner as you point out.

On a related topic, I installed Kodi on my Fire TV tonight and tried playing one of the MPEG2 720p files that wouldn't play correctly before. I ran fine, so either Kodi is somehow enabling hardware decoding, or more likely it has a better software decoder.

[gexi]

Originally Posted by Dargason

That's true, but the point is that smart TVs must have some sort of MPEG2 hardware decoding, probably inside the tuner as you point out.

On a related topic, I installed Kodi on my Fire TV tonight and tried playing one of the MPEG2 720p files that wouldn't play correctly before. I ran fine, so either Kodi is somehow enabling hardware decoding, or more likely it has a better software decoder.

Do you have a small video with problems that you could post somewhere? I wanted to see how it performed on my firetv to see if there was something different for me.

[stuckless]

This build comes with a bunch of little fixes and tweaks. Nothing major, but here's the overview.

Since I do almost all my initial testing on my phone (easier than running to the TV for each build), I needed a way to perform some easier actions, such as pause/play, etc. Originally I had a slide out drawer, but I got rid of that, and went with a simple left/bottom edge of buttons. So, if you slide out from the left edge, it will show these actions.

Here's a screen shot.
https://goo.gl/photos/dWrPEx1V6uG7eG3DA

The on screen navigation has Exit, Home, Options, Up, down, Left, Right, Select, Back, Key Board, Skip Back, Pause, Play, and Skip Forward. (I'll like add more buttons over time as space permits)

The Keyboard Icon will show the native keyboard, and key presses are dispatched to SageTV. So, if you are in a edit box, you can bring up the keyboard and start typing. The challenge is that the keyboard will possible obscure the text field, since the native android keyboard has no awareness of the SageTV edit box.

On a TV using a simple remote, a long press on the center button will also show this on screen navigation, giving you access to things like Home, Options, etc.

I also fixed a minor rendering glitch that affected mainly Phoenix. (shaded rectangles weren't really shaded, they were black)

There are also some new preferences in the preferences screen.
As mentioned a Long Press on the Center button now brings up the on screen navigation. If you want to have it bring up the sagetv options menu instead, then you can change that in the preferences.

There is a setting for "Use Surfaces". This is an optimization that is on by default since it will result in smoother animations. The problem is that I get some flickering (which I'm still trying to figure out), but if you turn off "Use Surfaces" there is no flickering.

There is a setting as well for "Use Bitmap Images", enabled by default. If you are on a WIRED connection, you can turn this off, and MAYBE, you might get a small bump in rendering performance. (To be hones, I find the bitmaps to be so fast, that I don't really a benefit to this option, but I wanted to enable it so that people can play with it)

[nyplayer]

Disabling "Use Bitmap Images" brought the UI to a crawl in the Nexus Player.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by nyplayer

Disabling "Use Bitmap Images" brought the UI to a crawl in the Nexus Player.

It might do that, especially if it hasn't cached them, and, if you are on WIFI. The miniclient protocol has it an as option, but I find the bitmaps to be faster as well. Not sure at what point the disabling this option would be faster. (maybe on a really slow older server).

[Fuzzy]

Yeah, I'm thinking this was for server-side loading issues - think of the difference in processor speeds between now and when placeshifter was developed.

[Gustovier]

Turning off surfaces definitely gets rid of the screen flickering issues.

Thanks for the rectangle transparency fix. Phoenix is much better now!

There's a couple of other smaller graphical (I believe shape drawing instructions) issues that might also still be missing as I do still see some minor differences (but I believe you are aware of this fact).

Comcast cable company has now converted a couple of my channels to h264. This gives me a good opportunity to see some differences with live tv mpeg2 vs mpeg4 h264 channels. I can say the h264 channels are playing a lot better than the mpeg2 channels. The mpeg2 channels I get pixelation and frame drops. I'm wondering if it's really using the Nvidia shield tv mpeg 2 HW decoder? I see no difference when I enable vs disable HW acceleration, which is why I question if it's really being used.

Another issue (I'll log it to the issue list) is that when holding down directional keys the app should register this as multiple key presses until the key is let go. As it works now. If you want to scroll the epg you have to continousily press the up or down key, you can't just hold them down.