Android/AndroidTV Placeshifter client (Discussion)

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by Gustovier

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).

You should the rendering issues. Even though I'm aware of some, if you log them, then I'll see when I got the issue list to see what's outstanding.

Originally Posted by Gustovier

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.

I do have a couple of mpeg2 files that someone sent me. I haven't much time testing video stuff yet, but, I have couple weeks over christmas, so I'm hoping to make some progress there. I'll do some testing to see if the Shield is using the hardware decoder.

Originally Posted by Gustovier

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.

Yeah, I notice this as well. This will be a tricky one. Not sure if SageTV handles this internally (it would be nice if it did), but, another problem is that I can't use long presses AND support this as well. Right now I have some directional long presses since the shield remote is very limited. long press down is pause, long press right is play, long press up is options. So, if I enable multiple sending of command when a key is pressed, then, I can't support long presses. I'll likely need to use an preference for this, since, on the shield remote, I'd rather have long presses, but on my logitech remote I'd rather have it sending multiple key presses.

[cncb]

Originally Posted by cncb

Also, does it seem like the player will allow for audio bitstreaming (DD and DTS)?

Does it look like this will be possible?

[brewston]

Originally Posted by stuckless

Right now I have some directional long presses since the shield remote is very limited. long press down is pause, long press right is play, long press up is options. So, if I enable multiple sending of command when a key is pressed, then, I can't support long presses. I'll likely need to use an preference for this, since, on the shield remote, I'd rather have long presses, but on my logitech remote I'd rather have it sending multiple key presses.

I was just playing with this, very cool

when FF/REW are implemented, would it make more sense to have :

long press right - FF
long press left - REW
long press up - options
long press down - pause
long press centre - STV's stop menu

A preference to toggle between long press and multiple presses for the different remotes makes sense to me

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by cncb

Does it look like this will be possible?

I have no idea

Originally Posted by brewston

I was just playing with this, very cool

when FF/REW are implemented, would it make more sense to have :

long press right - FF
long press left - REW
long press up - options
long press down - pause
long press centre - STV's stop menu

A preference to toggle between long press and multiple presses for the different remotes makes sense to me

I think these sorts of layout preferencs will have to come as part of a larger change that allows end users to remap buttons on their remote to specific actions (not to be confused with a similar feature that sagetv allows internally). Without that, it'll be a never ending requests of "I think long press down should be....". That whole piece is actually pretty compicated, since there are cases now where I change the action of the button depending on the media player state. ie, back is stop when media is playing, but it send BACK when media is not playing.

So, in essence, buttons have a single press, long press, and they could possibly have some context awareness, based on media playing or not. Some buttons like, navigation and select can not be media playback aware since when media is playing you can overlay a sagetv dialog, so up/down/left/right/select ALWAYS needs to send those commands.

Because of these scenarios, designing a button configuration screen is quite complex, and somewhat tedious... but I think it will need to happen eventually, so that people can configure and use a simple remote effectively.

[stuckless]

Thanks to pforemanpf (not sure who that maps to on the forums) we have a nice icon for the phone/tablet (instead of the green robot ) Thanks!!

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by stuckless

Thanks to pforemanpf (not sure who that maps to on the forums) we have a nice icon for the phone/tablet (instead of the green robot ) Thanks!!

fun! how do we activate the icon?

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by tvmaster2

fun! how do we activate the icon?

Likely wait for the next version release.

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

Likely wait for the next version release.

hehe. just installed 17 and realized that. doh

[gexi]

Originally Posted by stuckless

Thanks to pforemanpf (not sure who that maps to on the forums) we have a nice icon for the phone/tablet (instead of the green robot ) Thanks!!

Heh, that would be me. As long as you do not mind me tweaking things along the way in your app, I will keep opening pull requests. I've been learning Android on the side and this project gives me a good excuse.

Now if I could just figure out why firetv hates preference panels I could fix it in your app and mine.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by gexi

Heh, that would be me. As long as you do not mind me tweaking things along the way in your app, I will keep opening pull requests. I've been learning Android on the side and this project gives me a good excuse.

Now if I could just figure out why firetv hates preference panels I could fix it in your app and mine.

So, does the prefernces not show? Once I get the FireTV you sent me, I guess I'll have to look into that

As for the pull requests, by all means, submit away

[Gustovier]

I've also been looking for a reason to get back into Java development (I'm in IT mgmt these days..boo). Stuckless can you recommend some sites to start learning about video playback / graphic rendering on Android?

[gexi]

I have been looking into it some with a private build, as soon as I select preferences it kicks me out of the application. It also never seems to load preferences even though I have set a different set of default values in the code.

In the android emulators for both phone and TV it works fine so it must be something unique to the firetv.

If I figure something out I will submit a fix

[gexi]

Actually I think I've got something! Will submit a PR in a moment

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by Gustovier

I've also been looking for a reason to get back into Java development (I'm in IT mgmt these days..boo). Stuckless can you recommend some sites to start learning about video playback / graphic rendering on Android?

I'll see if I can dig up some information. To be honest, video playback and opengl is not my area of expertise either, so if find some good sites, I'll post them.

Originally Posted by gexi

I have been looking into it some with a private build, as soon as I select preferences it kicks me out of the application. It also never seems to load preferences even though I have set a different set of default values in the code.

In the android emulators for both phone and TV it works fine so it must be something unique to the firetv.

If I figure something out I will submit a fix

Must be some API that is being used that FireTV is not implementing, I guess

[gexi]

Originally Posted by stuckless

Must be some API that is being used that FireTV is not implementing, I guess

Nope, just a missing intent config. Pull request has been opened. Looking through the Amazon SDK, it appears that with Fire OS 5 they are essentially back in sync with Android.

As an added bonus, now that I can set preferences, switching to pull for the streaming mode fixes my comskip and tracking issues

Awesome work stuckless!

[stuckless]

So, last night I decided to watch a movie (mp4) using the Android MiniClient on the Shield TV. (Also just using the Shield remote). This is only the second time that I actually watched something from start to finish using an Android device. Most of the time I'm updating the App, testing a feature, and then back on the computer (repeat as needed).

My impressions were pretty good. I have "Surfaces" disabled, and it used "PULL" Streaming mode over WIFI. I'm also running Gemstone. I felt the UI was pretty decent (comparable to HD300, with a few minor glitches). The video playback was pretty solid (for that one file). I ended up having to pause/play a few times to get a snack, let the dog out, let the dog back in, etc, all normal stuff, and the App held up. Having mapped the long press down to PAUSE and long press RIGHT to play made it pretty easy to pause/play.

But, I did encounter a few things, and I logged some defects. I'll consider this out of ALPHA when I can use it, with a few quirks. As it stands, while I watched a movie OK, when I finished that and started to watch a recorded show, I ran into issues and I had to kill the app forcefully ... So, it's still not there.

What I did find out last night though, is that
- Resume Playback (for PULL media) was not working. (I thought this was working, but apparently not)
- When I'm playing a video, and I bring up on screen nav controls, to skip forward (it works), but when I press BACK button to close the nav, it also sends the media STOP command as well (because Back is mapped to Media Stop), which kicks me back to the sagetv UI.
- And Lastly, when I was playing the TV show, and I hit back, to stop the media, I got a spinning CIRCLE... Finally SageTV kicked me back to the main menu, but, the video's audio kept playing the background. Even when I exited the APP, the audio was playing. I ended up having to force quit on the App to stop it. I'm not sure what happened there, and it doesn't do it all the time, but I've seen this happen a couple times during testing as well.

Next week, I'm officially on holidays until the new year. So, I'm hoping to make some real progress on things. Specifically, I'm looking at re-adding the ExoPlayer back in, which needs a rewrite from when I first did it. Jeff and team are helping me by answering questions, etc, and once I get the ExoPlayer back in, I'll enlist their help to figure out why ExoPlayer won't play the TS stream that I'm getting from SageTV. I think that using ExoPlayer for PUSH mode (ie, live tv, ts files, mpeg2 files), will be better since I think the IJKPlayer is not enabling hardware decoding for the mpeg2 streams (and not sure why). Also while on vacation, I'm going to see about fixing some the UI gitches that I've been seeing. With any luck, maybe in January, we can have this project leave ALPHA and go into BETA.

I also have memory leaks, and performance tweaks to work on as well

Anyways, that's the status of things so far.

[nyplayer]

stuckless,


You are actually abandoning us to Spend time with your family and actually enjoy yourself???? How can you possibly do that.


PS thanks for everything you have done so far enjoy the holidays and other good things in life... I too am gong to sit back and not update or test anymore until after the holidays.

Once Again Thanks.

[Dargason]

Originally Posted by nyplayer

stuckless,


You are actually abandoning us to Spend time with your family and actually enjoy yourself???? How can you possibly do that.


PS thanks for everything you have done so far enjoy the holidays and other good things in life... I too am gong to sit back and not update or test anymore until after the holidays.

Once Again Thanks.

You read it the way I did... that he's going to take a break from this to spend well-deserved time with his family and friends.

When I read it again, I think maybe he meant he's on holiday from his real job and he plans to spend it working on this... I'm still not sure.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by Dargason

You read it the way I did... that he's going to take a break from this to spend well-deserved time with his family and friends.

When I read it again, I think maybe he meant he's on holiday from his real job and he plans to spend it working on this... I'm still not sure.

Pretty sure it's the latter.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by stuckless

Next week, I'm officially on holidays until the new year. So, I'm hoping to make some real progress on things.

Which means, that yeah, this is my new "job" while I'm vacation I'll be spending time with family as well, but right now, I can only spend about an hr a day on this (if I'm lucky), but when I'm on vacation, I can probably spend several hours a day on it (until my wife makes me go out with her).