Android/AndroidTV Placeshifter client (Discussion)

[Hotliner]

Originally Posted by stuckless

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).

There should be a "Like" button for this last post.. lol

[brewston]

Just wanted to add my thanks for the phenomenal progress you've made so far on this project..

[garfield659]

Just installed version 0.17Alpha on my Amazon Fire Phone and it works. It was a little jumpy but I was using wifi and the screen is small so sometimes I was not clicking the right place I think. Thank you so much for writing this app. I am so excited now I just purchased a Amazon Fire TV and can't wait to try it on there.

[Dargason]

Just a bump to remind people that the Indiegogo campaign is still ongoing. I didn't get around to contributing until today...

[stuckless]

The week I've been playing with ExoPlayer, again. ExoPlayer is a player framework, creating by Google, for Android. It's a nice player framework, but not without it's own set of problems. My main reason to look at ExoPlayer was to get PUSH working (which is what is used by LiveTV and has better support for seeking in ts files)

Probably the best feature of ExoPlayer is the fact that it can support the data sources more efficiently than what I've done with ijkplayer.

But, ExoPlayer can only play back media formats that it has explicitly handled, and it will only playback media for which android has native hardware playback.

In my testing, mp4 files seemed to play fine. MKV files were about 50/50... Video worked but audio didn't work if AC3 audio was used. My HDPVR h264 encoded TS files played (after I got a parsing fix from ExoPlayer).

Now the quirks...
Exo has a "philosophy" that if the file doesn't support seeking, then it won't let your seek it. .ts file are not seekable. In fact, when you seek, the file basically will just restart from the beginning. Players like ijkplayer do some extra work to enable seeking, which involves using approximation and multiple seek reads until it gets the right spot. Exo doesn't believe players should do that, and instead, you should use another format for your media that allows seeking. Given that the majority of my media is .ts files, this makes Exo almost useless to me

I tried some MPEG2 files (someone sent me a couple for testing), and neither of these played. Exo doesn't appear to have an mpeg2 extractor. I was hoping to test if the NVidia shield would play them.

Anyways, that's the state of ExoPlayer, for now. I'm still doing some work on it, but I'm also still looking into better support of PUSH with ijkplayer... I'll have to to determine at a some point, which is better, in the long run... Exo or IJK... Right now they both have their quirks.

[Gustovier]

Stuckless,

You probably came across this already, but is it possible to tell sage server to take TS stream and send it over HLS . Exoplayer will perform proper seeking because it now can use the HLS playlist as an indexing mechanism.

Now that I'm thinking about this sage tv I believe has no native support for hls and the necessary web server needed (although could be done via addons). But ffmpeg is there so maybe it's possible...

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by stuckless

The week I've been playing with ExoPlayer, again. ExoPlayer is a player framework, creating by Google, for Android. It's a nice player framework, but not without it's own set of problems. My main reason to look at ExoPlayer was to get PUSH working (which is what is used by LiveTV and has better support for seeking in ts files)

Probably the best feature of ExoPlayer is the fact that it can support the data sources more efficiently than what I've done with ijkplayer.

But, ExoPlayer can only play back media formats that it has explicitly handled, and it will only playback media for which android has native hardware playback.

In my testing, mp4 files seemed to play fine. MKV files were about 50/50... Video worked but audio didn't work if AC3 audio was used. My HDPVR h264 encoded TS files played (after I got a parsing fix from ExoPlayer).

Now the quirks...
Exo has a "philosophy" that if the file doesn't support seeking, then it won't let your seek it. .ts file are not seekable. In fact, when you seek, the file basically will just restart from the beginning. Players like ijkplayer do some extra work to enable seeking, which involves using approximation and multiple seek reads until it gets the right spot. Exo doesn't believe players should do that, and instead, you should use another format for your media that allows seeking. Given that the majority of my media is .ts files, this makes Exo almost useless to me

I tried some MPEG2 files (someone sent me a couple for testing), and neither of these played. Exo doesn't appear to have an mpeg2 extractor. I was hoping to test if the NVidia shield would play them.

Anyways, that's the state of ExoPlayer, for now. I'm still doing some work on it, but I'm also still looking into better support of PUSH with ijkplayer... I'll have to to determine at a some point, which is better, in the long run... Exo or IJK... Right now they both have their quirks.

It sounds like work needs to commence on the server side then. It takes almost no server side power to convert a TS to a PS. It takes almost no power to convert an AC3 audio stream to AAC. These are the features that are already built into the placeshifter protocol, aren't they? Have you tried only telling the server that your client supports what exo will playback, and see what happens?

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by Gustovier

Stuckless,

You probably came across this already, but is it possible to tell sage server to take TS stream and send it over HLS . Exoplayer will perform proper seeking because it now can use the HLS playlist as an indexing mechanism.

Now that I'm thinking about this sage tv I believe has no native support for hls and the necessary web server needed (although could be done via addons). But ffmpeg is there so maybe it's possible...

I've seen the HLS support in the core, and I'll look at it eventually. My guess is that it didn't work great which is why it's not used today Once PUSH is working, it'll handle seeking for TS streams on the server side, which will be extremely fast (it's what the HD300 uses). The challenge is updating the Player to "know" what is happening.

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

It sounds like work needs to commence on the server side then. It takes almost no server side power to convert a TS to a PS. It takes almost no power to convert an AC3 audio stream to AAC. These are the features that are already built into the placeshifter protocol, aren't they? Have you tried only telling the server that your client supports what exo will playback, and see what happens?

When I started out, I started out just telling the client that it can handle h264 streams... I had mixed results. I still have to write the code that can auto discover the audio/video codecs and built the MiniClient support list based on that, but I haven't gotten there, yet.

From talking with Jeff, I don't think the seeking performance will be all that great when you are trancoding on the fly... even if the cpu processing isn't that great, you still need to restart the transcoding process.

Right now I have questions out to the ExoPlayer team and the IJK developer on different things. I think we'll eventually get this right, but it's going to take some time and effort.

[Fuzzy]

Oh, I understand performance will be impacted doing the transcoding, but that's why I had mentioned the need to do some work server side. Currently, the transcoding is actually on the fly, meaning as the data is transcoded, it is sent to the client. For these types of light-weight transcodings, it might make more sense to let the transcoder work at full speed, and have that result stored temporarily on the server, and have the client access the transcoded file instead.

[BobbyDing]

Hi All,
I've been having issues when first installing and connecting this app and I'm hoping somebody might help shed some light on what's going wrong. As brief as possible... 3 different android devices have the same issue. When I first connect to my server (windows V9) with the android device and start the initial setup (at home, in network), the device will freeze and the server (service) stops/crashes. After which I cannot get the service to start again. I have to jump back to a previous image of the system to get the Sage service to start successfully. The same device(s) will work fine with a Sage V7 test pc I keep around (only they get the time limit error). The V9 server does have many plugins installed and it may be one of those that the android app is not liking. Attached are two sage log files. The larger is when the service was running fine until I tried connecting the app and the service stopped. The smaller file is just trying to restart the service and it keeps stopping. The app is V0.17. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!!
.

[stuckless]

From you logs, it appears you are hitting this bug in SageTCPServer.

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...993#post581993

You can try to removing the SageTCPServer plugin, and see if you get the same issue, to verify if it is SageTCPServer.

[gexi]

For anyone trying to build the latest mini client using the command line, these instructions may help:
From a clean directory
1) git clone https://github.com/google/ExoPlayer.git
2) cd ExoPlayer
3) git co dev
4) gradle build (to create the 1.5.4 development Exoplayer libraries)
5) mvn install:install-file -Dfile=library/build/outputs/aar/library-release.aar -DgroupId=com.google.android.exoplayer -DartifactId=exoplayer -Dversion=r1.5.4-SNAPSHOT -Dpackaging=aar
(this will manually install the exoplayer version sagetv needs to build)

You should then be able to switch back to the mini client directory and build

[BobbyDing]

Originally Posted by stuckless

From you logs, it appears you are hitting this bug in SageTCPServer.

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...993#post581993

You can try to removing the SageTCPServer plugin, and see if you get the same issue, to verify if it is SageTCPServer.

Thank You Sean. That appears to have been the culprit!

Bobby

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by gexi

For anyone trying to build the latest mini client using the command line, these instructions may help:
From a clean directory
1) git clone https://github.com/google/ExoPlayer.git
2) cd ExoPlayer
3) git co dev
4) gradle build (to create the 1.5.4 development Exoplayer libraries)
5) mvn install:install-file -Dfile=library/build/outputs/aar/library-release.aar -DgroupId=com.google.android.exoplayer -DartifactId=exoplayer -Dversion=r1.5.4-SNAPSHOT -Dpackaging=aar
(this will manually install the exoplayer version sagetv needs to build)

You should then be able to switch back to the mini client directory and build

I will eventually put out a build that includes ExoPlayer as well... just waiting to get some information back form the ExoPlayer team on a couple issues... Since as it is, I didn't feel the current implementation was stable enough to release.

[gexi]

No problem at all, just been working on the side and wanted to post the instructions in case anyone else was working locally also. Not rushing by any means, I just like to live on the edge

Originally Posted by stuckless

I will eventually put out a build that includes ExoPlayer as well... just waiting to get some information back form the ExoPlayer team on a couple issues... Since as it is, I didn't feel the current implementation was stable enough to release.

[bweb]

tldr: should i try to use client on firetv stick or nexus player for my mom? or what is my best (and cheapest) option to get her up and running asap?

Short story: my mom's sagetv7 died, at the moment i've rebuilt it in an old pc which i think is strong enough to be a server and i'm looking for extenders.

re android dev, wow stuckless, thanks for building for the community, i'll check out the donation site.

my question: if i'm looking for an extender or 2 for my mom, its gotta have a remote and be decently stable. i saw "fire tv stick" was listed... I have both a nexus player and a fire tv stick, are either good/stable/feature complete enough to give to my mom or should i stick with a windows box or buy an hd200/300? (i wish i had bought them an extender a while back, i saw the thread where they sold out of the hd200 and have some hd300.

[Dargason]

I don't think Sean's android miniclient is ready for prime-time use yet. I'd say go with a PC client (windows or linux) or go ahead and get an extender. I think there might still be a few HD300s available. If not, you might find some used ones for sale here or elsewhere (ebay, craigslist, etc)

If she can wait a while, an android extender might be a possibility, but only stuckless can say when that might be.

[trk2]

Originally Posted by bweb

tldr: should i try to use client on firetv stick or nexus player for my mom? or what is my best (and cheapest) option to get her up and running asap?

Short story: my mom's sagetv7 died, at the moment i've rebuilt it in an old pc which i think is strong enough to be a server and i'm looking for extenders.

re android dev, wow stuckless, thanks for building for the community, i'll check out the donation site.

my question: if i'm looking for an extender or 2 for my mom, its gotta have a remote and be decently stable. i saw "fire tv stick" was listed... I have both a nexus player and a fire tv stick, are either good/stable/feature complete enough to give to my mom or should i stick with a windows box or buy an hd200/300? (i wish i had bought them an extender a while back, i saw the thread where they sold out of the hd200 and have some hd300.

The HD300 is a robust and proven solution. I think it would save you and your mom many headaches versus an Android solution which is still in development.

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by bweb

tldr: should i try to use client on firetv stick or nexus player for my mom? or what is my best (and cheapest) option to get her up and running asap?

Short story: my mom's sagetv7 died, at the moment i've rebuilt it in an old pc which i think is strong enough to be a server and i'm looking for extenders.

re android dev, wow stuckless, thanks for building for the community, i'll check out the donation site.

my question: if i'm looking for an extender or 2 for my mom, its gotta have a remote and be decently stable. i saw "fire tv stick" was listed... I have both a nexus player and a fire tv stick, are either good/stable/feature complete enough to give to my mom or should i stick with a windows box or buy an hd200/300? (i wish i had bought them an extender a while back, i saw the thread where they sold out of the hd200 and have some hd300.

It all depends on what you want .... The android Client will give access to Netflix and other stuff like Plex kodi etc... but like it was previously stated the Android Miniclient is not quite ready for prime time.

[stuckless]

I think that if stability is key, then I'd seriously look at HD300 (or HD200s). The Android MiniClient just went into beta, and I suspect it;ll be sitting there for some time while I try to improve stability and usability.

Also, the Android MiniClient can't use mpeg2 hardware decoding, even if it exists. This is a limitation of IJKPlayer in that they haven't implemented it... and I'm not 100% sure that ExoPlayer supports it either. So, if you have mpeg2 capture cards, then that would play a factor as well.