[mythtv-users] MythTV Android Frontend is now available in the Google Play Market

[Ronald Frazier]

On Sun, Oct 7, 2012 at 7:35 AM, Daniel Frey <dmfrey at gmail.com> wrote:
> All,
>
> The MythTV Android Frontend is now available in the Google Play Market:
> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mythtv&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDEsIm9yZy5teXRodHYiXQ..
>
> Dan


Ah, now it's there. Just got a new tablet on friday, so I had to read
through all the threads here yesterday trying to figure out where to
get the apk from. If I'd just waited another day I'd have saved myself
some time :-)

So anyway, I installed your Sep 22 (I think) apk from git yesterday
and got it working. My first problem was that I compile myth myself
and didn't have the right config flags enabled. You might want to
document that somewhere so people don't have to figure it own by
looking through this forum. It might be a good idea to have a webpage
with that and other useful video and then have a menu item in the app
to take you to that page.

Once I got that working, streaming works fine, but there's 2 issues.

The first is that when starting playback, it takes a long time...about
20-30 seconds. I assume this is solely dependent on the backend's
transcoding speed, right? My backend is a Core 2 Duo E4500 system
(which is on the lower end of Core 2 line, performance wise), and the
transcoding takes about 170% CPU utilization (so almost all of both
cores). Is that any indication that the backend can barely keep up
(ie, does the transcoder only transcode as needed), or will the
transcoder just use all available CPU to continue transcoding the
whole recording as fast as it can (and then streaming playback will
continue from the transcoded temporary file)? Can anyone with a faster
backend (like maybe a newer ivy bridge Core i5 or i7) say how fast
playback begins? I had been thinking of upgrading my backend for some
time, so this would be another item on the list of excuses to do so.

The second issue was that there is no seeking available. I've seen in
some other threads that seeking via HLS in a live stream is possible
but it depends on the client. Do you know of any android clients that
work fine for this? I've tried dice player and mx player with no luck.
I can't find the BS Player Lite you recommended, and BS Player Free
doesn't seem to work. I wanted to try VLC beta, but it's not
compatible with the Asus Transformer Infinity, apparently. Without
seeking, this isn't really usable for me personally, as I've got to
sit through the 2-minute pre-roll I have on all recording, plus
commercials. And then any time playback aborts randomly, or even if I
switch out to another app or back, I've got to start playback all over
again from the beginning.


Otherwise, the app is decent. For the guide you need better sorting of
channels (right now it seems semi-sorted with a touch of
randomness...my guess is you are sorting by the channel id rather than
channel number). Having callsigns or channel names (and being able to
sort on them) would also be useful. The recording list could badly use
some filtering, as right now I see a few hundred livetv shows mixed in
with my recordings.



-- 
Ron Frazier