[mythtv-users] What's the deal with Kodi?

Andréas Kühne andreas at kuhne.se
Fri May 22 07:04:30 UTC 2015


2015-05-22 4:12 GMT+02:00 Michael Watson <michael at thewatsonfamily.id.au>:

> On 22/05/2015 10:50 AM, Eric Sharkey wrote:
>
>> On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 9:11 AM, Brian J. Murrell <brian at interlinx.bc.ca>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On Thu, 2015-05-21 at 13:08 +0100, Gordon McCrae wrote:
>>>
>>>> OK, I don't get that at all, so I suggest your specific setup is causing
>>>> the slowness (or mine is causing "fastness"?).
>>>>
>>> Or you just don't have as much data.
>>>
>>>  If I'm understanding you correctly, I select "Live TV / Recordings",
>>>> then I choose "Default", "Horizon", "Horizon - Volcano Hell" ..... and
>>>> the video starts immediately. No delays were experienced at all.
>>>>
>>> How many recordings do you have in your database?  I have 1886
>>> currently.
>>>
>>> On a remote machine I get about a 20sec lag after choosing Recordings
>>> and then I see my recording groups and a "Working" spinner on the bottom
>>> right that never seems go to away.
>>>
>>
>> I haven't used it in a while, so I thought I'd try it again.  I just
>> timed it on my cell phone (Samsung Note 4).  Remembering that Kodi
>> doesn't work with the stylus and needs a finger took about a minute.
>>  From touching "Live TV" to getting to the list of channels (waiting
>> for the channels and EPG stuff to import) was about six minutes.
>> Trying to remember where I was supposed to click to get to
>> "Recordings" was about four minutes.  (Under a "settings" like gear
>> icon?  Seriously?)  To get "Default" to show up was about 30 second.
>> After that it was fairly quick to select a show and get it playing.
>> Hitting the back button to try and select a different show brought up
>> the working spinner for about a minute while the show played in the
>> background.  I never did make it back to the program list and ended up
>> quitting Kodi entirely.
>>
>> Starting it again I had hoped it wouldn't have to suck down the EPG
>> data again, but it did.  It was faster on the second run but still
>> took a couple of minutes.
>>
>> All in all, I find Kodi's user interface to be extremely
>> counter-intuitive in just about every respect.  Everything I do seems
>> to be the wrong way to do something and even when I eventually figure
>> out what I'm supposed to do it takes minutes.
>>
>> (FWIW, I currently have 4354 recordings in the Default group which
>> consume 7890GB and 291 unique xmltvids in the channels table.)
>>
>> Eric
>>
>>  MythFrontend essentially cheats, as its clearly part of MythTV it is
> allowed to access the database directly, where any "third party" app must
> use the limited functionality of the MythAPI - Not really forced to, but
> frowned upon if it does.
>
>     It is my belief that MythTV should be split into two distinct projects
> (MythTV Backend, MythTV Frontend).   If the Official frontend was forced to
> use the API only, then we would see a lot more development of the API, thus
> providing faster and better features that any third party frontend can take
> advantage of, and possibly the ability to create "Official" android/iOS
> Frontend apps.
>
> I think if nothing else, this thread has shown a real need/desire for a
> lightweight frontend capable of running on Pi/iOS/Android devices.
>
> A point I find interesting between Kodi and Myth Frontend is:  On both my
> frontend PC's, after selecting a recording to watch and pressing play -
> Myth Frontend can take anywhere from 2 sec - 30 sec to start playing the
> recording, where Kodi will start almost instantly every time.  If only
> kodi-pvr-mythtv plugin cached the recording/guide content and updated in
> the background to provide a snappier experience, I would no longer be using
> Myth Frontend.
>
>
>
>
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I'm not really sure that the mytthv api can be upgraded to work faster. It
runs an XML interface which is probably the main problem (generating and
parsing XML takes time). It could be switched to json or to a binary format
for speed, but going to a binary format we will have the same issues as
now. Anyone who wants to can look at the mythtv source code and implement
their frontend the same way mythfrontend is implemented (direct access to
the mysql database). It will be frowned on by the mythtv developers and
subject to change, but it will work for a specific version of mythtv.

What could be changed easily would be to load only the curent showing
recordings each time you look at the recordings screen instead of loading
all recordings each time. That way you would be able to load the
information in the background and it wouldn't take as long to load.

Regards,

Andréas
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