[mythtv-users] Windows 10 - Kodi using MythTV API

[Richard Lane]

---- On Fri, 26 Oct 2018 17:32:22 +0100 Greg Oliver <oliver.greg at gmail.com> wrote ----

 > On Thu, Oct 25, 2018 at 12:48 PM Mike Bibbings <mike.bibbings at gmail.com> wrote:
 > On 25/10/2018 17:52, Greg Oliver wrote:
 > On Thu, Oct             25, 2018 at 2:23 AM Tom Harris <thom.j.harris at gmail.com>             wrote:
 > On Wed, Oct 24, 2018 at 4:55 PM Greg                       Oliver <oliver.greg at gmail.com>                       wrote:
 > Hi,
 > 
 > I                           was recently given a Surface Pro 3, so I did                           like everyone would do and bought a $25 dock                           for it and turned it into a MythTV frontend :)
 > 
 > Then                           I got to thinking - since only my Roku (it is                           currently a 100% Linux house) allows me to                           play back episodes on all of my pay channels'                           apps, I though - why not try Windows 10 - it                           has tiles that are easily navigated with a                           remote control and all of those channel apps                           are also available there.  I never made it                           that far.  The dock ethernet is Gigabit and                           gets every bit of it, but kodi's skip forward                           and back is noticeable to the point of                           unusable (it takes seconds to go back and                           forth a minute).  An android nvidia shield is                           instant with kodi doing the same thing.  I am                           just dumbfounded how something 10x faster and                           with much greater resources than the shield is                           so much faster.
 > 
 > I                           could not find anything related on the web, so                           am asking here if anyone else has experienced                           and overcome this?
 > 
 > I’m not 100% sure we’re talking about the same                       thing, but from my experience:
 > 
 > The default Kodi settings have a delay before                       acting on the skip ahead/back commands.   Kodi has                       logic for multiple keypresses jumping father (e.g.                       i click = 20 sec, 2 = 1 minute, 3 = 5 minutes) so                       it delays to see if more clicks are coming.   For                       a MythTV user accustomed to instant action this is                       really annoying.
 > 
 > In System -> Video -> Playback you can tweak these settings.  Change ’Skip Delay’ to                         0 for a much more responsive UI. 
 >  (I wrote up a few observations when I first                       set up Kodi.  Mailing list link:  http://lists.mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/2015-November/383134.html )
 > 
 > 
 > Thanks for the tip,             but I just tried that (it was set to 750ms) and it still             behaves the same (although a little time is shaved             obviously).  My nVidia shields are pretty instant - I will             check one of those to see what those settings are (I never             changed them).  I get the spinner for close to a second on             each jump.
 > 
 > Oh well, I guess I             will start digging into Windows settings trying to hunt it             down (or search Kodi forums, etc)..
 > 
 > 
 > As well as changing "skip delay" to 0 , try changing "skip steps"       e.g. I have only -30 sec and 30 sec set, which works fine for me       in LiveTV and recordings
 > 
 > Mike.
 > 
 > 
 > I'm not sure how Kodi works behind the scenes, but I am currently using miracast to get the output to the TV until the mini-dp --> hdmi adapter shows up.  If it is like anything else that casts, I should see display issues rather than network latency, but I am not.  I will wait until I test with it cabled to a TV before I go digging any further - it will be here today and I'll test some more.
 > 
 > -Greg
 > 
 >  
 > _______________________________________________
 > mythtv-users mailing list 
 > mythtv-users at mythtv.org 
 > http://lists.mythtv.org/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users 
 > http://wiki.mythtv.org/Mailing_List_etiquette 
 > MythTV Forums: https://forum.mythtv.org 
 > 

Kodis skip performance was one of the reasons I went back to mythfrontend. Most of my recordings have several minutes run-in and so the kids typically bash skip forward several times as soon as starting a recording, and then skip back a bit. Mythfrontend copes with this, even on the Pi2. Kodi on the Pi2 doesn't, and even when its accessing a recording directly on the same machine its stored it wasnt much better. The skipskipskipskip would cause kodi to sit and think for long enough to frustrate the kids, and a skipskipskipskip-backskip-backskip would often outright crash kodi. Changing the buffer settings seemed to help a bit but not enough to be called stable. I also set 'skip delay' to 0 and 'skip steps' to -30sec,+1min only, to reflect our mythtv settings as we simply couldnt get to grips with using skip steps in kodis default configuration. 

So not so much a solution but a 'you're not going mad, here too.'

Interestingly, running kodi on my xbox one accessing the same content is much more stable, as you've found with the Shield. It does seem that Kodis broad brush (runs on everything) leads to a very high YMMV factor.