[mythtv-users] Leanfront on firetv (not 4k) HDHR problem

[Peter Bennett]

On 12/30/19 12:16 PM, Ken Mandelberg wrote:
> I happen to have an older firetv stick (not 4K), and thought I would 
> try leanfront on it. My backend server runs a few week old version of 
> the master and uses an HDHR with Comcast, and I used the stick HDMI to 
> connect to a 5 year old Samsung TV (HD, not 4K).
>
> The leanfront is the "86" apk.
>
> The good news is it ran perfectly against mkv videos I happened to 
> have on the server.
>
> The bad news is the HDHR "ts' files had an issue. For about 8 minutes 
> they would work fine, and then started have some audio glitches, and 
> then a minute or so later would pause, get the rotating circle, 
> continue for a bit, pause, get the rotating circle, .... I suppose 
> that's some kind of buffering.
>
> I tried several recordings and the behavior was pretty consistent.
>
> Wondering if it was the "ts' format, I took one of the "ts" recordings 
> on the server and did a ffmpeg copy to a mkv file, and put it in the 
> video directory. When I played it there was no pause loop, but there 
> were concessional audio glitches after a while that I never see on the 
> other frontends, and I didn't see on the native mkv videos with 
> leanfront.
>
> So, any thoughts on this? Would a firetv 4k stick make any difference?
>
>
>
I also noticed that the old fire stick was having this type of problem, 
also the old fire stick does not deinterlace. I suspect either that the 
old fire stick does not support mpeg2 very well, or that the network 
interface on the old model is too slow.

The 4k stick works much better and I have not seen the problem after 
using it extensively for watching in the past few weeks.

If you want to convert files to mkv I recommend using mkvmerge rather 
than ffmpeg. This can help in some cases.
mkvmerge -o <output filename> <input filename>
You can replace the existing file on disk with the converted file, even 
keeping the extension as ts. I recommend trying this first on an 
unimportant recording in case of problems.

I don't think HDHR has anything to do with the problem.

Peter