[mythtv-users] Leanfront observations

[Peter Bennett]

On 4/23/20 2:30 PM, BP wrote:
> Unfortunately, like every other API based client I've tried, the lean 
> frontend suffers from being painfully slow loading/sorting recording 
> data. Until the API has a paging method (or some other scheme for 
> clients to asynchronously retrieve data in chunks) to retrieve 
> recording data, I don't see any API based frontend being a good user 
> experience for people with a lot of recordings.  A database native 
> frontend is near instant loading while I've waited 10s of seconds for 
> API based ones. Hopefully Peter's work on this frontend will provide 
> some visibility in to API weaknesses (and create an itch for someone 
> with spare time to improve it).

The API does have the ability to retrieve recordings in chunks of any 
number at a time. You can tell it how many at a time to retrieve. I have 
not used this feature. Obviously that makes the code more complex.

How many recordings do you have and what is the sort of timing you get?

In my experience, mythfrontend itself takes a really long time to start. 
With android, the splash screen shows for a long time  I get a quicker 
load time from leanfront.

I just ran a couple of timing tests, on a fire stick 4k.

I have 921 recordings and 432 videos. Leanfront opened and loaded the 
programs and videos in 7 seconds. mythfrontend took 18 seconds to open, 
then 2 seconds to load the program list, after selecting it from the menu.

Unfortunately, leanfront does not dynamically update, so you have to 
refresh the list if there are changes.

The main impetus behind leanfront was to give the best playback, 
including playback of 4K videos and recordings.

Peter