[mythtv-users] MythTV on Android

[Thomas Mashos]

On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 11:39 AM, Eric Sharkey <eric at lisaneric.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 1:44 PM, Thomas Mashos <thomas at mashos.com> wrote:
>> This would probably work clunky at best. You would need to initiate
>> the transcode, at which point it would transcode the file. You'll need
>> a pretty powerful backend machine to transcode HD material in real
>> time (or faster) so you'll looking at waiting around the length of the
>> video (or longer) before you can start downloading (Unless you want to
>> keep the connection alive on your android device, goodbye battery
>> life). Once you start downloading, you then have to DL a large file
>> (likely still > 1GB) which shouldn't take terribly long, but it's
>> still a multistep process.
>
> Isn't that almost exactly how HLS works?  It's all done automatically.
>  The end user doesn't have to manually orchestrate this.
>
> Eric
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Thanks for cutting out the rest of my response. I'm sure it was just
fluff and completely unnecessary.

Very basics, yes, that is how it works except when it comes to
expectations (which is what we're trying to manage here). When a user
starts streaming a video from the backend, they expect to watch it
now. We would expect the wifi connection to stay up during that time.
As they are watching, we expect the screen to stay on and "providing
they are on battery power" the user should expect to use as much
battery as necessary to watch a show. The user also would expect it to
take ~30 minutes of time to watch 30 minutes of show.

When you aren't watching it streaming (and instead are downloading the
show), those same expectations don't exist anymore for the user. At
best, the users wants to select download, come back later and have it
finished. While that's fine and all, from a development standpoint it
adds a lot of complexity. Should we wait until the transcode is
finished before beginning download or just start downloading as soon
as the chunks are available? What do we do if the wifi connection
drops? Do we force keep the screen on (since wifi turns off when the
screen does)? etc.

All of that adds a fair amount of complexity (which I'm sure Daniel
has enough of already). I'm not trying to sound like a dick, but I am
sure that patches are welcome.

Thanks,

Thomas Mashos