[mythtv-users] Experimental Android TV "leanback" MythTV frontend

[James Abernathy]

On 8/23/19 4:49 PM, James Abernathy wrote:
>
> On 8/22/19 11:14 AM, Peter Bennett wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 8/21/19 3:17 PM, Peter Bennett wrote:
>>> I am developing a pure android application for Android TV devices 
>>> called android-MythTV-Leanfront.
>>>
>>> It uses the android TV leanback user interface as used by other apps 
>>> such as youtube, prime video, etc. to play MythTV recordings.
>>>
>>> It supports 4K resolution video at 50 fps and voice search, which 
>>> are not working on mythfrontend for android. Also it supports 
>>> surround sound.
>>>
>>> It does not yet support many of the important features of 
>>> Mythfrontend, and some features it may never support.
>>>
>>> See https://github.com/bennettpeter/android-MythTV-Leanfront for 
>>> more details
>>>
>>> Peter
>>
>>
>> To answer David's question on IRC - Some reasons for attempting this:
>>
>> - I saw an opportunity to use the android exoplayer library and the 
>> sample program to easily build a new frontend.
>>
>> - Support Voice search, 4K playback, use only service api and avoid 
>> version dependence.
>>
>> - Avoid Existing android frontend problems - it is compiled with 
>> IGNORE_SCHEMA_VER_MISMATCH, IGNORE_PROTO_VER_MISMATCH", it will not 
>> support 4K or ipv6, we have to build with out of date ndk.
>>
>> - frontend should not require a 4k device to play 1080 recordings.
>>
>> Peter
>
> I've been playing with the new leanfront app on my Shield TV on a 
> 4K-60fps Samsung TV. I'm comparing the mythfrontend app to the new 
> Leanfront mythtv app. If I watch a networked news broadcast which is 
> 1080i OTA recorded from and antenna and a Hauppauge WinTV Quad PCIe 
> tuner I see only a very slight difference.  The news broadcast has a 
> text crawl along the bottom inserted by the local tv station with 
> weather and traffic. Depending on the app you view this with, you can 
> see small differences in the jitter of the news crawl. Normally with 
> the TV showing the news straight from the antenna using it's internal 
> tuner the crawl is perfect. With the Shield TV Kodi app, and 
> Mythtv-leanback app the crawl is perfect just like the TV only 
> viewing. The Shield TV Mythtv-frontend android app has just a very 
> slight jitter in the crawl. You have to look hard to notice it.  Also 
> testing with the Raspberry Pi 4 with mythtv combo Frontend and backend 
> there is no jitter on the crawl.
>
> So now for a couple of questions on the Leanback app. Is there a way 
> to delete a program from the list you don't want? How can you skip 
> forward and backward easily. using the ">>" control seems to be very 
> hard for me.
>
> Jim A
>
>
So based on this mornings test, I think I see something different from 
what I reported previous.

Program was a recording of a CBS News program on a local OTA station. 
1080i HD, MPEG2 ATSC. TV was a Samsung 4K.

This morning the Shield TV apps, Mythtv-frontend, 
Android-mythtv-leanback, and Kodi 18.3 all were perfectly smooth on the 
text crawl at the bottom of the screen. absolutely no different. Some 
panning looked jump, but I noticed that it looked that way on a Live TV 
with internal tuner, so that's a filming issue with the source material 
not Mythtv or HDHR tuners.

The only jitter I saw was on my Raspberry Pi 4B 4GB RAM. The news 
program was recording while I was viewing the start of it. There was a 
slight jitter in the news crawl. It's would run for seconds perfectly 
smooth, then a slight jitter of a few letters, then smooth again.

All solutions were very watchable.

Jim A