[mythtv-users] Leanfront observations

[BP]

On 4/23/20 6:38 AM, James Abernathy wrote:
> 
>> On Apr 22, 2020, at 5:52 PM, Peter Bennett <pb.mythtv at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On 4/22/20 5:06 PM, Larry Kennedy wrote:
>>> Peter,
>>>
>>> I got around to installing Leanfront on my Shield.  I have to say this app is very impressive!  Great job!
>>>
>>
>> Thanks for the kind words.
>>
>> Note - the documentation mentions LiveTV. Thai is not yet in the apk release. I am doing some final testing on that before releasing an apk with LiveTV support in the next couple of days.
>>
>> Peter
> 
> I agree with the praise for Leanfront. My wife and I are using it for 90% of our Mythtv activity.  Basically all my wife’s viewing is Leanfront and I use it except for Video editing and schedule management.
> 
> Leanfront is definitely the best video quality on Shield TV and FireTV 4K; with the Shield TV being better than the FireTV 4k. Both mythtv-frontend and leanfront have very good video quality, but Leanfront is the smoothest, and doesn’t suffer the timeline problems that happen 10-15 minutes into a playback like Android mythfrontend.
> 
> Jim A
> 

In concept, it is a nice start and has great promise.  I think it has a 
lot of merit simplifying what the frontend is.  I also think that as 
various streaming services have come to be and the explosion of various 
tv based apps since MythTV strived to be the "mythical convergence", 
that streaming boxes have become what MythTV tried to be.  The vision 
was right on about where things would go.  Some things just got done 
better by other developers (many of which are paid).  Myth's DVR is 
still unrivaled.  And I think that is mostly thanks to the scheduler. 
Other things like unlimited storage space, being able to add as many 
tuners as you desire and not having strict expiration timers are also 
great benefits.

I see a Myth Recordings frontend sitting on a box like the Shield as the 
best solution today.  Music is best served by a myriad of other apps. 
Plex (if you don't mind a centralized database knowing what movies you 
have) or Jellyfish are doing movie collections better.  Lots of other 
better solutions for viewing your photo collections on a tv.  Then all 
the streaming services offering tons of content.  Myth's advantage for 
all features is privacy.  Ultimately, I see DVRs dying as people 
subscribe to streaming services with all the content available on 
demand.  I'm guessing I'll be migrated from a typical cable service 
within the next three years depending on how the broadcast tv industry 
evolves.  Recordings played through Myth still have advantages over 
network streaming apps at this time.  ATSC 3.0 OTA might throw a curve 
ball in there as well with some of it's features.


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).