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Hello,
I'm a new user and have been playing around with XBMC (13.2) and ServerWMC for a couple of days now. I'm coming from a standard WMC setup mainly used for Live TV (my wife loves channel surfing) and recorded TV.
After using the XBMC+ServerWMC setup for a few hours, I've encountered a few "problems" compared to WMC Live TV and I'm hoping maybe someone can point me in the right direction. I don't know if these are XBMC or ServerWMC questions, so maybe I'm in wrong forum. I have a MCE IR receiver and a Flirc to use for a remote.
1. Is it possible to be in the EPG and press channel numbers to jump to that channel within the EPG? For example, if the EPG is on channel 2 I would like to type in "702" and have the EPG Timeline go to 702.
2. When I'm watching a channel and open the EPG to browse but then want to go back to the channel I was watching, I can't just press "exit or back" because it never clears out to the channel (it leaves the home menu open). Is there a way around this?
3. Can I program a "Live TV" button that starts playing the last open channel (I don't want the XBMC option that opens automatically to the last channel, I want an actual remote/keyboard button)? This exists in WMC but I can't seem to figure out how to get it in XBMC.
4. When watching a channel and press guide to open the EPG it causes my playback to stutter and sometimes makes the screen go black before "settling in." I have a decently powerful PC so I don't think hardware is the issue, but maybe there's a setting to make this smoother?
5. Any mods/tweaks/settings to make channel changes a little faster? It's about double the time it takes on WMC. I can live with it if need be, but this would help WAF.
Sorry for the long and obnoxious list, hopefully some of these can be answered? I've read about keyboard mapping a little bit by editing the XML but I'm not sure how this would work for a "custom" button. Like if random on screen buttons that are programmable, how do I associate those specific keys in the XML document?
Thanks to anyone who can help!
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jdlive
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If you happen to be using an HDHomeRun Prime to get cable, then setting up ServerWMC to use DLNA will make the channel changing much faster (see the thread below for the how-to). If not, then I'm afraid you're stuck with the delays. Before I switched over to using DLNA, I would actually go back to using WMC if I wanted to "channel surf", i.e. those rare times when I wanted to watch multiple football games or other live events. Most of my other TV watching is via recorded shows, so it's not a big issue.
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Just fyi, items 1-3 are not specific to our addon, but general to pvr in xbmc (I don't know the answer to the questions but someone here or the forum above this sub-forum will).
4. I can't reproduce this one. My guess is its related to your pc and graphics setup in xbmc but don't know for sure. Maybe play with the settings (like graphic acceleration, etc). If you still don't get anywhere, post more detailed steps about what you are doing. I doubt whatever is happening here is something we have control in the addon though.
5. Like jdlive says, dlna gives much faster channel changes (for most people). Actually it might even be faster than wmc, but have never tested. You can pause live tv, but not indefinitely and FF and RW kind of work. Its worth a try anyway and see if the wife says anything. You have to update to kodi (14.*) though and use the newest version of our addon to try it. Also even without dlna, 14.* should have faster channel changes since it is supposed to incorporate the so-called margro channel speedup so far as I know.
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Thanks for replying, krustyreturns. I'm new to this so hopefully my questions weren't taken as an insult to your awesome addon.
With some help from a user on reddit, I was able to solve 1-3 with Kodi 14 RC3 and some keyboard mapping (I'm using Flirc). #4 seems to have been resolved with Kodi 14 as well. I may give the dlna a shot as some point, but for now my wife says she can live with the delays as long as the EPG timeline is working well (which it now is).
One question I have, maybe someone can answer, is regarding the EPG Timeline view. Not sure if this is a skin thing or not (using Aeon Nox) but is it possible to have the Timeline not show what was previously on, and just start at what is currently on? For example, if it's 3:45PM it will still show shows from 3:15PM even though they are over. Makes browsing a little annoying, but not the end of the world.
Appreciate the help.
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I was going to post to say at least #1 was implemented in Kodi 14 which it sounds like you've already figured out. Cool to find out that you could fix #2 and #3 as well... id be interested in more details on how #2 is resolved (was your issue that you couldnt jump back to the current channel in EPG easily or that you couldnt get back to fullscreen viewing when pressing back?). Also it would be cool if you could post what you did to achieve #3 (a button that starts playing the last played channel) as im sure others would also be interested.
In terms of channel change speedup there isnt much more wiggle room. One thing ive done to make things more WAF is use a custom, keymap setup that binds Ch+ and Ch- to actually bring up the channel OSD and move up and down it, but not actually perform the channel change. This curbs the impulsive "channel surfing" behaviour and coaxes people to browse for the channel they wish to view next and then select it.
Your latest question, yes the EPG display "blue line" indicating the current time can be adjusted but it's done via AdvancedSettings.xml file. Have a search for "LingerTime" and you should find the required info.
As an aside, feel free to post your ServerWMC log containing some channel changes and we can have a look at how things are performing etc. It's unlikely any major improvements could be found but it's always worth a health check of things or even just having the quantitative analysis of how long a channel change takes on the backend etc. Also if you give an outline of your setup eg CPU.ram, hard drive type/s, network connection between server and HDHR, network connection between client and server etc
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Thanks, the LingerTime seemed to have worked!
But just now, I was on a channel and it was flickering back and forth between the show that was on and a green screen... any thoughts on what could be causing something like that?
I'll post what I did to resolve my other issues shortly.
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2014-12-22, 02:44
(This post was last modified: 2014-12-22, 02:44 by scarecrow420.)
You havent tried to send DRM channels through have you? Can you post a ServerWMC log to pastebin?
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2014-12-22, 03:53
(This post was last modified: 2014-12-22, 03:55 by scarecrow420.)
If you go to the debug tab in ServerWMC there is a button to open the log file (or otherwise just go to %ProgramData%\VDSoftware\ServerWMC). Then go to pastebin.com create a new paste, copy/paste the contents of your logfile, and then put the pastebin link to it here.
If this channel works on other Kodi clients against the same serverWMC then it's not a DRM problem. Hopefully we can see more in the logs
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Well I switched the de-interlacing to "on" instead of "auto" and the channel played fine for about 10 minutes until we turned a movie on for the kids. If it starts up again later I'll grab a log and paste the link here.
Really appreciate you taking the time to reply.
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2014-12-22, 07:57
(This post was last modified: 2014-12-22, 08:00 by scarecrow420.)
No obvious errors in the logs that I can see. There are plenty of reasons/differences between WMC and Kodi though. When you are watching TV in Kodi we are performing a WMC recording to WTV file behind the scenes, remuxing that WTV file to TS and then Kodi is streaming the TS file. Kodi uses ffmpeg to do the actual decoding and whatnot. Also we typically use tuners from the end of the list (eg tuner #3 in your example) while WMC is using from the top of the list (tuner #1). So there are a few things different between the 2 methods that could explain why "it doesn't happen in WMC but does in Kodi"
It's also not clear whether this problem affects all Kodi clients or only your local one. Earlier i thought you said it didnt happen on a remote client but im not sure if that's still the case. As far as ServerWMC is concerned, nothing is really different between one Kodi client and another so it generally wouldnt make sense if these problems occured on a particular channel but only for a particular client. Id expect it to manifest for any client who was watching that channel through Kodi/ServerWMC, unless of course the clients are on different Kodi versions or whatever.
Things you can try to narrow down the problem include
- turning off the "delete temporary stream files" option on the debug tab and then when you have a problem you can get the WTV and TS files from the TempSWMC directory and play them back directly as files to see if the corruption is present. Try different players such as Kodi vs WMC, try on another PC and so on.
This will help to shed light on the problem, eg if the problem does not exist in the WTV file but does exist in the TS file, then it is a problem with the remuxed. If the problem is in the WTV file and is shown by Kodi always but never by WMC then it would be Kodi/ffmpeg. If the problem is shown in the WTV file when played by WMC then the actual WTV recording is at fault (and thus it coudl perhaps be your tuner or just a temporary signal issue at that time). If the files work on another PC but show problems on this PC then it could be something locally on the PC.
- You can also make ServerWMC take tuners from the top of the list by setting the LiveStream Decoy method to 0 in the config file, although this will then disable our live stream protecion feature so its really only reccomended when trying to debug a situation.
I would probably go with testing the temporary WTV and TS files first.
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2014-12-22, 08:32
(This post was last modified: 2014-12-22, 08:41 by element192.)
Thanks so much for the detailed reply.
My first attempt is going to be updating my graphics drivers. Live TV playback has been working on my other PC just fine and it's running the same software setup (Kodi 14 RC3 and ServerWMC on Windows 7) and using the same HDHR Prime.
If that doesn't work, I'll start trying to troubleshoot with your steps above. Again, I appreciate your help.
EDIT: alright, within minutes after installing the current drivers I had the green flickering again. Will test the temporary streaming next.
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Played both the WTV and TS files on both the HTPC (that's having the issues) and my other PC and there was no flickering at all on either of them. I used VLC for the TS file and WMC for the WTV files. But THEN I opened Kodi and went to Live TV -> and played the file and the flickering was there!
So it must be some kind of issue within Kodi I would imagine? Any thoughts on what it could be? Pretty weird right?
