The TV support on Kodi seems to be an afterthought.
I'm a human that voluntarily clicked 'enable TV', and 'enable plug-in ServerWMC' and still the TV section doesn't appear immediately and may still not appear!
I tried to make sense of it and the only justification for it I found is that the designer is a truck driver than never record TV but only do streaming, and make a big deal if in a dead zone the TV section appear but they are no channels available to watch.
Let me explain. My wife watch Netflix often, well.. outside Kodi.
I often take over, and start Kodi, it's super fast to switch to Kodi with the remote control of Amazon FireTV.
But, then, you have to wait... quite a long time to see the TV section to shows-up at all. Ideally, I want that when I open Kodi, it's opening it directly on the TV section.
Strangely, many time everyday, Kodi need to reload the channels, reload the recordings, reload the timer, before it shows the TV section, like if these things change a lot often, so why I think a truck driver was involved ;-)
If no channel is found, the TV section doesn't shows-up! Even if I have 300 TV recording ready to be watched, it's why I believe our truck driver only do TV live streaming.
I raised the issue to the smart and responsive developers that work on ServerWMC and they told me it's the fault of Kodi.
Please give an accurate description of the problem without insulting the people who waste their free time creating software for ungrateful people like you. Preferably include a
debug log (wiki) too which highlight the issue. You could also point us to this discussion with the superior beings who made ServerWMC so us lowly truck drivers can actually get a reference to what you're talking about.
Hang on. It is Kodi's behavior that if no channels are retrieved from the backend then it won't show the 'TV' menu (I would like to see this changed too). However it is serverwmc's fault if it doesn't send the channels to Kodi at start up. If this is happening to you, you should post your serverwmc log on pastebin after this happens so we can take a look at what's causing it.
Also, why dis truck drivers? I bet some are great coders.
A live TV backend without channels is not exactly a common situation, in 99% of situations it's due to a bug in the addon used or a problem with the backend. If you want to use a backend for recording only you can just add the directory where the recordings are stored.
@
negge,
If all you want is recordings, just adding as a video source is not a great solution since a lot of the metadata displayed comes from the guide. Maybe this is specific to serverwmc, but its at least true for that case. I think its not a very important issue, but I think it would be better if kodi displayed the TV section with blank channels if it doesn't get channels - but go ahead and show the recordings. It would help with debugging too, not seeing the TV section at all, there isn't a lot to go on for the user.
Adding workarounds for users' broken setups is not that high on my priority list. If you are able to recording things, you have to have working channels. If you have working channels, Kodi will start the PVR manager. You do not want to deal with the shit storm of posts from pvr.iptvsimple users if we decide to show the TV section even though their 240p pirated Arabic TV online playlist doesn't load for whatever reason. It's much easier to debug and trash can such posts if it doesn't load at all.
(2016-01-29, 19:09)negge Wrote: [ -> ]Please give an accurate description of the problem without insulting the people who waste their free time creating software for ungrateful people like you.
Sorry. Actually, I'm grateful. I thought that was funny enough to compensate for the potential insult. Bug report are boring so I try to make them more entertaining. Kodi rock! The UI is way better than MediaPortal, Unlike MediaPortal I can use the mouse 95% of the use case and it has cool animation.
(2016-01-29, 19:13)krustyreturns Wrote: [ -> ]If this is happening to you, you should post your serverwmc log on pastebin after this happens so we can take a look at what's causing it.
We did that already, and we found a workaround by disabling DLNA.
Summary:
1- TV section should always show, and immediately if user enabled anything related to TV.
2- Should have a way that latest section accessed by Kodi, like TV or preset default section, like TV, open by default when starting Kodi.
3- In the worst case scenario of having no channel, and if somehow still want to hide TV section, it should still shows up if recording are available.
4- Should cache timer, guide, channel, recording, so that scanning become faster. Beside channel, everything change in realtime anyway, so it could just do it latter like already doing.
5- Scanning of TV timer, guide, recording, channel should not be a synchronous/blocking event that block the user to access and navigate TV section.
(2016-01-29, 19:28)krustyreturns Wrote: [ -> ]It would help with debugging too, not seeing the TV section at all, there isn't a lot to go on for the user.
I agree. I wanted to mention that in previous post. It's confusing to get silent errors. I keep clicking enable TV xyz and it still play hide and seek.
I agree that kodi seems a little clunky in this regard. My backend is mythtv, which has its own database of channels, recordings, etc. Quite why kodi has to grab that database info and stuff it into its own database, which is what delays startup, is beyond me.
Surely the point of a backend is to make use of it, eg
User: click recordings
Frontend: send api call to backend 'give me the latest 10 recordings in the database'
Backend: here you are
Frontend: display that
User: scroll down
Frontend: give me recordings 11 to 20
Etc