Kodi Community Forum

Hi,

once I thought this would not be a problem at all, but as I found out, it unfortunately is. First let me explain: assume you have a network drive, and there is a videofile still being written, but you already want to watch the first minutes of it, then my problem is as follow:

Kodi only notices the overall duration of the video at the very moment when the file is being clicked on to be played. But: the file is getting bigger and bigger in the background. When you only play the file, it's not a problem, because when Kodi reaches the end of the file, it notices that there is more to play, and plays it. fine.

However, if you fast forward or jump through the file, that information is not updated, and Kodi will come to the end after 10 minutes (at least it thinks so, even though the file has grown in the meantime), and stops the file, and doesn't even remember the progress, i.e. it starts from the beginning when you replay it.

To clarify what I mean: let's assume I start my file with 10 minutes being written. Then, there is some part of the file I would like to skip after 5 minutes, then the actual duration of that file is not 10 minutes anymore, but 15 minutes. But I cannot skip beyond 10 minutes, because Kodi will break playback.

Very very sad tath this is implemented that way. What am I doing wrong, or is this actually a kodi bug?

You make it sound like a streaming add-on flow issue, and that would be determined by the add-on or 3rd party author. It's interesting that Kodi will start to play an incomplete file and because it's not following a transfer, accurately pulls in the file based on the size, but doesn't update the source in real time, as it's expected to be a fixed file. I'd equate this to copying a large file and then before the transfer is complete, copying out from the destination. think you would run into checksum issues pretty quick on systems that couldn't choreograph this ballet of fetch and play.

I see no bug here, wait for the file to complete the download, (one has to wonder 'what download', can't you wait for) or put on your coding hat and come up with an add-on that handles local/network files as a continuous stream.

PatK, thanks for your answer, but I have to clarify a bit: this is not a file being copied and therefore incomplete. In fact, the file on the server that I use is a live recording from DVBViewer Recording service, coming from a DVB-S card connected to that server, that is still being recorded. So I record live TV on that server to a file. Under Windows, there are several programs available that can handle files that are still being written in progress, like it usually happens while a live TV recording is still in progress, and you want to play the first part (something like timeshift if you want to put it that way).

Of course I could timeshift locally with Kodi, but I want to use that server to handle all the DVB-S stuff.