[CaffeinatedMike]

I'm looking to implement threading in my video add-on and I was wondering if I create a thread will it continue to run during video playback or will it be paused until playback stops? The reason I ask is because I'm trying to figure out if I need to create a service or if I can avoid it.

[ironic_monkey]

if you plugin spawns threads you are breaking API and all bets are off. mostly likely it will crash and burn at a later point.

[CaffeinatedMike]

if you plugin spawns threads you are breaking API and all bets are off. mostly likely it will crash and burn at a later point.

I see many plugins implement threading though. Perhaps if I explain why I need the single extra thread. I need to continually poll a link to get the valid cookies to keep an m3u8 alive.

[Roman_V_M]

Because of an issue with Python threading implementation in Kodi (I'm calling this "issue" because I don't think it is a bug but rather an implementation problem) a child thread always outlive the master Python process, unless explicitly terminated.
So yes, technically you can run background threads in your addon, but you need to make sure that your threads are properly terminated, especially when Kodi sets abortRequested flag.

[CaffeinatedMike]

Because of an issue with Python threading implementation in Kodi (I'm calling this "issue" because I don't think it is a bug but rather an implementation problem) a child thread always outlive the master Python process, unless explicitly terminated.
So yes, technically you can run background threads in your addon, but you need to make sure that your threads are properly terminated, especially when Kodi sets abortRequested flag.

Thanks for that information Roman, I hadn't known that children would outlive the master. However, I am making a point to ensure all threads are dead before the addon exits (or at least I think I am). For this particular situation I only create a single thread inside a service like so

Code:

if __name__ == "__main__":

    monitor = LiveMonitor()
    poll_thread = threading.Thread(target=monitor)
    poll_thread.start()
    
    while not monitor.abortRequested():
        # Sleep/wait for abort for 10 seconds
        if monitor.waitForAbort(10):
            # Abort was requested while waiting. We should exit
            break
        live = addon.getSetting('live_url')
        if live != '':
            client = liveclient.UHSClient(live, 'channel')
            client.poll()
    
    del LivePlayer
    del LiveMonitor
    poll_thread.join()

Is this correctly implemented?

A little background:
I'm looking to poll the url every 10 seconds to keep the m3u8 alive. the LiveMonitor process (of the xbmc.Monitor class) inits the LivePlayer process (of the xbmc.Player class) in its init definition. The monitor starts polling the url once the live_url setting has been set (is not '') and the LivePlayer simply looks for the onPlaybackStopped action and sets the live_url setting to ''

[Roman_V_M]

@CaffeinatedMike

Thanks for that information Roman, I hadn't known that children would outlive the master.

In the standard CPython implementation Thread.daemon property controls if a child thread will outlive its parent. But in Kodi this flag does not work and the thread will continue to run, unless stopped.

Is this correctly implemented?

No, it is not. The target parameter of Thread constructor expects a callable function object, and a class instance is not a such object (unless a class explicitly implements __call__ method which is not the case here). Please look into some Python threading tutorials available in the Internet.