[margro]

Hi and welcome here Mark.

Hi all,

I'm new here. Just set up a Raspberry Pi 2 with Kodi 14.2 (OpenELEC), with the connection to MediaPortal being the killer feature for me.

In fact, I've been a member of the MediaPortal development team for several years now, but I really want to use the lighter hardware/free OS that Kodi permits.

So, I have a lot of experience with MediaPortal under the hood, and hopefully I can make a sensible contribution with that experience. I've also been using MediaPortal as a TV client/server for many years now, so I have a really clear idea of what works and what does not work.

So, I hope no-one will mind if I make some comments and observations that might improve usability.

It it always useful to have someone form the MediaPortal development team here on the forum.
Comments and observations are welcome.

First of all, 'timer'. If I go into this screen, I cannot see the EPG data. I realise that this is by design, but if I have a series scheduled to record and I have already seen some episodes, I need the EPG data in order to decide if I want to cancel an episode.

Also, the 'new' way of showing the information in this screen in Kodi 15 (Mon-Tue-Wed-Thu-Fri-Sat-Sun and then the time) actually makes it harder to see when the program will record. I find it clearer to just show the actual date/time.

Again, I am not trying to criticise - just to give observations.

True, the current view in Kodi is less intuitive than the MediaPortal one. It is still based on the original programmers proof-of-concept and not yet focused on usability.
Note that all these views are not PVR addon specific. So I cannot just change this view in the MediaPortal PVR addon to match the look and view of MediaPortal itself.

Secondly, recording thumbnails. This was a long-standing problem in MediaPortal on a network client for a long time. I think it was eventually fixed with Windows remoting, which may not be any use for Kodi. I guess since you are not using rtsp, so that the recording directory is available as a share, it should be okay to generate thumbs directly from the file. On my Pi, video thumbs are not generated at all, which doesn't help (yes, I found and changed the relevant setting!).

Still work in progress. In my development version of the addon, I'm already setting the links to the MediaPortal generated thumbs on the backend. For RTSP mode, I'm planning to download the addons from the backend and store them in the PVR addon cache directory.

One more thing at the start. MediaPortal generates an xml file for the recording. Sometimes I like to hang on to recordings and archive them into my video library. MediaPortal then reads the info from the xml file for stuff that isn't in themoviedb or thetvdb. I know Kodi can do something similar with .nfo files, but if support could be added for xml files, this would be nice!

That is of course doable but I'm not sure if Team Kodi considers this as a useful extension unless the XML is following some standard format not specific for MediaPortal.
What if we would do it the other way around (Convert the xml to nfo) or is that not possible?

I am sure I can come up with more stuff in time, but I figured the first thing to do was get onto the forum and connect with people.

Best wishes,

Mark