[Apothis]

What is the recommendation on Hardware Acceleration? Should I enable MediaCodec or libstagefreight or both?

What ever works best for you. I find MediaCodec only or MediaCodec + libstagefright work best for me, but it may be different depending on your encodes or the media types your are trying to play.

If you have mediacodec enabled, then libstagefright is disabled anyway, no matter what the setting says.

---

@NEed Scott

wiki is missing a key line:
Gotham Final Release - Currently, only Libstagefright video acceleration is working. MediaCodec acceleration should be disabled.
Please add the above, without this 1080p is no go for Gotham 13.1rc1
Once this has been disabled all seems to work fine.

ATT: if u enable and disable this mediacodec few times ,make sure to exit xbmc to apply the changes (eventual do a force stop). as it did not work for me before doing this.

Why don't you sign up for the wiki and do it?
According the earlier posts, mediacodec was fixed in one of the betas.

Yes, it was removed from the wiki because its no longer accurate. a few people have reported issues with a few individual encodes, but generally speaking (an specifically for myself) its working fine. I have it turned on, and dont have any problems at all with 1080p high bitrate encodes (or anything else)

[LRa]

Anyone has had problems with the wifi?

I haven't touched my fire tv for a week or so, and now, each time after I stream something via xbmc, when the video finishes, I don't have a wifi connection anymore. When I go to he fire tv settings I get a message saying there's a connection problem, and the only way I managed to get the wifi back is to hard reset the device with select+play.

Any ideas?

P.s. When I see the network chosen in the fire tv settings, it has "connected with problems" next to it.

[nero12]

Yes, it was removed from the wiki because its no longer accurate. a few people have reported issues with a few individual encodes, but generally speaking (an specifically for myself) its working fine. I have it turned on, and dont have any problems at all with 1080p high bitrate encodes (or anything else)

Whats the difference between libstagefright and mediacodec ?
someone wrote that only one of them will work no matter what the settings says ?

does one have any advantage over the other one ?

why is both on as default if only 1 of them will work ?

[CuriousG]

I've given up the pipe dream that we'll see an XBMC launcher from the Amazon app store in the near future, if ever. So I just did the Classic TV workaround. After trying out the official application to make sure I'm not missing out on anything before sacrificing it, I'm glad this program will no longer be running. Forced 40-60 seconds of ads when first launched and who knows how many more ads in between. I think there was another 20 second ad after two minutes of playing video on a 20 minute show and there doesn't appear to be any way to skip ads either. Good riddance!

[Apothis]

Yes, it was removed from the wiki because its no longer accurate. a few people have reported issues with a few individual encodes, but generally speaking (an specifically for myself) its working fine. I have it turned on, and dont have any problems at all with 1080p high bitrate encodes (or anything else)

Whats the difference between libstagefright and mediacodec ?
someone wrote that only one of them will work no matter what the settings says ?

does one have any advantage over the other one ?

why is both on as default if only 1 of them will work ?

I guess reading is hard, this was only posted a few pages back:

In my experience, i have no problem with mediacodec and libstagefright both turned on, everything plays. My first question is anyone could tell me the difference between the two and what turning them on actually does?

I guess no one answered this question, so I guess I'll take a stab at it.
I did a little bit of research and this is what I found:

Both are APIs to access hardware acceleration on Android devices
(which is what Fire TV basically is).

Before Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean), there was no official API for hardware
video decoding. So, libstagefright was created as an unofficial hack to
allow for hardware acceleration on Android devices using private APIs.

As of Android 4.1 and above Android added official hardware video
acceleration to the public API. This is known as mediacodec, and XBMC
had added support for this. Now, since Fire OS 3.0 (which is what
AFTV runs) is based on Android 4.2.2, it gains support for mediacodec.

Only one API will get used. If you have both selected, mediacodec
is used (unless the version of Android does not support it, then it uses
libstagefright -- but this does not really apply to the Fire TV). If you
do not have mediacodec selected, you are forcing it to use libstagefright.
If you have neither selected, it's equivalent to not running any hardware
acceleration at all (equivalent to disabling the feature by selecting
"Software" as the "Decoding method").

Hopefully what I summarized is correct, but I'm sure someone will
correct me if not.

References:
http://babylon.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t...68&page=99
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_OS
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=180872

[g4ptek]

There's also adbFire. It's a companion program for Android XBMC, (Gotham only). It allows you to sideload XBMC (and other apps) without the hassle of downloading the Android SDK and other tools. Also push xml and other files to the various XBMC directories. Everything you need is built into adbFire.

The current version is Windows-only. OS X will be available sometime next week.

I get the following error message when I try to run the above. I am using Win 8.1

Any ideas on what the problem is? Thanks.

Jay

I also got this error message on Windows 7, and Vista.

Sam with me, i use Win7 Prof i got an error too

[HenryFord33]

I get the following error message when I try to run the above. I am using Win 8.1

Any ideas on what the problem is? Thanks.

Jay

I also got this error message on Windows 7, and Vista.

Sam with me, i use Win7 Prof i got an error too

I think the dev of the program is working on a fix.

[hondalex]

Hello All,

I've been using the FTV for about a month. Started with SMPC and now on Gotham 13.1 beta.The issue I've been having is that even though I have the AFT wired to my router I get this times where the movie I'm playing (I have all my DVDs ripped to ISO in my PC and run them through SMB) the move just stops. Like it wants to buffer but it just stops. I can press play and it puts me back where I was maybe 2 seconds before it stopped the video.

Any ideas? It's not a huge deal but it sucks if you're in the middle of an awesome scene and all the sudden it stops.

[elmerohueso]

Yes, it was removed from the wiki because its no longer accurate. a few people have reported issues with a few individual encodes, but generally speaking (an specifically for myself) its working fine. I have it turned on, and dont have any problems at all with 1080p high bitrate encodes (or anything else)

Whats the difference between libstagefright and mediacodec ?
someone wrote that only one of them will work no matter what the settings says ?

does one have any advantage over the other one ?

why is both on as default if only 1 of them will work ?

I think this was all explained before. As I understand it, libstagefright was more of a hack to enable hardware decoding on specific chips. MediaCodec is an official library that enables hardware decoding. If both are selected, only MediaCodec is used. I guess the only advantage/disadvantage of MediaCodec would be in how well the device manufacturer implemented it. For example, on the OUYA, MediaCodec is great with h.264 but sucks with MPEG4 (XVID/DIVX).

[Natedawg87]

This is not exclusively about XBMC, but there has been some talk about FTP in this thread so I am putting this here to see if anyone can help.

I am trying to get FTP working with the Fire TV. I installed the FTP Server by Rapfox app on my phone and made a backup so I could copy it off and load the APK on my Fire TV. It loaded fine, and I was able to connect via an FTP client, but I cannot view hidden files. I tried Filezilla, WinSCP. and WS_FTP LE clients all with no success. Anyone have any suggestions?

[barrmy]

This is not exclusively about XBMC, but there has been some talk about FTP in this thread so I am putting this here to see if anyone can help.

I am trying to get FTP working with the Fire TV. I installed the FTP Server by Rapfox app on my phone and made a backup so I could copy it off and load the APK on my Fire TV. It loaded fine, and I was able to connect via an FTP client, but I cannot view hidden files. I tried Filezilla, WinSCP. and WS_FTP LE clients all with no success. Anyone have any suggestions?

filezilla by default hides hidden files - go top menu go to server->force showing hidden files
alternately, just go directly to the directory with the . in front in the remote site box

[jocala]

I get the following error message when I try to run the above. I am using Win 8.1

Any ideas on what the problem is? Thanks.

Jay

I also got this error message on Windows 7, and Vista.

Also same on win 8 and 8.1 Update. I already had it installed and can adb in my sleep but thought I would check it out.

Thank you for the download, I've resolved the issue. When I built the app for deployment, several files weren't included. I'll post when I re-enable the download link.

[LRa]

I'm having a problem I did not have before with my fire tv, after a few minutes of using it, the wifi, while still connected, stops working till I reset the FTV.

Ideas?

[sadboy]

Whats the difference between libstagefright and mediacodec ?
someone wrote that only one of them will work no matter what the settings says ?

does one have any advantage over the other one ?

why is both on as default if only 1 of them will work ?

I guess reading is hard, this was only posted a few pages back:

In my experience, i have no problem with mediacodec and libstagefright both turned on, everything plays. My first question is anyone could tell me the difference between the two and what turning them on actually does?

I guess no one answered this question, so I guess I'll take a stab at it.
I did a little bit of research and this is what I found:

Both are APIs to access hardware acceleration on Android devices
(which is what Fire TV basically is).

Before Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean), there was no official API for hardware
video decoding. So, libstagefright was created as an unofficial hack to
allow for hardware acceleration on Android devices using private APIs.

As of Android 4.1 and above Android added official hardware video
acceleration to the public API. This is known as mediacodec, and XBMC
had added support for this. Now, since Fire OS 3.0 (which is what
AFTV runs) is based on Android 4.2.2, it gains support for mediacodec.

Only one API will get used. If you have both selected, mediacodec
is used (unless the version of Android does not support it, then it uses
libstagefright -- but this does not really apply to the Fire TV). If you
do not have mediacodec selected, you are forcing it to use libstagefright.
If you have neither selected, it's equivalent to not running any hardware
acceleration at all (equivalent to disabling the feature by selecting
"Software" as the "Decoding method").

Hopefully what I summarized is correct, but I'm sure someone will
correct me if not.

References:
http://babylon.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t...68&page=99
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_OS
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=180872

Stagefright is not a "hack", it's essentially the Android C wrapper for the OpenMAX API, which is in turn implemented by the hardware drivers. MedicCodec is Android's Java API for codec access, and it calls into stagefright at the native level:
https://source.android.com/devices/media.html

If done right, using the native stagefright directly will no doubt result in better performance than calling through the MediaCodec Java wrapper. As for whether the libstagefright related code in XBMC is a "hack", that is a different story, and I have no idea what the state of code in XBMC is. There's certainly no reason that it has to be a "hack".

[Colin15150]

This box is great in some regards, - mega fast in the XBMC menus, but it has no 24Hz video output, and no AAC to PCM on the fly transcoding. The Raspberry pi can do the last two, which are pretty much essential for someone with AV amp and a big display.
Menus are very slow on the Pi though in comparison. Wish the Fire TV did 24Hz and ACC transcoding.