Future of PVR in XBMC?
#31
My observations are the following:

On a fairly powerful HTPC (Phenom II x3 processor, 8 GB RAM) using tvheadend and a Terratec Cinergy C PCI tuner, channel changes take roughly 2,2 seconds (2,7 for scrambled ones, slightly longer for HD). A friend of mine has the same setup except the tuner is an old FireDTV C/CI, there channel changes take noticably longer (haven't measured it though). I have never tried other backends so I can't provide any subjective comments there.

I may add that the 2,2 seconds mentioned earlier is the time until the video starts playing - the initial still frame appears after just over a second.
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#32
(2013-09-13, 21:25)simbo Wrote: I have to disagree here based on my painful experiences trying to wean my wife off WMC. There, she can just hit the Record button twice and it records the entire series. You can't get much more efficient than that. In fact, the lack of series recording via the 10 ft UI is one of the reasons she's screaming at me to go back to WMC.

I love it. Same thing at my home. It must pass the "Spouse Test".
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#33
Its been mentioned before that there is an issue with XBMC code (especially when switching HD <> SD IIRC) - FernetMenta and Margro did some work on speeding things up if I recall, and managed to get the times down to a second or two, but I don't think the code has made it into the main XBMC builds yet.
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#34
(2013-10-02, 14:21)Swifty Wrote: Its been mentioned before that there is an issue with XBMC code (especially when switching HD <> SD IIRC) - FernetMenta and Margro did some work on speeding things up if I recall, and managed to get the times down to a second or two, but I don't think the code has made it into the main XBMC builds yet.

Hope it will be there in soon, this is the only showstopper for me to get rid of the cable tuner.
The +/- 10 seconds of waiting when switching channels is to long
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#35
An interesting thread.

I've long thought although there has been a lot of excellent work done to bring PVR support to XBMC (I take my hat off the the guys doing this), the approach is wrong. Its just a little too late to change it though.

My approach would have been to only use the back end software (Mediaportal, TVHeadend etc..) to play the channels. I would have programmed a lot more of the functionality into XBMC itself, such as recordings. If XBMC handled the timers itself, it wouldn't matter what backend you used. XBMC would simply at a given time tell the backend to play/record a channel.

In my view using this approach... programming it initially would have taken a lot more time and effort but ongoing would be a lot less hassle. More features would be able to be added in the long run as they are all handled internally and the user experience in my humble view would be better.

I use XBMC every day. At the moment its not family friendly which is actually good for me as I get to choose what we watch. My current set up is Openelec on a pc under the TV, a Rpi in the bedroom, XBMC on my android phone, a main server in another room housing TVHeadend, and a couple of tuners and all the hard disks. I do use the TVHeadend web interface to record stuff as its much easier for me. I also use the TVHeadend Android app which works fine. But these are not family friendly. TVHeadend for instance crashes at least 4 times a week. I need to log in using SSH and restart the service. How many people want to do that?

We are geeks. We use XBMC because of that fact I believe. XBMC has fantastic functionality and its great having PVR support, But in order to make other people use it, it needs to become easier to use. Everything should be able to be done on the screen just like a normal Sat box can. A couple of clicks done. We are some way off from that though.
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Front End: Asrock ION 3D running OpenElec - Backend: Dedicated server Running Ubuntu with TBS 6981 DVB-S2 USB
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#36
Then the front end would need to be on when the recording is due to start and finish, and many frontends could be telling a single backend to do conflictting things, bad design sorry.
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#37
I Just found this thread..

I love having live TV and live tv recording (including series) ability on my front end.

Up until a few weeks ago, I had a Synology backend running DVBlink tv server and Plex server.
I had an NUC running XBMC (Openelec) as frontend.

I have 2 Dual tuner Hdhomerun network tuners.

To get live scheduling from XBMC frontend, I did 4 fairly simple steps..

1. Installed DVBlink channel plugin for Plex server.
2. Installed PleXbmc addon for XBMC.
3. Installed DVBlink client for XBMC.
3. Installed Amber skin for XBMC - this linked it all together (this skin supports PleXbmc fully - quite nice if you haven't tried it before).

In everyday use, the live tv channel changes were 2 seconds.
The wife and I used live TV in XBMC for watching tv and single episode recording (via tv guide).
To record series, we simply went to the main menu and selected the DVBlink Plex channel.

Unfortunately I uninstalled everything the other day to try out the latest synology DSM (operating system) and the new DVBlink 5 that just came out and I found out that DVBlink no longer supports or develops the Plex channel. Which was a pity, because the latest Plex with the DVBlink channel installed was so slick, I was ready to ditch XBMC altogether. So frustrating. I guess I could try and find and old copy on the net somewhere....

I see this thread has been quiet for a few months now. Can anyone else share there setup with a record series feature from their XBMC front end??

I installed mediaportal backend on a spare windows server i had and client on my windows NUC yesterday and had a play. It was ok, but not as fast and slick as XBMC. Also, it is was not as user friendly for the wife for live tv (although it's reasonable and I am interested to see what the future holds). The addons were better than I expected, but again not as vast and as slick as XBMC.

Oh well back to the drawing board...

Hooroo :-)

banhuk
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#38
I recently found that PVR.WMC supports series recording from the XBMC UI, and it does it very well (as long as the skin developer supports it). Of course the backend PVR server must be running Windows and have access to the tuners, but I'm seriously thinking of building something around this configuration after testing it for a while. The only major issue is channel changing performance, which is still much slower than WMC.

For me personally this is a cop-out, as I want to get rid of WMC but all I'm doing is hiding it!
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#39
Awesome.. Thanks simbo...

I was just reading about WMC backend fro XBMC...

So what skins support in that you know of??

Will give it a go...
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#40
(2014-06-09, 15:30)banhuk Wrote: So what skins support in that you know of??
I've used Confluence and Amber with success.
The documentation also mentions Arctic and Aeon MQ5.
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#41
(2014-06-09, 15:09)simbo Wrote: I recently found that PVR.WMC supports series recording from the XBMC UI,
So does the mythtv cmyth pvr client.
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#42
(2014-06-09, 21:32)nickr Wrote:
(2014-06-09, 15:09)simbo Wrote: I recently found that PVR.WMC supports series recording from the XBMC UI,
So does the mythtv cmyth pvr client.
And nextpvr
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#43
It amazes me in this day and age we have to resort to Media Center still. I have HD Homerun tuners and think it would be great if I didnt need another product to grab EPG and record (in the US, we get no love) shows. The info is very easy to find (IMDB, tvrage, zap, etc) seems like it would be simple (and please dont get me started w xml programs).
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#44
Do you mean windows media centre? I certainly don't use it.

There is a lot to what you suggest - conflicts, repeat showings, priorities, scheduling.
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#45
(2014-09-16, 03:15)ap90033 Wrote: It amazes me in this day and age we have to resort to Media Center still. I have HD Homerun tuners and think it would be great if I didnt need another product to grab EPG and record (in the US, we get no love) shows. The info is very easy to find (IMDB, tvrage, zap, etc) seems like it would be simple (and please dont get me started w xml programs).
Here in NZ we have to use xml grabbers as our streams don't'have full 7 day guide info in them. So that type of software definitely has its place. The key problem has been stated before that having the recording as a background service is a good idea due to the ability to have multiple front ends talking to the single backend which manages the tuners and availability. If XBMC/Kodi had the recording built in then it would have to have it's own back end software running or there would be conflicts happening on any other front ends using the tuners.

Not to mention that the back ends that we have access to (wmc, npvr et al) have been around for a long time and are very well developed in their own right. To assume that the XBMC/Kodi team could produce something as well rounded as the dedicated backend software is a tough ask.

I like the option of having a dedicated back end piece of software which manages the recording, tuner availability, epg, etc. What I don't like is that skinners have to support series recording independently of XBMC. That is to say, if my favourite skin doesn't have support for my backend's series record feature, I don't get series record. Yes, I know you can copy the recordPrefs and deleteTimer xml files over, but they don't always work, and always need some tweaking to make look like the skin in question.
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