2014-06-23, 18:54
(2014-06-23, 16:53)angeloaz Wrote:(2014-06-20, 22:21)angeloaz Wrote: Just posting some observations about instability after running XBMC on the Fire TV for about a week.
I've been experiencing quite a bit of crashes on the official Gotham release. It seems to mostly occur when changing channels on the Live TV feature. And if I switch channels enough, it will inevitably crash XBMC (all of sudden, no XBMC and I'm back at the Fire TV UI). It seems to happen less often if I stop the current live tv stream before changing to a different channel, but that just delays the crash.
My Live TV function is driven by a MythTV backend and a HDHomerun Plus (set to H.264 transcoding of the OTA signal).
In addition to the official 13.1 release (linked from the Wiki), I've also tried several other releases (13.2 beta, 14.0 alpha) from here: http://mirrors.xbmc.org/test-builds/android/arm/ -- with the same results.
Another issue (not sure if it's related) is that changing channels often will cause the audio and video streams to get out of sync. The video will slows way down, but the audio seems to keep going at normal rate. This will sometimes correct itself after a bit, but usually I have to stop the stream and restart it in order to eliminate it.
My recourse at this point has been to run SPMC 12.4.2 -- which hasn't crashed on me once yet. Although I think I may still see the audio/video sync problem occasionally, but it's at least stable and usable.
Also, I'm running x86 versions of Gotham on a couple of PCs throughout the house and they don't have any apparent problems with the Live TV function.
Follow up: Turning the transcoding completely off on my HDHR Plus seems to make the Live TV function of 13.1 much more stable. It doesn't seem to crash at all and channel changes are much faster and reliable (no a/v sync issues or buffering messages like I see with H.264). The video playback performance seems to be fine too -- this is surprising since the Fire TV claims to not have hardware support for the MPEG2.
Another curious observation: looking at the Codec Info data during playback shows the CPU usage about equal between H.264 (using "stf-h264" decoder) and MPEG2 playback (using "stf-mpeg2"). It seems that they are both using about 1/2 of CPU cores 0 and 1 -- and nothing on 1 and 2. I would have expected the H.264 stream to decoded in hardware and to use much less CPU than MPEG2.
For the record, if I turn MediaCodec on (and libstagefright off), everything seems to go to hell: lots of crashes, CPU usage goes way up (3 cores going pretty strong), and the "drop" frame counter goes crazy. The decoder changes to "ff-h264" and "ff-mpeg2" in that case.
Interesting. I have a similar setup and LiveTV (and recordings) have not been great. MythTV 0.27 on Ubuntu server 14.04 and HDHomeRun Plus results in the video lagging behind the audio, some times the video freezes completely while the audio continues. I also get complete crashes on occasion. This only happens on FireTV running XBMC on Windows or Linux is fine. So what settings do you use for acceleration? MediaCodec off and libstagefright on?
