[rounda]

Just to chime in here... This issue is not as uncommon as you think.

I was a network administrator for a company that provided white label OTA streaming for regional cable companies, serving millions of end users.

Streams go down all the time. We had priority 1 (major outages) issues almost daily.

So yes, it's possible he's got pirated streams, but it's also just as possible legal streams get dropped at the provider.

All those streams get split into pieces and put back together when you stream them. And all the watched pieces get deleted when they're no longer within the provider's catch-up range.

When the server doesn't delete them properly, you get major memory leaks and streams cut out.

[macadoshis]

What an obtuse way to react to the problem. Under the pretext of thinking that only illegal streams can be the source of the problem, you ignore such a central and basic functionality, which most other IPTV services have already implemented (shareware or freeware), even basic cheapass iptv client like Perfect Player. Do you think that all (legal) streams have a quality of service and an availability of 100.00% ? In addition, as said previously in this thread, the cause is not always the server but it can come from the client (unstable internet connection on the KODI host, which causes micro-cuts of 1 or 2 seconds). When you are from the TV and the remote control, you don't particularly want to keep the remote on your pocket and have to press OK to restart the channel every time there is a cut.

If I buy a bike that tends to derail every time I roll over a bump, are you going to tell me to avoid stony roads (which a bike is supposed to allow) and only ride on bike path ? or are you going to improve your derailment system to stabilize it, satisfy your users and help make your bike the best and most suitable on the market for all situations ?

I know kodi is an opensource community, I'm a developer myself, but please don't take that argument out of "I'm in charge of planning feature requests and since I don't have this problem in my situation with my own streams at home, I choose to ignore it, they prolly lying or don't know how to use Kodi" ...
Either make it clear that you are overwhelmed by issues and feature requests already logged, or that for fear of encouraging the use of illegal sources you prefer to avoid making KODI open to connection loss problems, at the expense of users who use legal sources but with low quality of service or unstable Internet connection.

[giaur]

Well, as I already said, assumption stream is always stable is entirely bad in my opinion. As well as assumption not stable stream is pirate stream, so there's no need to care is bad

But I guess there's no plans to change how it works, because Kodi changes will be required.

Btw, sometimes unexpected end of stream causes deadlock and Kodi is completly dead, on Coreelec it means dead device, need to hard reset (reconnect power source). I've been reporting it some time ago, but as far as I remember, no solution found.

[phunkyfish]

Detecting when a stream ends properly or dies unexpectedly is actually a very hard problem to solve for, regardless of stream quality.

Kodi is different as it’s a media centre style app that tries to help you both organize your media as well as play it through its addon ecosystem. Handling EOFs in that context is infinitely more complicated than a “just play this player”.

But if you are up to the challenge we are always open to contributions!!!

[giaur]

If you assume stream is infinite (live tv is), is that still so hard to detect playback is stopped without user action and start playback again from scratch? I think all players works this way, they don't care to detect anything, only start playback again when stopped not by user action.

You actually don't need to care if stream is finished or eof, live tv should be Infinite stream and it never ends, so you could implement Kodi to connect to the same stream again when playback stopped or interrupted.

[phunkyfish]

If you assume stream is infinite (live tv is), is that still so hard to detect playback is stopped without user action and start playback again from scratch? I think all players works this way, they don't care to detect anything, only start playback again when stopped not by user action.

You actually don't need to care if stream is finished or eof, live tv should be Infinite stream and it never ends, so you could implement Kodi to connect to the same stream again when playback stopped or interrupted.

You are over simplifying this. All players work that way is not a valid statement. Kodi has inputstreams which the VideoPlayer pulls data from. The inputstream doesn’t know when VideoPlayer is finished, it simply no longer exists. For this reason this logic needs to be built into an inputstream to detect any kind of end so it could then restart the stream and keep being a source of data for VideoPlayer.

If you can quantify the myriad of reasons a streams stops so it can be detected properly in time to have VideoPlayer not stop, then that’s the starting point. All of this would be a lot of work. It’s doable, but it’s a lot.

[giaur]

I know what you mean. But stil, I'm pretty sure most players like PerfectPlayer work this way, there's nothing more than automate press play the same channel/stream again when playback has been interrupted unexpectedly. And don't even try to detect reason/stream end etc. User is happy, as he does not need to press Play again.
After all, final effect is as expected