[janbar]

Since the release 5.9.0, the addon no longer handles caching (by default).
This feature existed since the first release (XBMC Gotham, 2012), to manage throughput of downloaded data during playback or startup. At that time, XBMC had the bad habit of downloading content massively and without flow control. This behavior caused the stuttering of the playback, and worse the total blocking of the interface when your backend shared many channels and contents. So, we implemented the "FileOps" feature to manage the content download instead of XBMC and store all these files in a local cache.
Since Leia (v18), Kodi manages these things better and does not seem to download the content in a burst or in advance. As a result, I disabled this historical feature that seems useless today. If you encounter any problems caused by the removal of this feature then express yourself here.

The benefits are:
- Automatic refreshing of channel icons with a normal channel update
- Drastic reduction of disk space requirement for Kodi user data (divide by 2)

[knappster]

@janbar this might be a transient thing, but I updated to 5.9.0 yesterday (using Kodi 18 beta 5) and this morning when I launched Kodi, the informational messages for MythTV PVR Client "Timer disabled" messages are staying on the screen for quite a long time.  I am seeing a flood of these messages in my kodi log:

06:12:23.720 T:139773745493760   ERROR: CPVRTimerInfoTag: No timer type, although timers are supported by client 632756738!
06:12:23.720 T:139773745493760   ERROR: CreateFromIds: Unable to resolve numeric timer type (10, 632756738)
06:12:23.720 T:139773745493760   ERROR: CPVRTimerInfoTag: No timer type, although timers are supported by client 632756738!
06:12:23.720 T:139773745493760   ERROR: CreateFromIds: Unable to resolve numeric timer type (12, 632756738)
06:12:23.720 T:139773745493760   ERROR: CPVRTimerInfoTag: No timer type, although timers are supported by client 632756738!
06:12:23.720 T:139773745493760   ERROR: CreateFromIds: Unable to resolve numeric timer type (12, 632756738)
06:12:23.720 T:139773745493760   ERROR: CPVRTimerInfoTag: No timer type, although timers are supported by client 632756738!
06:12:23.720 T:139773745493760   ERROR: CreateFromIds: Unable to resolve numeric timer type (12, 632756738)
06:12:23.720 T:139773745493760   ERROR: CPVRTimerInfoTag: No timer type, although timers are supported by client 632756738!
06:12:23.720 T:139773745493760   ERROR: CreateFromIds: Unable to resolve numeric timer type (10, 632756738)
06:12:23.720 T:139773745493760   ERROR: CPVRTimerInfoTag: No timer type, although timers are supported by client 632756738!
...

 followed by: 

06:12:26.089 T:139773846996736  NOTICE: PVR Manager: Stopping
06:12:26.136 T:139773846996736  NOTICE: PVR Manager: Stopped
06:12:26.136 T:139773846996736  NOTICE: PVR Manager: Starting
06:12:26.136 T:139773855389440 WARNING: CreateLoader - unsupported protocol(thumb) in thumb://None/
06:12:26.499 T:139773745493760 WARNING: Unable to determine channel type. Defaulting to TV.
06:12:26.499 T:139773745493760  NOTICE: PVR Manager: Started
06:12:26.502 T:139773846996736  NOTICE: EPG thread started

Performance in Kodi seems fine.  I just wanted to raise these errors since you requested feedback.

[janbar]

06:12:23.720 T:139773745493760   ERROR: CPVRTimerInfoTag: No timer type, although timers are supported by client 632756738!
06:12:23.720 T:139773745493760   ERROR: CreateFromIds: Unable to resolve numeric timer type (10, 632756738)

This is an error returned by PVR (Kodi). Seems it tried to load the timer types before the addon starts, and so obviously the list was empty.  Or it didn't load them before triggering the timer update. I think this could be caused by a flow issue in PVR, but I can't be sure because I haven't the issue. You should create an issue to resolve it.
There is an other flow issue at startup about Channel Group: Groups previously created are deleted at Kodi startup because it cannot find any channel ... before the addon starts .

About this thread, nice to know the performance are fine after this change.

[disaacso]

These errors have been mentioned a few times.  They don't cause a performance issue.

[janbar]

@knappster , please create a bug report for your issue. This issue breaks the schedule manager and until you restart Kodi without this issue you cannot schedule any timer rule or worse you could schedule invalid rules.

[janbar]

@knappster the issue is related to the bug reported by trac #17864 . For instance I included in the addon 5.9.1 a hack to work around the issue. It seems existed since changes in kodi 17.0 and probably that affected all users having a backend not up at kodi startup, and worse not responding in the second. Many users using WOL feature were affected by it, and probably many users on slow network (wifi, powerline link etc).

[knappster]

@janbar, sorry for the delay in replying.
Please find my log here:
https://pastebin.com/UqdYV2dc

I haven't seen it again since I reported it.  I only have the standard log, but no debug logs.  I thought about posting it to the trac issue, but after reading through some of the comments, I thought it might be better to post here instead.  On my system, it is unlikely that Kodi would launch before mythtv backend was up.  I use mythwelcome, which launches after mythbackend is up.  Then I launch mythfrontend from mythwelcome, and Kodi from mythfrontend.  All is run from the same local machine, so latency should not be an issue.  I don't really manage any channel groups or timers through Kodi, almost all of that is done through mythweb and I just watch live tv or recordings and delete recordings after they are watched.

Let me know if you would still like me to take any further action.  I will compile and install 5.9.1 in the coming days and I will report back any feedback.  By the way, I've noticed that whenever I compile the pvr.mythtv package, it always downloads the latest release (or maybe latest commit).  Is there some way to specify the release to build if I ever need to revert to an older build that I haven't already compiled?

[knappster]

FYI, I've installed 5.9.2 and everything continues to perform well.

[janbar]

Thanks, good to hear. Here I haven't so much channels as guys from UK or US, and I can't realize the perf. In 5.10 I will remove the old code for image caching now unused.

Now recording artworks are updated on the fly each times your backend refresh the metadata. Same for icons when the guide grabber update them with channels guide.

[User 206796]

Forgive my ignorance but I'm assuming this thread is related to what I notice the addon doing upon startup which is searching for channel icons. So far, the only way I can set icons to channels is to manually assign the icon to each channel via the Kodi channel manager which is a long arduous process and if Kodi crashes, sometimes all channel customization is lost. If this provides a more automated solution, I'd like to utilize it. My question is: Where does it search for the icons? On the mythtv backend, the channel icons folder specified in Kodi settings or an external website? And how does it match the channel? Via file name?

[janbar]

@jsnj , all channels icons are provided by the backend itself. You have two ways to setup them:

1 - Using "myth-setup" on the channels screen you should be invited to download missed icons for channels. See MythTV documentation or wiki.

2 - You can configure the xmltv grabber for your region/country. Once done it will update channels icons when running "mythfilldatabase". See MythtTV doc... or wiki.

[knappster]

@janbar I may not be the best gauge for performance, either.  I don't have any channel icons and I am using OTA for mythtv so I only have about 12 total channels.  However, I haven't seen anything change with performance with 5.9.2.

[User 206796]

@jsnj , all channels icons are provided by the backend itself. You have two ways to setup them:

1 - Using "myth-setup" on the channels screen you should be invited to download missed icons for channels. See MythTV documentation or wiki.

2 - You can configure the xmltv grabber for your region/country. Once done it will update channels icons when running "mythfilldatabase". See MythtTV doc... or wiki.

 Thanks. I downloaded the icons and set it up in mythtv awhile ago, but the icons never showed. That's why I went the arduous kodi route of setting them. Anyway turns out the problem was this that I found in a post at the mythtv forums:

"The icons must be in the .mythtv/channels directory of the user that the backend runs as. If they're in your own directory (and the backend isn't running as your user) they won't be found."

So I just copied the channel icons folder from my user directory to the mythtv user directory. Now all's well.

[Christian_Haitian]

Hello,

I updated to the latest release of this addon while on Kodi Krypton 17.6 and I no longer have my channel icons that were loaded from my mythtv backend (version 29.1). With the recent change per the announcement, does this mean that the only way to get the channel icons to load will be to update to Kodi Leia?

[janbar]

Maybe your backend is miss configured. You should check mythtv wiki about your issue.
Also you could check your addon settings are not configured to disable icons or artworks. There is a setting for that.