Android Mini Client on Oreo

[crarbo1]

Thanks jvl711 & stuckless for looking into this issue so we can update our ShieldTV's to Oreo.

I have one other question about the mini client that is not related to the Oreo bug.

Is there a way to customize the transparency of the pop up on screen buttons when you long press the select button on the ShieldTV? Right now it is not very transparent and blocks a lot of the screen. I sometimes use those buttons to quickly fast forward through a sporting event that I have recorded. This isn't a huge deal but I thought I would ask.

Thanks again for all of your work!!

[stuckless]

FYI... I uploaded a version 1.2.13 to the Play Store. This version doesn't fix the issue, since it can't really be fixed in my code, but it should still allow the UI to render, even if there are "bad bitmaps".

[DarkWolf77]

Originally Posted by stuckless

FYI... I uploaded a version 1.2.13 to the Play Store. This version doesn't fix the issue, since it can't really be fixed in my code, but it should still allow the UI to render, even if there are "bad bitmaps".

Loaded it up on my phone and it looks great. After your post yesterday I tried running optipng on all the pngs in the sage dir and it didn't seem to change anything. It hasn't shown up for my Shield yet, but considering the issue was showing up on my phone too I can't imagine it's borked there. Question, when it fails to load one of the 'bad bitmaps', does it log it in debug? It might be helpful to isolate the trouble makers so they can be addressed.

[MrD]

Originally Posted by DarkWolf77

Loaded it up on my phone and it looks great. After your post yesterday I tried running optipng on all the pngs in the sage dir and it didn't seem to change anything. It hasn't shown up for my Shield yet, but considering the issue was showing up on my phone too I can't imagine it's borked there. Question, when it fails to load one of the 'bad bitmaps', does it log it in debug? It might be helpful to isolate the trouble makers so they can be addressed.

Did you clear the image cache on the shield?

[DarkWolf77]

Originally Posted by MrD

Did you clear the image cache on the shield?

Cleared the caches, uninstalled the app and installed from scratch, restarted the server, etc. No matter though, the new app has definitely cleared up the issues, though.

[TwistedMelon]

On noticing a client update today, I immediately came here to see what's what. I've found that over the past four or more months I've used the Sage client maybe once or twice to watch a recording (in progress or with some glitches) that Plex couldn't deal with on playback. Mostly the client is used only for scheduling and that's primarily because given the MPEG streams in my area, I'm limited to using IJK and that doesn't support audio passthrough. I honestly hadn't even yet seen the issues with the Oreo update and image loading.

But in any case, I'm about to test Plex's own DVR support for the second time. My Schedules Direct subscription comes due in August, just before I go on vacation, so now's as good a time as any. I also need to set up my new unraid server in the next month and skipping Sage could be one less bottle neck.

This time around I'm using the HDHR Quatro so I'll give it a shot with multiple tuners. Plex has also recently added initial support for a grid-based guide to the server (exposed only to the desktop/web app at the moment) and they continue to tweak DVR features and playback support for the MPEG2 ATSC streams in their private fork of ExoPlayer. But... I'll also be checking out Emby shortly as a possible replacement for Plex as a whole.

It's been a good 14 years, but this may be it for me with Sage. Very bittersweet.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by TwistedMelon

On noticing a client update today, I immediately came here to see what's what. I've found that over the past four or more months I've used the Sage client maybe once or twice to watch a recording (in progress or with some glitches) that Plex couldn't deal with on playback. Mostly the client is used only for scheduling and that's primarily because given the MPEG streams in my area, I'm limited to using IJK and that doesn't support audio passthrough. I honestly hadn't even yet seen the issues with the Oreo update and image loading.

But in any case, I'm about to test Plex's own DVR support for the second time. My Schedules Direct subscription comes due in August, just before I go on vacation, so now's as good a time as any. I also need to set up my new unraid server in the next month and skipping Sage could be one less bottle neck.

This time around I'm using the HDHR Quatro so I'll give it a shot with multiple tuners. Plex has also recently added initial support for a grid-based guide to the server (exposed only to the desktop/web app at the moment) and they continue to tweak DVR features and playback support for the MPEG2 ATSC streams in their private fork of ExoPlayer. But... I'll also be checking out Emby shortly as a possible replacement for Plex as a whole.

It's been a good 14 years, but this may be it for me with Sage. Very bittersweet.

I have a plex pass subscription, and I've been toying with the same idea. I have both Emby (with a monthly pass) and Plex (with lifetime plex pass). There are aspects of both emby and plex that I like, and at the same time, aspects that I dislike. I setup a Trakt account and configured plex and emby to use, so that at least I could keep watched statuses in sync between those two. I might consider creating a Trakt plugin for SageTV and that way I could easily keep them all in sync. (It was tedious getting all my watched tv statuses setup in plex, so that I could create a view of unwatched TV only )

If I did switch to plex, I'd likely still use sagetv for all my recordings, and just watch them in plex.

Neither plex or emby from what i can tell support comskip, though, so that sucks.

[rickgillyon]

Was hoping this would help with the client hangup and crash with thumbnails with too-long paths. Sadly not. I'm getting a lot of grief with that one.

[oldfolkie]

I'm using the SageTV add-on for Kodi and it supports comskip as long as you make a tweak to the comskip.ini file (https://kodi.wiki/view/Edit_decision_list).

The add-on has a pretty basic UI and it requires Java 7 instead of 8, but it keeps track of watched status in SageTV, plays OTA recorded MPEG2, does FF and Rewind, displays closed captions, and plays 5.1 surround audio.

The reason I started using the add-on is that Kodi can be configured to wake my SageTV server, which I could never get to work in the mini-client. I now have Kodi (and the add-on) installed on two Shield TVs and one Fire TV Cube. I have the shared central Kodi database on my SageTV server.

[cat6man]

Originally Posted by oldfolkie

I'm using the SageTV add-on for Kodi and it supports comskip as long as you make a tweak to the comskip.ini file (https://kodi.wiki/view/Edit_decision_list).

The add-on has a pretty basic UI and it requires Java 7 instead of 8, but it keeps track of watched status in SageTV, plays OTA recorded MPEG2, does FF and Rewind, displays closed captions, and plays 5.1 surround audio.

The reason I started using the add-on is that Kodi can be configured to wake my SageTV server, which I could never get to work in the mini-client. I now have Kodi (and the add-on) installed on two Shield TVs and one Fire TV Cube. I have the shared central Kodi database on my SageTV server.

i had no idea there was a sagetv add-on for kodi.........have to check that out

[oldfolkie]

More info here:

https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/sho...3&postcount=70

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by rickgillyon

Was hoping this would help with the client hangup and crash with thumbnails with too-long paths. Sadly not. I'm getting a lot of grief with that one.

I have looked at this a couple times, but, the solution isn't a simple one I can't just change the name on the Android side (which would be easy), but instead I have to keep all the names in a database, since later, I need to send back to sagetv, all the names that we have, and sagetv uses this for caching.

[rickgillyon]

Originally Posted by stuckless

I have looked at this a couple times, but, the solution isn't a simple one I can't just change the name on the Android side (which would be easy), but instead I have to keep all the names in a database, since later, I need to send back to sagetv, all the names that we have, and sagetv uses this for caching.

Thanks for the efforts anyway. Is there any way we could tell the miniclient via an option to just stop loading thumbnails? Not having them would be preferable in this case.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by rickgillyon

Thanks for the efforts anyway. Is there any way we could tell the miniclient via an option to just stop loading thumbnails? Not having them would be preferable in this case.

The miniclient itself doesn't know about any sagetv artifacts. It can't tell the difference between a poster or the letter 'a' (both are sent down as an 'image'.)

[TwistedMelon]

Originally Posted by stuckless

If I did switch to plex, I'd likely still use sagetv for all my recordings, and just watch them in plex.

I may go back to doing that once the new server is set up. It's been a frustrating couple of days with Plex - it just seems to get buggier as time goes on and with respect to DVR and Live TV it's years behind where Sage was when official development stopped with v7. It may be more likely that ATSC goes away and becomes completely irrelevant before Plex's DVR capabilities are up to snuff. Looks like they're fully committed to Exo Player and that's a shame, because performance on that player via their implementation is just terrible.

With the new server, even though I'll have a lot more storage space, I plan to transcode everything because I don't see any hope for adequate MPEG2 playback support in the future.

[fresnoboy]

Justto pile on, my shield upgraded to Oreo and the miniclient acts very strangely with SageMC - the home screen displays fine, but when I initiate playback, I hear audio but no video is displayed. Very odd.

Thx
mike

[BobbyDing]

Anybody had any success blocking the update?

[rrhorer]

On my Shield, only the option to upgrade shows up as the first large thumbnail in the top row when I turn on the Shield. Based on others' experience, as related in this thread, I have been careful not to select the upgrade option. I believe in the Shields settings there is a setting to have automatic upgrades or not.

[BobbyDing]

Yeah, it shows up on my shield home screen too. But sometimes I get a full "UPGRADE NOW" screen, and I'm afraid either myself or somebody else will accidentaly select YES. There must be a url I can blacklist in my router. Haven't found that url yet though.

Found a site with older images. Not sure if any of these images would work to bring the shield back to 6.3.

https://developer.nvidia.com/gameworksdownload

[rrhorer]

You're right. I did a power/restart and got the update screen. I selected "remind me later" but was afraid that it did the update anyway. Luckily, it did not. I went with this setup because one of my HD300s died. I replaced the HD300 with a Shield and, later, added a harmony Hub because of the horrible Shield remote. Anyway, this Oreo update issue has me worried.