Android/AndroidTV Placeshifter client (Discussion)

[Narflex]

For forced placeshifting formats...adding higher bitrate options and resolutions to the Placeshifter is trivial. For the bitrate...just change line 831 of sage.miniclient.MiniClientManagerFrame; that's the UI control that presents the bitrate range....this'll pass all the way through to the server. For the resolution & frame rate...you'll need to make a few more changes in that file (search for D1; you'll find the JComboBox you need to modify to add more resoultions); and then also in sage.FFMPEGTranscoder search for D1 again and you'll find the server code that handles these resolution names too.

For dynamic; there's a forced resolution of 352x288 in FFMPEGTranscoder for dynamic mode (line 886)....but this could be made more dynamic by modifying the code below that adjusts various startup parameters based on detected bandwidth (but you can't change resolution while transcoding..only bitrate). The maximum rate looks like it's 1500Kbps and is used a few times in MiniPlayer.java (that should really be turned into a constant, like there is for the MIN rate in that file).

I'd have no problem approving changes in these areas.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by Narflex

For forced placeshifting formats...adding higher bitrate options and resolutions to the Placeshifter is trivial. For the bitrate...just change line 831 of sage.miniclient.MiniClientManagerFrame; that's the UI control that presents the bitrate range....this'll pass all the way through to the server. For the resolution & frame rate...you'll need to make a few more changes in that file (search for D1; you'll find the JComboBox you need to modify to add more resoultions); and then also in sage.FFMPEGTranscoder search for D1 again and you'll find the server code that handles these resolution names too.

For dynamic; there's a forced resolution of 352x288 in FFMPEGTranscoder for dynamic mode (line 886)....but this could be made more dynamic by modifying the code below that adjusts various startup parameters based on detected bandwidth (but you can't change resolution while transcoding..only bitrate). The maximum rate looks like it's 1500Kbps and is used a few times in MiniPlayer.java (that should really be turned into a constant, like there is for the MIN rate in that file).

I'd have no problem approving changes in these areas.

Yeah, I had found the bitrate limit pretty easily, was just in the process of looking for where the resolution was actually processed on the server end, so you saved me some time on that one.. :-)

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by MattHelm

To get usable (for me) quality real-time transcoding it takes 100% of any CPU currently sold, which I guess is why everythime I see or hear about it, I cringe.

This simply isn't true anymore. Years ago yes it was but with the new multi core processors I find more than suitable transcoding for my 50" plasmas using plex and roku. Processor doesn't hardly skip a bit even if 2 are asking for feed at once.

[MattHelm]

Originally Posted by PLUCKYHD

This simply isn't true anymore. Years ago yes it was but with the new multi core processors I find more than suitable transcoding for my 50" plasmas using plex and roku. Processor doesn't hardly skip a bit even if 2 are asking for feed at once.

I deleted PLEX after a week, and GAVE my Roku away. Both seemed pretty worthless to me. Picked up a used HD200, MUCH better. But to each their own.

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by MattHelm

I deleted PLEX after a week, and GAVE my Roku away. Both seemed pretty worthless to me. Picked up a used HD200, MUCH better. But to each their own.

I guess it depends on where or how you view things. Plex is great for mobile use. Something that is currently not available directly from SageTV at the moment.

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by MattHelm

I deleted PLEX after a week, and GAVE my Roku away. Both seemed pretty worthless to me. Picked up a used HD200, MUCH better. But to each their own.

Also great for when you're away from cell service or don't want to consume your mobile data as you can sync content to your devices. I use that feature on my iPad so I can watch stuff at lunch.

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by MattHelm

I deleted PLEX after a week, and GAVE my Roku away. Both seemed pretty worthless to me. Picked up a used HD200, MUCH better. But to each their own.

A week isn't long enough to try anything IMHO, To each their own but I use roku's and firetv's with plex in 3 room and my main htpc in the living room. 0 issues and quality is undetectable from main pc imho. And like others have said nothing beats it for mobility especially the availability to download transcoded copys directly on mobile devices.

[Gustovier]

So I would advise that we try to get direct playback working first. Alrhough transcoding will give you more global playback capability direct streaming provides a much better experience as mentioned (if the HW can handle it). I think looking at using libVlc library would be an option.

The Nvidia Shield would be the ultimate AndroidTv device to use for this.

[Fuzzy]

Well the nice thing is, Placeshifter already supports both, defaulting to direct playback if local, and auto-bandwidth transcoding when remote. It also forces transcoding when the client doesn't support the format of the source. That's all sort of covered, as long as placeshifter is properly configured with supported formats for whatever platform it is deployed on. The MediMVP, for instance, doesn't support MPEG4, just MPEG-2, so any content played on it is transcoded to MPEG-2 SD video.

[MattHelm]

Originally Posted by PLUCKYHD

A week isn't long enough to try anything IMHO, To each their own but I use roku's and firetv's with plex in 3 room and my main htpc in the living room. 0 issues and quality is undetectable from main pc imho. And like others have said nothing beats it for mobility especially the availability to download transcoded copys directly on mobile devices.

IMHO, 1 week was overkill. Installed and setup in a day or 2, after about 1/2 of my videos were not watchable with my setup, removed. (and yes, played with the settings for hours, trying a lot of the options.)

I'm not saying it's bad software, or isn't useful for some people, just not that way I needed it to work.

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by MattHelm

IMHO, 1 week was overkill. Installed and setup in a day or 2, after about 1/2 of my videos were not watchable with my setup, removed. (and yes, played with the settings for hours, trying a lot of the options.)

I'm not saying it's bad software, or isn't useful for some people, just not that way I needed it to work.

fair enough but my original point stands trans coding does not take 100% of modern cpus or close and is a viable option for many players

[wayner]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

Well the nice thing is, Placeshifter already supports both, defaulting to direct playback if local, and auto-bandwidth transcoding when remote.

Why do you need to transcode for remote playback. My upload speed is 20 Mbps and the folks that have Google Fiber are way better than that. How about giving you the option of transcoding for remote playback, at least for clients that can play back many types of files - I realize that this may not be true of Android or iOS.

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by wayner

Why do you need to transcode for remote playback. My upload speed is 20 Mbps and the folks that have Google Fiber are way better than that. How about giving you the option of transcoding for remote playback, at least for clients that can play back many types of files - I realize that this may not be true of Android or iOS.

Us in the States aren't often afforded that much outgoing speed unless we spend butt loads of money every month. My upload speed is lucky to get to 7Mbps.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

Us in the States aren't often afforded that much outgoing speed unless we spend butt loads of money every month. My upload speed is lucky to get to 7Mbps.

And quite often my cellular down speed isn't anywhere near a fraction of that.

[reggie14]

My upload is 75mbps, but I only get that to a handful of major service providers. I've never been able to download from my server above around 10mbps, and usually it's closer to 3mbps. I'm guessing Verizon has some congested transit links.

[blade]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

Us in the States aren't often afforded that much outgoing speed unless we spend butt loads of money every month. My upload speed is lucky to get to 7Mbps.

Fortunately not all of us in the US are in the same boat, so streaming without transcoding would be great for me. I get +90 Mbps per second both downloading and uploading (that's actual speed not advertised and it's the low end offering). For $12 more a month I could switch to 1 Gbps both up and down.

[cncb]

I have had the Shield TV for a few days now and it is playing MPEG2 recorded TV inside Kodi really well. It also has no problems with 1080P MKVs from blu-rays (can even play VC1 smoothly even though it apparently doesn't have hardware acceleration for this yet). Rumor has it that the next update might bring HD audio and 24p output. So far it is looking good as a possible extender.

[stuckless]

While you guys are debating whether or not we should or should not stream I've been trying to get the first part of this going... ie, just being able to show a UI and interact with it from an Android device. I'd like to say it's going smoothly, but that isn't the case

I do have a "UI" (that I can't interact with) showing... but I still have some issues around the font rendering (ie, not rendering the the color). I'm also upscaling 720x480, for now, so it's a little blocky.

The following image is from my phone, running 1920x1080.

[Narflex]

Sean,

This looks like it might only be the text color rendering issue. The 'double text' that's showing is like the main text (rendered in white) and then the shadow for the text (supposed to be a fairly transparent black, shifted down/right 2 pixels...but it's being rendered in white here). The last parameter in the DRAWTEXTUREDRECT command is a blending color which should be applied to that texture when rendering it (it'll either be an alpha effect; or with text it's a color + alpha in order to give the texture map for that glyph it's actual text color).

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by Narflex

Sean,

This looks like it might only be the text color rendering issue. The 'double text' that's showing is like the main text (rendered in white) and then the shadow for the text (supposed to be a fairly transparent black, shifted down/right 2 pixels...but it's being rendered in white here). The last parameter in the DRAWTEXTUREDRECT command is a blending color which should be applied to that texture when rendering it (it'll either be an alpha effect; or with text it's a color + alpha in order to give the texture map for that glyph it's actual text color).

Yeah, I was seeing that being the case (more in the Java2d implementation), and in my current iteration of this, the Canvas that I'm using doesn't support doing that, easily. I might try to create a pixel filter myself, or might need to go back to native opengl.

So far I'm run into lots of little issues... from needing to transpose the Y values, reording the pixel bytes from ARGB to RGBA (and vice versa)... It's been interesting.

I did start out with a pure opengl port, but I ran into issues because the opengl apis were not the same, and I don't know enough opengl to be able to intelligently figure it out

Right now I'm using a wrapper on opengl, and I'm using a back buffer (similar to the java2d impl), and that implementation doesn't really support the vast features that Java2d does.

I guess it's back to opengl, natively

On a positive note... On an Android device, I can now fully interact with the UI... It just looks crappy