Android MiniClient 1.2.9

[stuckless]

Last night I pushed out a new MiniClient release. The last one was in May, and sadly this is not a big release.

I've updated the Players (IJKPlayer and ExoPlayer) to their latest releases.

I fixed a numbe of errors that was reported through the Android Developer console.

And I think that ExoPlayer is probably just as good as IJKPlayer in my testing. I'm now using ExoPlayer as my default player for the first time. My biggest gripe with ExoPlayer was that it would mess up sometimes when I skip commercials, or skip ahead, but I think I've fixed that now.

[TwistedMelon]

Is it live on the Play Store or did you just submit it? I just picked up a Shield earlier today and the Sage download about an hour ago was 1.2.8.

Played a couple of recordings without issue without changing anything. This afternoon/evening I'll hopefully have time to set it up in earnest and do stuff like copying over the properties from my HD300 for theme/UI.

Looking forward to seeing all your hard work. Thanks again for making this a reality. It's shame more people don't know about this and SageTV in general.

[trk2]

Good news and thanks for your continued work. As someone who values audio passthrough it is very exciting to hear the stability of ExoPlayer has been improved.

[btrcp2000]

Just dl'ed now, version says 1.28 but date is 10/31/17 and notes reflect changes above. Maybe the version didn't get updated?

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by TwistedMelon

.. and the Sage download about an hour ago was 1.2.8.

Originally Posted by btrcp2000

Just dl'ed now, version says 1.28 but date is 10/31/17 and notes reflect changes above. Maybe the version didn't get updated?

Yeah, sadly, it would appear that I did not update the version text (I did update the version counter, but not the display text )

[KarylFStein]

Originally Posted by stuckless

Last night I pushed out a new MiniClient release. The last one was in May, and sadly this is not a big release.

I've updated the Players (IJKPlayer and ExoPlayer) to their latest releases.

I fixed a numbe of errors that was reported through the Android Developer console.

And I think that ExoPlayer is probably just as good as IJKPlayer in my testing. I'm now using ExoPlayer as my default player for the first time. My biggest gripe with ExoPlayer was that it would mess up sometimes when I skip commercials, or skip ahead, but I think I've fixed that now.

Thanks for the update. I usually use IJKPlayer on my tablet as I have not had much luck with ExoPlayer on it. However, I saw this post and saw that the update had been installed on my tablet, so tried ExoPlayer tonight. (If it makes a difference note that I'm currently a few thousand miles away from my server and on a shoddy Internet connection.) While I had audio it was interrupted by loud "pops" every few seconds and no video. IJKPlayer seemed to work fine in brief testing although short skips of 10 seconds didn't do anything, (not a big deal as the longer skips over 30 seconds e.g. commercial breaks so far seemed to work). And I had the app close on me a couple time in the middle of playback, (same thing yesterday before the update, though).

Do you have WAN connections as part of your testing? I am guessing that is a totally different beast as it does transcoding. But I would think that would help smooth things out assuming the server could keep up, which mine should be well able to do.

Anyway, I have no idea of all the pieces involved with remote playback, but if retiring IJKPlayer is on the table, (not sure if it is, but seems like it might help development to not have to manage two players), please keep remote playbck in mind.

That said, I've been on the road for a couple weeks now and while there have been some inconviences with the app shutting down or skipping stopping working as you got past the halfway mark on a show, it did not drive me to stream something directly from the content providers as in the past. So I think good progress. I'm looking forward to trying this on my SHIELD when I get home.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by KarylFStein

Thanks for the update. I usually use IJKPlayer on my tablet as I have not had much luck with ExoPlayer on it. However, I saw this post and saw that the update had been installed on my tablet, so tried ExoPlayer tonight. (If it makes a difference note that I'm currently a few thousand miles away from my server and on a shoddy Internet connection.) While I had audio it was interrupted by loud "pops" every few seconds and no video. IJKPlayer seemed to work fine in brief testing although short skips of 10 seconds didn't do anything, (not a big deal as the longer skips over 30 seconds e.g. commercial breaks so far seemed to work). And I had the app close on me a couple time in the middle of playback, (same thing yesterday before the update, though).

Do you have WAN connections as part of your testing? I am guessing that is a totally different beast as it does transcoding. But I would think that would help smooth things out assuming the server could keep up, which mine should be well able to do.

Anyway, I have no idea of all the pieces involved with remote playback, but if retiring IJKPlayer is on the table, (not sure if it is, but seems like it might help development to not have to manage two players), please keep remote playbck in mind.

That said, I've been on the road for a couple weeks now and while there have been some inconviences with the app shutting down or skipping stopping working as you got past the halfway mark on a show, it did not drive me to stream something directly from the content providers as in the past. So I think good progress. I'm looking forward to trying this on my SHIELD when I get home.

Thanks for the feedback, it's good to know, and not to worry, IJKPlayer is not being retired anytime soon.

In all my years with sagetv I've never accessed sagetv outside of my LAN, so, no internet testing is not on my list

[TwistedMelon]

Looks great running the MBDiamond theme. Just had time to go through a few menus and test playback again - need to switch over to EXO to test.

I definitely need to get that Flirc ASAP to be able to use more buttons/keys. The restrictions when only using the basic Shield remote will drive me batty. Especially missing multiple skips in each directions, but also not being able to hold down any of the navigation buttons to repeat (scrolling, skipping, etc.)

[TwistedMelon]

Got a little more time testing...

I deleted SageTV from the Shield TV and did a fresh download, just in case. I verified the one downloaded contained the release not about EXO now working better.

EXO won't work. Video stutters and plays erratically and no sound is output. I did get sound one time but it was garbled and after a few seconds it locked up. I'd really like to get this working and hopefully be able to pass through all audio to my processor and AVR.

IJK seems to play recorded MPEG2-PS well. Skipping work but shows some slow-down when resuming. Not a huge deal. But, all audio is output as LPCM which my video processor/HDMI switcher reports as 2xLPCM. I'll have to do an audible test tomorrow to see if that's right.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by TwistedMelon

Got a little more time testing...

I deleted SageTV from the Shield TV and did a fresh download, just in case. I verified the one downloaded contained the release not about EXO now working better.

EXO won't work. Video stutters and plays erratically and no sound is output. I did get sound one time but it was garbled and after a few seconds it locked up. I'd really like to get this working and hopefully be able to pass through all audio to my processor and AVR.

IJK seems to play recorded MPEG-TS well. Skipping work but shows some slow-down when resuming. Not a huge deal. But, all audio is output as LPCM which my video processor/HDMI switcher reports as 2xLPCM. I'll have to do an audible test tomorrow to see if that's right.

That's too bad. I guess we'll have to see well it works when there is a new ExoPlayer build. I don't think these issues are anything that I can fix in the client, so hopefully ExoPlayer improves.

[TwistedMelon]

Is the lack of pass-through with IJK a hard limitation or something that can be changed at some point in the future?

Any other libraries or code out there that can be leveraged for playback, such as what's currently in Kodi and Plex?

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by TwistedMelon

Is the lack of pass-through with IJK a hard limitation or something that can be changed at some point in the future?

Any other libraries or code out there that can be leveraged for playback, such as what's currently in Kodi and Plex?

I'm sure it could be changed in ijkplayer, but who would do it? It's not of interest to the maintainer of ijkplayer, and the solution, from what I can tell needs be specific to the hardware. It's not something I'm going to do.

ExoPlayer, since it supports audio passthough, is really your best shot. The audio pops, etc, seem like something that could be fixed in the ExoPlayer side, I'm guessing. You can try opening a bug there, but they'll need a sample media file, etc, and they are not the friendliest bunch of people

As for Plex/Kodi... I guess we'll have to wait for a lead developer on one of those pojects to join sagetv. Although, personally, I think it might be easier to recreate the MiniClient inside of Kodi, instead of actually trying to pull in the Kodi player. This is what Plex did.

[TwistedMelon]

SageTV inside Kodi as a plugin would work.

I still don't understand the need/use of Plex inside Kodi. They're both based originally on the same XBMC code base. Each is available to install on platforms where the other is available. It's no more difficult to install a native Plex app than it is to install the Plex plugin within Kodi.

I was hoping the Kodi or Plex playback code could easily be pulled from a repository and used in place of exo/ijk.

Last night I found the thread where you asked the IJK dev about passthrough and saw it didn't get any traction. Unfortunately he must be playing all his media sitting in front of a 2-speaker computer.

I'm happy to submit a video stream to the EXO devs - it doesn't matter what file I play, every recording from my Hauppauge digital tuner seems to exhibit the same results.

[TwistedMelon]

All the info I could quickly bring up on EXO indicates that at the time, they didn't support H.222 (MPEG2-PS) - the streams Sage is saving to disk directly from Hauppauge's OTA tuners.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by TwistedMelon

I still don't understand the need/use of Plex inside Kodi. They're both based originally on the same XBMC code base. Each is available to install on platforms where the other is available. It's no more difficult to install a native Plex app than it is to install the Plex plugin within Kodi.

I'm pretty Plex devs get the standard, "but kodi can play... how come you can't". They both might have grew out of the same xmbc code, but that was many years ago, and they are both very different beasts today.

Originally Posted by TwistedMelon

Unfortunately he must be playing all his media sitting in front of a 2-speaker computer.

I can't say much... I use a 2 speaker bose setup.

Originally Posted by TwistedMelon

All the info I could quickly bring up on EXO indicates that at the time, they didn't support H.222 (MPEG2-PS) - the streams Sage is saving to disk directly from Hauppauge's OTA tuners.

Jeff (Narflex) added MPEG2-PS processing to ExoPlayer.

The bigger problem with ExoPlayer is they refuse to add hacks to work around problems in streams (unlike ffmpeg), so if they analyzed your stream, and found that the hardware was creating some errors in the stream, they'd say, too bad. ExoPlayer is really good for single purpose players like Netflix and YouTube where they control the content and player, but doesn't work so well for media players that need to support lots of different stream types (like sagetv). It's working OK for me now, because all my streams are TS stream with some mkv/mp4 files.

[TwistedMelon]

A "perfect video stream" is a pretty novel fantasy.

So how many cases of beer does one have to buy you to get you interested in bringing the Miniclient up as a Kodi plugin?

[TwistedMelon]

I had the chance to test EXO with some MKV files containing H.264 video streams and AC3 audio - playback was perfect, with fast seek and instant play speed recovery. But this isn't what I need to play back using the mini-client.

Can you let me know where I should submit a bug and offer some video samples? Do you happen to know if Jeff is still interested in/able to make any changes to the code he added for MPEG2-PS?

Also, have you taken a look at MPV? It seems to have some API access for embedding it within other apps (and Android builds/sources), I just don't know if it can fit within your requirements.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by TwistedMelon

I had the chance to test EXO with some MKV files containing H.264 video streams and AC3 audio - playback was perfect, with fast seek and instant play speed recovery. But this isn't what I need to play back using the mini-client.

Can you let me know where I should submit a bug and offer some video samples? Do you happen to know if Jeff is still interested in/able to make any changes to the code he added for MPEG2-PS?

Also, have you taken a look at MPV? It seems to have some API access for embedding it within other apps (and Android builds/sources), I just don't know if it can fit within your requirements.

libmpv is certainly feasible, just not trivial to integrate a new player. The bigger barrier would be that I'd need to do a JNI integration and I hate working in JNI. Does libpmv solve the audio passthrough issues? Both ijk and iibpmv use ffmpeg, but I'm not sure what "extras" libmpv is bringing to the table. (I've also looked at using vlc in the past as well, but, the chalenge is that I need build the sagetv streaming protocol into the native part of the library, and that's pretty tedious for me )

EDIT: Submitting an issue for ExoPLayer
https://github.com/google/ExoPlayer/issues
They have a pretty strict issue template.

[TwistedMelon]

Originally Posted by stuckless

Does libpmv solve the audio passthrough issues?

It supports passthrough at least, don't know if issues will come up in implementation.

--audio-spdif=<codecs>
List of codecs for which compressed audio passthrough should be used. This works for both classic S/PDIF and HDMI.

The MacOS build seems to play back the couple of recent recordings I tested it with, including fast seeking without any resuming issues.

[nettech_gt]

I don't see 1.2.9 on the Amazon app store or JFrog... Will it be made available soon? Thanx!