Fork of SageTV MiniClient for Android TV

[tvmaster2]

Finally got around to some real-world use of the miniclient on a Firestick 4k.
Overall, really close to be being excellent, however...
I had problems with FF in a show which was a recording in progress - no matter where I tried to FF to, Miniclient would most often jump backwards to random points on the timeline, often to nearly program start.
Any thought? Was this because the recording was still in progress? Why would that make a difference if so...

[jvl711]

Originally Posted by tvmaster2

Finally got around to some real-world use of the miniclient on a Firestick 4k.
Overall, really close to be being excellent, however...
I had problems with FF in a show which was a recording in progress - no matter where I tried to FF to, Miniclient would most often jump backwards to random points on the timeline, often to nearly program start.
Any thought? Was this because the recording was still in progress? Why would that make a difference if so...

Hi,

Can you confirm which version you are using.... This is something I believed that I had fixed . I felt it was much better than it had been. I almost completely rewrote how it was doing seeking.

I will tell you that the way that the Android client is setup up, it is currently using the sagetv mpeg remuxer. It relies on the remuxer to seek to the right position in the file. It could be making mistakes....

[jvl711]

Originally Posted by crl

It's exciting to see this client approach the level of replacing HD300! Thanks to all for their contributions. I've seen a few others upthread with same issue as mine, but without any replies.

I have 1.7.0 working with MPEG2 OTA streams on Fire Stick 4K only when Exoplayer is disabled. I also have the first MPEG2 hardware decoder (OMX.MTK.VIDEO.DECODER.MPEG2) unchecked. This works reasonably okay.

It seems most in this thread are using OpenDCT to fix the MPEG2 container in order to successfully use Exoplayer. Since I use internal an PCI capture card I don't think OpenDCT is an option for me (it didn't discover my cards when I tried.)

Is there any way to enable the same streamfix when using an internal capture card as what OpenDCT is doing?

Is there any way to disable a specific hardware codec for Exoplayer in the same way IJK allows it?

I suspect I'd be all set if either of the ideas above are possible - and others who don't have HDHRs.

Thanks!

Adding stream fix to the Android Client is on my roadmap. I plan to add a setting to the Android Client that will tell SageTV to use the SageTVTranscoder to perform a stream fix before sending to the client. This will in a sense be like realtime transcoding of the file, but with very low resource use on the server, since it will not be reencoding the content.

Josh

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by jvl711

Hi,

Can you confirm which version you are using.... This is something I believed that I had fixed . I felt it was much better than it had been. I almost completely rewrote how it was doing seeking.

I will tell you that the way that the Android client is setup up, it is currently using the sagetv mpeg remuxer. It relies on the remuxer to seek to the right position in the file. It could be making mistakes....

I believe the version which Amazon auto-updated to is 1.70? Sound correct? We were watching a show last night in real time, and paused to answer a phone call, etc. When I pressed play, and then FF to get past commercials, the random jumping commenced. Windows 7, 32bit server. No wifi bandwidth issues. Happened two more times in the hour show (phone rings more often this time of year). Also lost audio sync a couple of times when trying to get back on track.
I haven’t tried a pre-recorded show yet, so I’ll get to that next

[crl]

Originally Posted by jvl711

Adding stream fix to the Android Client is on my roadmap. I plan to add a setting to the Android Client that will tell SageTV to use the SageTVTranscoder to perform a stream fix before sending to the client. This will in a sense be like realtime transcoding of the file, but with very low resource use on the server, since it will not be reencoding the content.

This sounds like it would do the trick!

[crl]

I have a potentially fascinating observation. Using a different android tv box (s905x) I loaded v1.7.0 and played some MPEG2 TV recording, including live. On this unit they played beautifully! I assume this was exoplayer since I hadn't been into the settings to change anything.

I wanted to turn off the UI sounds and my playback became a slow, stuttering disaster! I tried a ton of things but it worked again once I cleared all app data from Android settings. Played perfectly again. Went into the settings and changed nothing - merely exited and the problem returned.

Does this make any sense?

[craigap]

I would like to thank all involved in producing this client. I recently learned of this product and decided to buy a Firestick 4K and try it out instead of trying to find another HD300 and wire an Ethernet port to a room that doesn't have one.
I seem to have the same issue using the exoplayer for my OTA recordings in MPEG. Made the settings changes to IJK and software decoding and it has been adequately functional.

Sounds like there is a transcoder in development to change my OTA recordings to a format that exoplayer will play? I also read some things about openDCT fixing this issue. I would like confirmation that this only works for network OTA tuners and not my PCIe HVR-2255s.

Also, could this client be easily uploaded to Roku as a Roku Channel? My suspicion is that there would likely be incompatible coding (not a coder at all here), but wanted to ask. Would love to see this on Roku.

[jvl711]

Originally Posted by craigap

Also, could this client be easily uploaded to Roku as a Roku Channel? My suspicion is that there would likely be incompatible coding (not a coder at all here), but wanted to ask. Would love to see this on Roku.

I am pretty sure that Roku apps ae written in a completely different programming language. Someone would need to create it from scratch.

Josh

[wayner]

Originally Posted by craigap

Also, could this client be easily uploaded to Roku as a Roku Channel? My suspicion is that there would likely be incompatible coding (not a coder at all here), but wanted to ask. Would love to see this on Roku.

My understanding is that the SageTV miniclient, which is what is used on extenders, SageTV Placeshifter, and the Android app, is written in Java, just like the core of SageTV.

So it was some work, but not a complete rewrite, for stuckless to initially port the miniclient to AndroidTV. But Roku apps use something called Brightscript so it would be pretty much a total rewrite to make it work on Roku.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by wayner

My understanding is that the SageTV miniclient, which is what is used on extenders, SageTV Placeshifter, and the Android app, is written in Java, just like the core of SageTV.

So it was some work, but not a complete rewrite, for stuckless to initially port the miniclient to AndroidTV. But Roku apps use something called Brightscript so it would be pretty much a total rewrite to make it work on Roku.

The Android MiniClient is more of a rewrite than a port. I did use some of the Linux miniclient and hd300 miniclient code as a reference, but, for the most part it's a rewrite.

The "miniclient" itself is not very hard to emulate. I created one in Javascript that could render the UI and navigate it. Several years ago I did look at brightscript because I was looking to do some other work there, I think the UI rendering would be ok, but the video playback will be the challenge.

The sagetv miniclient uses 2 tcp sockets to communicate with the sagetv. 1 socket is a command socket and the other is a graphics socket. These exchange a simple binary and efficient data model, but in effect, sagetv is sending your bitmaps from the server with instructions on where to render them and scale them and or how to blend them, and you just have to apply that. When I did this for javascript I basically put a small server in the sagetv core that translated the instructions to json since that was easier to deal with.

The video playback is the real challenging part. Sagetv uses 2 video modes and neither is standard. Although the PULL model is more like a traditional video playback in that you just keep reading the stream of data and pass to the video player. The PUSH model is completely different and the video playback is managed on the server and data is pushed to the client which means data is non linear. ie, "something" on the server could cause the video to skip ahead, and when that happens a new "push" buffer is sent, but you have to watch fro this an reset the player and then sync the timeline, etc. This is why sagetv can do instant skipping, but it's also why people see timeline issues in miniclient when they seek. Brightscript's video player is likely not programmable, you just give it a URL, so this would be the hardest challenge. You also need to use a rendering engine like opengl that supports being overlaid on top of video where you can punch a hole in the UI to see the video under it. This is how PIP and overlays in general work in sagetv.

The core of the sagetv UI render engine is basically this file that reads instructions and then forwards them to the UI manager. https://github.com/OpenSageTV/sagetv...t/GFXCMD2.java

[randyth]

I just got an AirTV Mini free with a two-month subscription to Sling TV (I'm a seasonal Sling TV subscriber for the NBA and Tour De France). It's essentially a Google TV device streamlined for use with Sling TV. How streamlined? Well, the remote has a dedicated Sling TV button on it -- along with a Netflix button -- and hitting the Guide button always jumps to the Sling TV channel guide (grrr). But, if you can train yourself to avoid that button...

Initial testing shows the new SageTV miniclient for Android TV works really, really well on it for live TV and recordings! No changes to the default settings were necessary. I am having trouble with some imported videos, but have yet to look into this issue (I mainly use Sage TV for OTA).

I had heard that older versions of the Sling TV-branded AirTV Mini used to boot to Sling TV after you put it to sleep with the power button. Appparently they changed that behavior because, so far, it wakes up to the last-used app for me. I'm actually thinking this will replace a Fire TV Stick 4K as one of my Sage TV clients.

[willieb]

I am just getting caught up on the changes to the miniclient over the past couple months. Thanks for all of your work, Josh.

Forgive me if this is a bit of a hijack. I'm not 100% sure if my question relates only to the miniclient or if it is really a SageTV core question.

One thing that I have asked about from time to time is how hard would it be to set a flag to not use any of the placeshifter interface and just use "regular" Sage at all times? I am not sure if your recent transcoder changes make all of this moot, but the issue I have always run into is when either connecting over a vpn or just from a different subnet within my own home network, Sage defaults to placeshifter mode and it is clunky and annoying. Sometimes it transcodes at terrible quality, but it is annoying even when it is not transcoding (I was just rereading and possibly setting the miniclient to PULL might get rid of the transcoding but I am not sure). For example, logging into placeshifter on the miniclient is difficult and it never seems to remember my credentials so that I have to log in every time. I recently segregated all of my IoT devices, including my chromecasts and Miboxes, onto their own VLAN on a different subnet and using Sage has become really cumbersome. I know I could always just suck it up and move them back, but where's the fun in that?!? So my question is, is there an easy fix for this? Is there a way to just disable placeshifter all together or are there special settings on the new miniclient I can use to get my "regular" Sage experience back across a different subnet?

Thanks for any thoughts!

[KeithAbbott]

Originally Posted by randyth

I am having trouble with some imported videos, but have yet to look into this issue (I mainly use Sage TV for OTA).

I have quite a few imported DVDs ripped to .iso files, it would be great if the MiniClient could support them (like the HD300s do), but I realize it is not likely to happen.

[wayner]

iso files are tricky. It is fairly easy to convert to MP4 or whatever if you don't care about some of the special features, etc of DVDs.

[KeithAbbott]

Originally Posted by wayner

iso files are tricky. It is fairly easy to convert to MP4 or whatever if you don't care about some of the special features, etc of DVDs.

I know it’s an option, but I also know that someone else in the family at some point will say “hey, where’s the special features for this movie?”, and then I’ll have some ‘splainin to do. Plus, I have a lot of television seasons on ripped DVD, and it seems like it would be a pita to convert those to a different format. When I converted from a Windows SageTV server to an unRAID SageTV server, I converted all of my ripped DVDs from vob format to isos, to avoid spin-up delays when switching between vob files. Maybe I should see if vob files work better in the MiniClient.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by KeithAbbott

I know it’s an option, but I also know that someone else in the family at some point will say “hey, where’s the special features for this movie?”, and then I’ll have some ‘splainin to do.

That's when you launch into "You guys are spoiled. When I was young if we wanted to watch a movie we had to wait for it to come on TV and then make sure we were able to plant ourselves in front of the TV for a few hours. And you are complaining about not having the extras on a 4K UHD movie rip when you have hundreds of movies available at a few presses of the button?"

[jvl711]

Originally Posted by willieb

I am just getting caught up on the changes to the miniclient over the past couple months. Thanks for all of your work, Josh.

Forgive me if this is a bit of a hijack. I'm not 100% sure if my question relates only to the miniclient or if it is really a SageTV core question.

One thing that I have asked about from time to time is how hard would it be to set a flag to not use any of the placeshifter interface and just use "regular" Sage at all times? I am not sure if your recent transcoder changes make all of this moot, but the issue I have always run into is when either connecting over a vpn or just from a different subnet within my own home network, Sage defaults to placeshifter mode and it is clunky and annoying. Sometimes it transcodes at terrible quality, but it is annoying even when it is not transcoding (I was just rereading and possibly setting the miniclient to PULL might get rid of the transcoding but I am not sure). For example, logging into placeshifter on the miniclient is difficult and it never seems to remember my credentials so that I have to log in every time. I recently segregated all of my IoT devices, including my chromecasts and Miboxes, onto their own VLAN on a different subnet and using Sage has become really cumbersome. I know I could always just suck it up and move them back, but where's the fun in that?!? So my question is, is there an easy fix for this? Is there a way to just disable placeshifter all together or are there special settings on the new miniclient I can use to get my "regular" Sage experience back across a different subnet?

Thanks for any thoughts!

So if Sage transcodes a video or not is based on a few factors.

1. If the client has the ability to decode the media. A list of formats and codecs that the client can decode is sent to Sage when it connects. When you go to play the media, if it is not supported, than the media will be transcoded.

2. During the connection phase the server determines the bandwidth between the client and the server. If it is lower than a specified threshold, than it will transcode the media. To stop this from happening you can set the low water mark to a setting that will never be hit.

I think there may have been code that forced PUSH mode in the client if you were not on the same network. I am not 100% sure about that though. I would like to know what you are seeing if you try my latest build. It may behave a little differently now.

I have added HD transcoding using a patched Sage.jar. The quality is adjustable in the settings, and is very passable if you have the resources, so this may be moot.

Josh

[willieb]

Thanks Josh -- just joined your patreon. I think you are my best chance to keep this Sage Saga going (still can't believe its been almost 10 years since it stopped). You are doing great work ad we are all benefitting!

I got your jar and put it on my server. I'll do a little testing with it over the weekend. I've got miboxes and new Chromecast with GoogleTVs. I guess my main question is why have the placeshifter layer at all anymore? I understand why it made sense 10 years ago to detect a different subnet and automatically switch to placeshifter / transcoding, but today, with much higher internet speeds and easy VPNs, it seems like the subnet check is a bad criteria for determining whether automatic placeshifting/transcoding should be done. Seems like a flag on the client would be better (and maybe that is what you've done with your list of codecs that the device can do).

Placeshifter mode has the annoying log in, which is tough to navigate. I also think it turns animations off completely (and I know it is dumb but I kind of like them). I also had to set up my Gemstone separately for the placeshifter. My thought was just that if I can connect to the server, despite being on a separate subnet, it would be better if I could just tell Sage to treat me just like it would if I were connected directly on the network. I sometimes use a travel router with wireguard and with that I can even take an HD300 on the road (although the chromecasts are better because they do so much more). I suspect core sage changes would be necessary here but I can't imagine it would be hard to just have a flag to use placeshifter mode or not. Just feels like an additional layer of complexity that is largely obsolete.

Of course I might be barking up the wrong tree or just plain doing it wrong so feel free to tell me and I can try whatever folks suggest.

Thanks again!

[KeithAbbott]

I'm using version 1.7.0 of the MiniClient on a FireTV Stick 4K, and I have the "Use Native Resolution" option checked in the settings. However, when I check channels that should be 720p (Fox, ESPN, ABC, etc.) they are all showing up as 1080p when I press the info button on the TV remote. Am I missing a setting somewhere? I would prefer if the MiniClient display the native resolution of the channel being viewed, rather than sending it as 1080p all of the time. Any suggestions?

[willieb]

I am also getting a lot of these ExoPlayer errors today on recorded shows. Don't remember seeing this before. Any thoughts anyone?