Kodi Community Forum

Folks -

I've been using XBMC and the PVR variant for what seems like forever now, but only ever on Linux - various Ubuntus (Ubuntii?), XBMC-Live, OpenELEC, etc.

Now, I'm getting a bit narked with firmware support for my tuners, constantly rebuilding drivers for every kernel update, and so on. I'd go all-out for OE if I could, but that has tuner challenges as well.

So... I'm thinking of trying Redmond's finest (well, Win7, anyway) on my backend-cum-secondary HTPC. I know my way around Windows pretty well, but I thought I'd save myself some hassle with a couple of targeted questions...

One given: I'm sticking with XBMC as my front end. I like XBMC. My kids know how to use it. My wife does. The babysitter does. My parents look at it in awe. So that's a given: XBMC stays as the front end.

Q: Is the MediaPortal plugin support in XBMC still better than 4theRecord? I know it was, but are there significant differences?

Q: At the risk of a religious war breaking out, which backend is better for day-to-day scheduled and ad-hoc recordings, either from XBMC or from a web interface (I'm easy, it's in a different room anyway so web is fine)?

Q: I know that MP originally forked from XBMC... but it doesn't have a separate backend, correct? So do you have to start the whole MP application (front-end and all) or does the PVR/EPG/etc. stack run as Windows services? Can you have XBMC as a front end and an MP backend on the same box, without the MediaPlayer front end getting in the way?

Q: I'm completely happy with VDPAU for H.264 acceleration in Linux.... but how would a lowly 1.6Ghz Atom/ION rig (Revo 3600) cope with HD H.264, though?

I have my concerns about Windows on such a low-powered system, but once I'd had a coffee while booting, it'd probably be fine...

Thoughts appreciated.

(2012-06-22, 21:22)Prof Yaffle Wrote: [ -> ]Q: Is the MediaPortal plugin support in XBMC still better than 4theRecord? I know it was, but are there significant differences?

They are now roughly comparable although 4TheRecord channel switching times are slightly lower. Both addons are feature complete in the sense that they offer almost everything that XBMC PVR can provide at the moment.

(2012-06-22, 21:22)Prof Yaffle Wrote: [ -> ]Q: At the risk of a religious war breaking out, which backend is better for day-to-day scheduled and ad-hoc recordings, either from XBMC or from a web interface (I'm easy, it's in a different room anyway so web is fine)?

Because I'm the author of the MediaPortal addon and the co-author of the 4TheRecord addon, you are safe

The 4TheRecord backend scheduling options are more extensive than the ones from the MediaPortal TV Server.
Scheduling from XBMC is still limited with respect to what MediaPortal and 4TheRecord can offer. (Only ad-hoc, and basic day-to-day).
Advantage of 4TheRecord is the standard web interface for advanced scheduling options. The MediaPortal TV Server requires a plugin if you want a web interface.

If you have an analog TV card, then MePo is the only option.

(2012-06-22, 21:22)Prof Yaffle Wrote: [ -> ]Q: I know that MP originally forked from XBMC... but it doesn't have a separate backend, correct? So do you have to start the whole MP application (front-end and all) or does the PVR/EPG/etc. stack run as Windows services? Can you have XBMC as a front end and an MP backend on the same box, without the MediaPlayer front end getting in the way?

You can install only the "MediaPortal TV Server" part, which is the backend.

(2012-06-22, 21:22)Prof Yaffle Wrote: [ -> ]Q: I'm completely happy with VDPAU for H.264 acceleration in Linux.... but how would a lowly 1.6Ghz Atom/ION rig (Revo 3600) cope with HD H.264, though?

I don't have and ION, but for Win7 you can enable DXVA2 acceleration.

Comprehensive answer - certainly something to chew on - d.u.w., margro!

I am running xbmc an acer aspire revo 3610 win7 with mediaportal's backend, 2 gig of memory, everything is running quite smoothly. Have a weird bug with sound missing after sleep but i think it has to do with a but in nvidias audio driver and my specific tv.
Ariel

(2012-06-23, 13:47)arielgr Wrote: [ -> ]I am running xbmc an acer aspire revo 3610 win7 with mediaportal's backend, 2 gig of memory, everything is running quite smoothly. Have a weird bug with sound missing after sleep but i think it has to do with a but in nvidias audio driver and my specific tv.
Ariel

I had the same problem, fortunatly I found a dirty workaround. Changing the Hz on tv would bring back audio. So I just playback a 50Hz or 60Hz video clip to have the tv change hz and the audio would be back. Now I'm using xbmcbuntu and don't have the problem at all.

Use FTR because of the extensive scheduling options through it's (excellent) web interface. Stock MediaPortal doesn't have anything close, even with it's own stand alone web addon.

If you need analog card support you can use the MediaPortal TV Server backend with the FTR front end and get the best of all worlds. I do this as I have two HDPVRs.

Well, I took the plunge and spent last night cannibalising two PCs into two new ones - Openelec was restored and back up and running on the main set almost instantly, and then I set about attacking Windows 7 and 4TheRecord for the next several hours on the other system...

First impressions:

Yes, Windows really *is* that much slower and resource hungry than Linux. The good news is that Win7 and an SSD is much faster than Vista on a mechanical drive on this same box. The bad is that I've lost nearly 30Gb just to boot...

4TR was a little fiddly to install (not "MythTV, configure-forever-and-still-fail" fiddly, just "pay attention and think" fiddly), but mostly because of the dependencies, finding which version of SQL Server to download and from where, realising that you also needed VLC if you want to watch anything, and so on. Installing anything on Win7 seems to take an age, but I refer the reader to the first point!

EPG seems to be populating nicely, albeit slowly - I've got it scanning each channel for data instead of wrestling with an XML source. As that happens, so the other functions are coming into life, so I wait to see how XBMC talks to it.

Dushmaniac's PVR build doesn't include the FTR client, so I had to switch to Margro's - pre-built, easy download, no hassle there.

Web interface is nice, although the tvheadend one had a really appealing simplicity (all config in one place). Properly functional, though.

I'll see how it all goes...

Latest... going cold on this idea, I must confess!

I had to hack Openelec to get the FTR add-on working. That's fine, I'm used to Linux (I found myself in Notepad on the Windows box and used / to search the file... ) - but TV channel switching is s-l-o-w and then very unreliable. Only half the channels work - and then only sometimes. No HD channels will work on either box (yet I can record them and stream them to VLC, albeit without HW acceleration so useless to watch).

Additionally, if I record anything, then XBMC won't play the HD streams I've just recorded - VLC plays 'em fine, though. I've got a debug log, but I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that it's not worth the effort and that I miss my friendly old tvheadend installation: it was far more... "predictable".

I don't want to lose heart as many people have good things to say about Argus/FTR, but I'm sinking here. I'm not asking for help just yet, I'll start a new thread if I do... I'm just shouting at the wind for the moment.

The log is blathering on about AddOnLog: ForTheRecord PVR client: Could not start the timeshift for channel, so I'd suspect permissions - except it works sometimes, and permissions don't change. Hmm...

rebuild drivers every kernel update? Why not just dkms?

dkms? Never knew about it... oooh, ooh, you have me intrigued now. I'm really not getting on with FTR and/or Windows (problems tuning to channels, tuners dropping, endless issues with Windows share permissions and domain logins, not enough grunt to effectively stream even SD channels off the server - plus I miss the simplicity of tvheadend's EPG compared to FTR).

I'm going for a rebuild into xbmcbuntu pretty soon, I think, and then an upgrade to Dushmanic's Pulse8 PVR build. If I overlay Adam Sutton's tvheadend then I'll definitely look at dkms for the TBS drivers (they're the ones that cause the grief - that and NVidia, but I might revert to the stock drivers there and remove one hassle).

Thanks for the pointers. Amazing, isn't it... I've been using *ix OSes for nearly 25 years - and I'd missed that completely! Windows must have made me lazy :-)

Check the yavdr ppa for dvb related dkms packages for your distro, they have one that includes tbs support.

(2012-07-27, 10:43)Prof Yaffle Wrote: [ -> ]dkms? Never knew about it... oooh, ooh, you have me intrigued now. I'm really not getting on with FTR and/or Windows (problems tuning to channels, tuners dropping, endless issues with Windows share permissions and domain logins, not enough grunt to effectively stream even SD channels off the server - plus I miss the simplicity of tvheadend's EPG compared to FTR).

I'm going for a rebuild into xbmcbuntu pretty soon, I think, and then an upgrade to Dushmanic's Pulse8 PVR build. If I overlay Adam Sutton's tvheadend then I'll definitely look at dkms for the TBS drivers (they're the ones that cause the grief - that and NVidia, but I might revert to the stock drivers there and remove one hassle).

Thanks for the pointers. Amazing, isn't it... I've been using *ix OSes for nearly 25 years - and I'd missed that completely! Windows must have made me lazy :-)

The biggest gripe I had with 4TR/XBMC-PVR was that the channels would show up twice, and most of them would refuse to tune. I downloaded the latest 4TR/Argus and gave it a shot. I wiped out the DB and started fresh. I scanned for channels, made sure to link them all up properly. I went downstairs and enabled the 4TR client (which I, like you had to hack the crap out of Pulse8's version of OpenElec to get it working) It pulled in the list of channels, everything was wrong! So I jumped into XBMC's settings and told it not to cache the EPG, and use channel order from the backend. Low and behold, that worked well. Channels still refuse to tune from time to time, but tuning another channel then switching back usually works. I get a LOT of buffering with HD channels... far more than I got with TVHeadend... but I'm also on wireless.

Overall it's working not so badly.

I threw in the towel on FTR yesterday when I realised that it was constantly eating 60-70% CPU between a couple of permanent services/processes... the impact of that was too much, even copying files was enough to virtually seize up the system. Nothing personal, it's a fine backend and they all have their quirks - I think it just needs a bigger box than my first-generation ION Revo 3600 - plus Win7 isn't the lightest of host OSes, even with lots of RAM and an SSD.

Rebuilt under XBMCBuntu and Pulse8's XBMC/tvheadend, and the whole system was back up and running in a couple of hours. Now running with enough CPU to spare so that I can actually use XBMC at the same time!

Now, time to look at dkms without breaking anything...

I had the same problem with FTR, eating all my CPU, then I notice it was all my 3 dvb cards grabbing EPG. So I tweaked the grabbing options a little and problem solved.

@KRA77 - yes, I suspected the same, but I think I've just become more comfortable with Linux than Windows despite sitting in front of the latter all day, every day at work. So tvheadend it is for me for the moment, at least.

Anyway... TBS drivers... I have no real idea what I'm doing here, but you don't learn by staying safe - thanks for the pointers, guys, I've taken the plunge and done... well, something :-)

After a good bit of Googling and reading, I installed the yaVDR repository:


Updated package list and upgraded anything that comes with this repository:


This updated dkms, libva, nvidia-current, lirc and a few others. As an aside, the nvidia-current upgrade seems to have installed updated NVidia drivers (295.20 vs the current Oneiric 280.13) in dkms "format", so I suspect that these will also survive a kernel update in future. If I find myself at a login prompt instead of XBMC at some point, I'll know that last statement was wrong...

Anyway, install the TBS driver package:


... this also installed a couple of dependencies, and is building the kernel modules as I type:


So let's see what happens. I'll reboot first and see if anything still works!

It's all a learning process for me, so (assuming that the system hasn't now been reduced to a smoking ruin) I'll have to wait for a kernel update to see what happens - whether it simply installs the compiled modules into the new kernel, re-compiles them (and, if so, whether it needs new headers), etc. I suspect it'll simply install the compiled modules, fetching new driver versions as and if the yaVDR guys update this package - fingers crossed, anyway.

I'll let you know what happens, just in case it's useful for anyone else.