Timeshifting

Hello,
Is there some timeshifting code in the pvr branche?
Yesterday I wake up my media center to watch tv. I noticed the the tv-logo's where gone, en the epg information wasn't available. I tried to start a channel and watching was possible.
But the channel up/down buttons wheren't working, so I opened the menu. The menu was like I was watching a normal movie. So the pause and foraward buttons where there.
I tried to hit the pause button, and the live tv stream did pause. After some time I hit play, and it was playing again! I also was able to FastForward! Didn't tried backward.
Wow cool! Timeshifting! But some minutes later the whole system crashed and after a reboot the pvr part was back to normal without the pause button.
Does this mean we can expect timeshifting to be available soon??

I'm using:
Openelec.tv ION 64bit version from: http://gujs.openelec.tv/build/PVR-PPA-op...ppa-odk48/
Tvheadend Backend.

I think there was some work on time shifting in the past but it never did work well. Thus it was disabled. I can't pause live tv on my system and the up/down keys work like expected. I haven't noticed any change on this behavior for quite a while.

Hallo Johnnygo,

once I had your described "error", too. I was very happy to see this function, but after a reboot the menu didn't have the timeshift function anymore. Nowadays with confluence skin, it isn't possible to use real timeshift. If you use the neon-skin, you can pause and play livetv (only tested for a little moment), FF and RW doesn't work correct!

In the past we had a workaround to timeshift. Make a record, watch this record and you can pause, play, rw and ff very well. But after some time it didn't work anymore, so a ticket was opened in opdenkamps github. Now there is another workaround, but didn't test it:

https://github.com/opdenkamp/xbmc/issues/213

It's not a solution, its a workaround, if you really want and need it, test neon-skin, maybe it's enough usability for you.

Greetings Hoppel

Hi hoppel118,

I just tried neon skin and now I can play/pause the live stream. Do you know how this skin do thats ?
The pvr clients don't support timeshift, where the skin plugin store the timeshifted stream ? In a buffer in memory ?

Ok, I think I found the answer. It use the video stream buffer, if the stream is paused for too long, it doesn't restart and I have a message about "buffer 100%".

Hey EkASs,

the timeshift-plugin is not a priority-feature at the moment. First lars wants to do some other things like code cleaning I read in another thread.

So we would have to wait for timeshift until other things are done. It's the thing that would make the xbmc-pvr nearly complete.

The neon-skin thing is the only I know that actually "works".

Greetings

I use the transparency skin and timeshifting seems to work really well for me!

It really depends on the backend support. Some backends support it, others not.

For the Mediaportal pvr addons (both versions), timeshifting works fine because the TVServer itself already does the timeshifting by default.

mrpg Wrote:I use the transparency skin and timeshifting seems to work really well for me!

With linux timeshift doesn't work completely. You can't rewind/fastforward and after a little time pausing livetv you get a buffer overflow. Have you ever paused livetv for a greater time-period (1/2hours)?

margro Wrote:It really depends on the backend support. Some backends support it, others not.

For the Mediaportal pvr addons (both versions), timeshifting works fine because the TVServer itself already does the timeshifting by default.

Is this really true? I thought timeshift is handled by xbmc. I have got a vdr in the backend. Until now timeshifting is not possible with vdr or tvheadend.

Greetings Hoppel

hoppel118 Wrote:Is this really true? I thought timeshift is handled by xbmc. I have got a vdr in the backend. Until now timeshifting is not possible with vdr or tvheadend.

A few years back, the pvr-testing2 branch from Alwinus contained indeed some code to support timeshifting, but it never worked 100% and Alwinus removed it again. The current XBMC-PVR code does, as far as I know, not contain any support for timeshifting at the moment. This means that if the backend does not handle the timeshifting, it is not possible to do that at the XBMC side (unless someone adds some livestream recording capabilities to the PVR addon).

The MediaPortal TVServer backend and ForTheRecord backend do the actual timeshifting at the backend side, so to support that in XBMC, only pressing the pause button would be enough, as long as the PVR addon tells the backend that it should continue "recording" in the timeshift buffer e.g. via a keepalive message or something.
The only thing that is missing in the Confluence skin to support it is the pause button ;-)