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For The Record + MediaPortal TV Server is currently (in my opinion) the very best solution there is for backends. MePo's TV Server is solid, uses very little memory, supports nearly every modern (and some not so modern) tuner/capture device on the market, and is very stable. It also has very solid plugin support for things like IR blasters.
For The Record sits on top of it (it has a plugin). FTR actually comes with it's own tuner software, called Argus, but it doesn't support nearly as many devices, and there's no analog capture support at all.
However FTR's scheduling, tuning, and web interface options are hard to beat. The only problem with either of them is they are Windows-only - it's not that I have a philosophical issue with Windows, I just like options, and I find Linux based HTPC's (such as XBMCBuntu) to be much easier to deal with day to day. That could just be me though, since I am used to shells and scripting. All that said the FTR/MePo combo is so far ahead of any other backend for XBMC at the moment that I deal with it anyway. Hello remote desktop.
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I'm confused why timeshifting is something that XBMC needs to implement. Isn't that something that the backend needs to implement? As far as XBMC is concerned, it just needs to connect to a buffered stream instead of a live stream. The interface would need a pause button, but that would simply send commands to the backend.
Attempting to buffer live video on the frontend would start causing major issues as the frontend is most likely not the proper place to store TS streams.
MUCH of the complexity could be removed by simply having the backend be the buffer.
Some of the backends already support this. TVHeadend will allow you to play the live stream if you're recording it. They have some issues to work out (You can't see the proposed end of the stream, it simply updates the stream length on the fly, but it DOES allow for a bit of time shifting)
I've heard that VDR also is allowing a bit of this.
I'm not trying to troll, I'm just asking what are the other tech hurdles I'm not thinking of?
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MediaPortal would support that since the buffer is server based. XBMC has to support going back in time and checking the available timespan of the timeshift buffer.
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margro
Posting Freak
Posts: 883
Indeed, the only thing that I need to support timeshifting with the MediaPortal addon and the ForTheRecord addon is an extension of the PVR API to forward the "pause", "forward" and "rewind" commands from XBMC to the addon. Both Windows backends already do the timeshifting (buffering) and the addons already read from the timeshift buffer.
The missing functionality was actually already available in very early versions of the PVR branch, but Alwinus removed it because it didn't work properly. I still have a local branch on my computer with a more or less working timeshift functionality. The only thing that I have to fix is to limit the rewind and forward to the buffer contents for the current channel. Right now, I can even rewind to the previous channel :-)
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This is excellent news! Is it really a problem that the rewind override to the previous channel? Doesn’t Mediaportal behave that way?
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da-anda
Team-Kodi Member
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that won't work, because only having 1 DVB-S2 card would require a channel switch to perform the recording - and a channel switch would then erase the TS buffer.