[bluenote]

Thanks, really useful.

Thanks guys. I disabled stagefright acceleration and suddenly, amazingly, both nexusei devices started working properly
My normal troubleshooting was a little foreshortened because I swear, this used to work [although, I can't pinpoint when it broke]. So I have to admit, I was blaming pvr.wmc in the privacy of my own mind

For those reading along at home, set your "settings level" to expert to see the correct options, then go settings/video/acceleration, turn off libstagefright.
This will fix your decoding errors.

Thread search acted a bit funny I discovered so here is some keywords
stage fright
stagefright
cstagefright
cstagefrightvideo
nexus

So this isn't entirely what I would do. If you need to use stagefright for example for h.264 or most 1080 content on an android device then you wouldn't want to simply turn of stagefright. Instead you will want to create an advancedsettings.xml file that has the following:
<advancedsettings>
<video>
<stagefright>
<!-- -1 is default, 0 is never used this codec, 1 is always use this codec, bypassing blacklist -->
<usempeg2codec>0</usempeg2codec>
</stagefright>
</video>
</advancedsettings>

This way you can leave stagefright as your hardware acceleration method to handle .h264 content, but disable it for mpg2 files (tv and recorded tv).
I think this was first suggested by Koying, but I can confirm it works extremely well on the AFTV. I was having occasional crash issues with mediacodec turned on, but stagefright wouldn't play all of my files. The above allowed me to use stagefright and all of my files will play.

I hope this helps.

[onlinespending]

Just wanted to report that I'm using ServerWMC and the android version of the client (0.2.99) with a rooted Amazon Fire TV. It works fairly well, but crashes without fail every time I select another channel from the EPG while another channel is currently playing / tuned. Is there anything I can provide that might help in debugging this issue?

[krustyreturns]

What crashes swmc or fire tv? The swmc log after a crash would be a good start for debugging (see debug tab in swmc). If it is swmc that crashed, after restarting swmc make sure you post the log from the previous run.

[onlinespending]

What crashes swmc or fire tv? The swmc log after a crash would be a good start for debugging (see debug tab in swmc). If it is swmc that crashed, after restarting swmc make sure you post the log from the previous run.

The entire FireTV crashes and reboots. Turns out it was the HW acceleration interfering with things. As soon as I turned it off, it works just fine. This is awesome BTW! Now if only the EPG didn't take a day (sarcasm) to load (I know out of your control) then it'd be a dream.

[scarecrow420]

when you mention turning the HW acceleration off, did you see the above posts that explain how to do it for MPEG2 only so you dont have to disable it for all etc? Just making sure

In terms of EPG load time, how many channels do you have? If you dont need all of them to be visible on the FireTV you can use our "Client Restrictions" feature to filter the list of channels (and/or recordings) that get sent to this client to only be those from a channel group (WMC Favorite Channel lineup) that you define. So say if you have 100 channels but realy only want 30 of them shown on the FireTV, create a channel group containing these and then setup client restriction to restrict this client to that channel group. This wont affect any other clients (if you have any)

[mr3p]

yeah EPG load time is unfortunately painful as otherwise I love using AFTV as WMC front end.

@krustyreturns: any way to reduce the delay time for EPG loading?

[onlinespending]

when you mention turning the HW acceleration off, did you see the above posts that explain how to do it for MPEG2 only so you dont have to disable it for all etc? Just making sure

Yes, I was going to actually mention that I tried doing just this, based on what jjhtpc said:

Code:

<advancedsettings>
<video>
<stagefright>
<!-- -1 is default, 0 is never used this codec, 1 is always use this codec, bypassing blacklist -->
<usempeg2codec>0</usempeg2codec>
</stagefright>
</video>
</advancedsettings>

And while the crashes / reboots were reduced when switching channels, it didn't completely eliminate them. It was only when I completely disabled HW acceleration in the XBMC settings that it was fixed entirely (or at least so far). Not sure what to make of that. And this only occurs when one channel is currently tuned in and I try changing channels. Stopping playback in between works fine even with HW acceleration enabled.

[krustyreturns]

yeah EPG load time is unfortunately painful as otherwise I love using AFTV as WMC front end.

@krustyreturns: any way to reduce the delay time for EPG loading?

See scarecrow's post before your post. The only thing I can add to that is to edit the settings in xbmc to limit how many days of guide data it downloads.

On our side (client-serverwmc) I actually think we send the data pretty fast. I believe the xbmc team is making changes to speed up guide display in helix.

[onlinespending]

yeah EPG load time is unfortunately painful as otherwise I love using AFTV as WMC front end.

@krustyreturns: any way to reduce the delay time for EPG loading?

See scarecrow's post before your post. The only thing I can add to that is to edit the settings in xbmc to limit how many days of guide data it downloads.

On our side (client-serverwmc) I actually think we send the data pretty fast. I believe the xbmc team is making changes to speed up guide display in helix.

I've also noticed tuning / switching channels takes 5 - 8 seconds. I'd like to test out the ServerWMC client on my HTPC to see if the delay is a function of the slower Fire TV or if this is always the case with ServerWMC. Watching channels directly on the PC that has WMC on it results in a 1 - 2 second delay. Even using an Xbox as an extender, which also has the limitations of going over the network, is very fast when switching channels.

[scarecrow420]

Due to the recording and remuxing, it does take longer than WMC natively. In general the "backend time" is acceptable IMO and usually a couple of seconds, but then XBMC has to analyse the WTV file as well and that also takes a few seconds. A change was proposed by user "margro" that sped up the XBMC analyse time to near instant but the change was rejected because it caused some video issues in XBMC for some people. You can look up "margro build" for a copy of it, although I think he only built windows versions so I guess on a FireTV you may be out of luck. You could always build your own android version that includes margro's fix, if you wanted. Getting an android build environment up and running on a ubuntu VM running in say VMWare Player is not trivial, but is "doable" if you have some technical knowledge and time etc.

In terms of backend channel time, ServerWMC logs will show you this. Running a client locally on the HTPC will also help compare against the fireTV. I cant comment on whether the FireTV hardware has any impact on the channel load times. I doubt the network connection does, as long as it's Gb wired

[onlinespending]

You can look up "margro build" for a copy of it, although I think he only built windows versions so I guess on a FireTV you may be out of luck. You could always build your own android version that includes margro's fix, if you wanted. Getting an android build environment up and running on a ubuntu VM running in say VMWare Player is not trivial, but is "doable" if you have some technical knowledge and time etc.]

That's great info. Thanks

[breezytm]

See the link below if you are having any crashing issues. It just might help you out. I run my client 24/7 now without any issues. To reduce the channel pull and egp load time I enabled client restrictions. I go to windows media center and changed the category to "most viewed". From there I created a list of channels myself and my girl actually watch. I have about 630+ channels but we only watch roughly 30 channels. I don't watch non HD channels. I created a favorite listing in WMC call custom with 53 HD channels. I also change the channel delay to 1 sec in XBMC. It works quite okay. I mean it doesn't work like WMC does but It works really really well.

BTW, Deinterlace set to auto. No network settings in advancedsettings.xml file.

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=202394

[onlinespending]

I also reduced my channel list to about 70 channels and limited the EPG to 2 days. The EPG is still ungodly slow, but tolerable I suppose. What do you mean by "I also change the channel delay to 1 sec in XBMC"?

[breezytm]

that was a mistake.
Settings > Live TV > Playback > Delay channel switching to 0ms.

Every time I setup xbmc I remember I always having to change that setting to 0 but I setup my windows 7 test box a few minutes ago from scratch and it was already set to 0. It's either I am loosing it or am actually loosing it I am not sure which one.

[onlinespending]

I'm actually using just 1 day of EPG data, since it's rare that I'll need to look that far in advance. You can also adjust how much history of EPG XBMC uses. The default is 24h. I adjusted to keep just the previous 2 hrs, since how often do you really need to look at the EPG from the past?

advancedsettings.xml

Code:

<epg>
  <lingertime>120</lingertime>  <!-- keep X minutes of past epg data (default: 24h) -->
</epg>