[tolax]

I'm running WMC fed via a HDHomeRun cable card box. Display is via several Amazon Fire TV's. Live TV is working very well but I am running into an issue with recordings. Namely that approximately 50% of recordings work fine (yay). The other 50% though just show a black screen although you can hear the audio without issue.

Very happy to believe that this is an Android/FireTV issue. It would be good to know though what is tripping the system.

Taking four shows that were recorded yesterday.......

Henry Danger - Black Screen + Audio
Top 20 Countdown - works fine
Hot 20 Country Countdown - Black Screen + Audio
Phineas and Ferb - works fine

Pastebin shows the above launched one after the other.
http://pastebin.com/UQzpgvJt

As a supplementary question - did anyone find a sensible way of updating the Android client? In XBMC my system reports .99 but the ServerWMC confirms that .93 is actually being used.

Thanks

Tolax

[scarecrow420]

Do you have root access? I found there was a libs directory in the XBMC file system area that contained the shipped (2.93) version of the pvr.wmc SO library. Once I delete that, the addon is correctly running the version in the addons directory. But obviously if you dont have root access, you cant delete it.
edit: Looked up the exact path: /data/data/org.xbmc.xbmc/lib/libXBMC_WMC.so

Regarding your black screen recording issue, the obvious question is - do these recordings (WTV files) play OK in XBMC (or WMC) on a windows box? The server shows no issues when remuxing these recordings. You could try turning off option "Remux all recordings" and the clients would then just try to play the WTV files direct. I know with rpi they typically need the remux of all recordings on, but wasnt sure about android/fireTV devices. Do you have this on for a reason?

[tolax]

okay to answer my own question. It appears to be an AmazonFireTV/Android issue.

Dragged out my old openelec box and all the recordings playback without issue.

Interestingly on AFTV if I disable hardware acceleration the black screen recordings work fine. That is not a good solution though as you need libstagefright hardware decoding for liveTV and 1080P videos.

One interim option might be to use MCEbuddy (donate version) to remux after the recording into something that the FireTV likes. Any views on what to mux to? I would like to keep the muxed output in the recordingTV section so that it still appears under 'recordings' in the SNMPc menu.

Thanks

Tolax

[scarecrow420]

I edited my post while you were posting yours, incase you missed it. I just noted the exact location of the cached library area on android and also asked about your "RemuxAllRecordings" setting

[tolax]

scarecrow420 - thanks for the quick response.

The remux setting did not seem to make any difference (I did restart xbmc).

Used MCEbuddy to remux the raw WTV to WTV/x264 codec and that worked fine. In the interim I will use MCEbuddy to monitor the RecordedTV section and convert as necessary.

Thanks again for the great app.

Tolax

[tolax]

Just as a quick update in case anyone finds this thread and has a similar issue with the FireTV.

The 'best' workaround (time, cpu power, WAF) requires the donor versions of MCEbuddy and optionally Comskip.

Use MCEbuddy to monitor the 'recorded tv' folder. Configure the 'WTV (unprocessed)' profile and set to overwrite the original file. For a one hour WTV recording (approx 4Gb) processing time on my i7 is around four minutes.

Adding comskip so that the adverts are removed gives a processing time of around nine minutes. CPU cost is around 20% while processing

Nice thing is the WMC still views the resulting Ad free file as a recording that it created so any WMC settings with regard to the number of episodes to keep etc still work.

Next step is to see why the MCEbuddy 'unprocessed' WTV file works in Xbmc while the original WTV recording just displays a black screen.

Tolax