Pausing Live TV streams

[osx-addict]

X-NEWA is a program plugin, not a PVR plugin, so X-NEWA does not rely on the frodo pvr api

Doh.. See.. I learned something new today.. So with it, the API to follow is different & probably more 'broad' in terms of constraints.. Makes sense

[mvallevand]

x-newa can use any of the core XBMC players that are exposed to python plugins. By default it first attempts physical drive access, then virtual (physical using advancedsetting.xml) and then http or other XBMC supported protocols. It can be configured to use the standard 8866 direct streaming interface to live tv or files or a VLC proxy to the 8866 streaming interface for live tv with direct vlc streaming of recording with or without transcoding. I have tried many options including rtsp and the only one that consistently and reliably supports time-shifting of live tv is the physical/virtual approach

Martin

[KRA]

It's not really RTSP-only, but the scheme is better suited to that type of communication. It definitely wasn't well suited to standard HTTP streaming, which addons like NextPVR use.

As mentioned earlier, I'll need to experiment before I can decide if I can add timeshift support to the NextPVR addon support. If I do, I'll be be moving to the live tv streaming from HTTP to a different mechanism. A big pain in the arse, which could have been avoided.

this doesn't sound good, and if this is the case with several plugin developers it seems to me you should rather put your combined effort into changing xbmc than every developer changing their backend.

[osx-addict]

this doesn't sound good, and if this is the case with several plugin developers it seems to me you should rather put your combined effort into changing xbmc than every developer changing their backend.

I agree -- I think coordinated effort with the developers that have the more mainstream plugins would be time better served to get those features that are needed to pull off what we would all love to see!

[osx-addict]

I have tried many options including rtsp and the only one that consistently and reliably supports time-shifting of live tv is the physical/virtual approach

Martin -- Is the issue you ran across related to the internal plumbing & APIs for streaming that are causing the problems or something else internal to XBMC? Just curious from your perspective..

[mvallevand]

Although a difficult question, IMO it generally is a problem with the source reporting not-seekable since on growing files it requires logic. However the XBMC readahead buffer seems to have trouble determining the file size of growing files too especially if the file writer is caching writes. Finally there is a specific issue with pausing using NextPVR

Martin

[sub]

Finally there is a specific issue with pausing using NextPVR

That isn't a big deal though - if XBMC had implemented support timeshift of http streams then NextPVR would have needed to add several things to its live streaming API, including pausing and seeking etc. The pausing problem you're noticing is just because you're trying to pause the http stream but support for that hasn't yet been added.