Any way to control closed captioning? And smooth playback on a Raspberry Pi 3 for TV

[shlom]

Hello, I'm a legacy 4.x user and took a break from using NextPVR for the last several months due to the pandemic, and recently came back to it and was amazed at the progress that 5.x has made. In my current set up, I have an Ubuntu server running NextPVR 5, HD Home Run OTA tuner, and I was planning on re-purposing a Raspberry Pi 3 for the client. The Pi is connected via 100 mbps Ethernet, the server is GbE. The Pi is not overclocked. The Pi is installed with LibreELEC and the official Kodi plugin. I have an MPEG2 license. I am only using it to watch pre-recorded TV in North America, no movies, no streaming, no live TV. I do, however, frequently start a TV show not long after it starts, and may end up catching up with the live broadcast by the end of the show.

I have a few issues with this set up.

1. The playback isn't the smoothest around. SD content is fine, but 720p and 1080i both have a few seconds of buffering, and messing around with pausing, fast forwarding, rewinding, etc can really cause stuttering.
2. Channel ordering is sequential in the Kodi plugin, and not by actual channel number. Is there a way to configure Kodi to use the actual broadcast channel number?
3. I have hearing impaired viewers that need closed captioning. It doesn't work by default in Kodi. Is there a way to enable it? It seems like I might have to mess around with something like ccextractor on the server? Does that work with a stream that's being recorded? When I bring up the web client, closed captioning works great except that it's mostly in a middle band of the screen and HUGE and blocks a lot of the screen for longer captions. Is there any way to adjust the captioning either font size or location?

Am I better off finding a more powerful client than the Pi to connect to the TV? I was hoping for a silent client (I know, I know, some of the viewers in my household can't hear a thing but I can.)

Thank you

[mvallevand]

1. Make sure that the mpeg2 decoder is properly installed and check your logs.

2. If you have the channel numbers correct on the backend make this is done as a PVR General Setting but you have to bump the settings level to up to Advanced. I have not being successful in getting the Kodi team to make this a standard option.

3. Not many Kodi dev's in North America so they make it harder then necessary since you have to enable them.

Settings->Player->Language->Enable parsing for closed captions

Then the subtitle option should work.

Most any other NextPVR compatible PC you find is faster then the RPi. On top of that you are using it as a client too.

Martin

[shlom]

Thank you for your reply, big quality of life improvement after changing those settings.

I was a little unclear - but I have a separate PC acting as NextPVR server, and it works great. The Pi is only being used for playback of primarily recorded TV. I verified MPEG2 is enabled via command line. The playback isn't terrible, but it's not the best, particularly with initial buffering and seeking - when compared to the native web UI for NextPVR (for example, on a Windows or Mac client running Chrome).

Is there any way to adjust the closed captioning in the native web UI - such as font type/size/location?

Also, I have my eye on that fanless Chuwi Herobox running Intel Celeron N4100 (4c, 2.4 ghz turbo, Gen 9.5 graphics) with HDMI 2.0 as another sort of expensive option for client playback - probably under Linux - would that work using Chrome browser? Is it even hardware accelerated?

[mvallevand]

If you use FF and Rewind instead of Skip I don't think any PC will give you DVD/BD smoothness if that is what you are looking for. I am not an RPi fanboy but I would say playback was a strength not weakness based on most posts. Feel free to send in your Kodi debug log if you want me to check.

Martin

[biggoronjon]

Kodi is the most flexible client as far as adjusting subtitle size/placement.

Burning the subtitles in for your hearing impaired users is another option. I like Handbrake for this. `