V5 suggestions

[boringgit]

A couple of observations based on a few hours of use...


I really like the new web interface in terms of both appearance and usability. I didn’t interact with the old GUI other than quickly TSing in to set a recording, (I generally watch recordings using Kodi on a firestick) but this is much slicker.


I have found it's a bit awkward to scroll backwards and forwards in the TV guide - OK on a laptop, but not really possible on a touchscreen because the scroll bar is so small (I don’t have a suggestion as to how to fix that - the old method of having to click to go left or right was also not ideal - I feel like a two finger drag would be good but goodness only knows how you code that into a webpage)



I left this parish some years ago when Plex introduced their PVR - I had a lifetime Plexpass from years ago and initially it was great. Without going into detail - it is not great anymore. One thing that was handy was the ability to download your recordings while away from home - Plex was pretty good at transcoding them and downloading them (It then generally lost them causing many a frustrated flight until I found that I could usually find them in the filesystem somehow). A transcode then download button would be great. No complex client - just download the file at a reduced size.


My server has a decent CPU, but as it is running headless I much prefer to have NPVR running as a service as opposed to an application, so getting hardware acceleration is a bit of a non starter. Would there be some way of getting the service to spawn an application thus be able to make use of hardware accelerated transcoding?


My use case for this is that while travelling (yeah - whenever that is possible!), your internet connection is often not upto live TV playback or downloading GBs of raw TS streams, but you can just leave the laptop downloading for a while to get the show. The only sport I really watch is F1, but I know that if I dont watch a Grand Prix within a few hours of it finishing I will find out who won on social media and have little interest in watching...


I'm sure you have a thick skin after years of this, but please don't see anything here as a criticism, just a feature request

[sub]

My server has a decent CPU, but as it is running headless I much prefer to have NPVR running as a service as opposed to an application, so getting hardware acceleration is a bit of a non starter. Would there be some way of getting the service to spawn an application thus be able to make use of hardware accelerated transcoding?

It's worth pointing out that if you're using Win10, then both Intel and NVidia hardware acceleration is possible from a service with NextPVR. AMD is the only remaining one that needs to be running on the desktop.

With older versions of Windows, often no acceleration was possible from a service.

I'll update the message in the Settings screen, to give a clearer view of the situation, so that people don't rule it out.

I'm sure you have a thick skin after years of this, but please don't see anything here as a criticism, just a feature request

No worries - I didn't see any criticism.

[sub]

I have found it's a bit awkward to scroll backwards and forwards in the TV guide - OK on a laptop, but not really possible on a touchscreen because the scroll bar is so small (I don’t have a suggestion as to how to fix that - the old method of having to click to go left or right was also not ideal - I feel like a two finger drag would be good but goodness only knows how you code that into a webpage)

What type of touch device is this? With the ipad no horizontal scrollbars appear on the guide page, but the entire blue timeline (top and bottom) can be used to swiping/dragging forward/back in time.

[sub]

I've added a download button for ready recordings in todays release. It's just downloading the native file, rather than transcoding, but it's a start.

[mvallevand]

Most devices people take on the road these days will only play h264/aac so the issue is much bigger than bandwidth, here in North America anyway.

Martin

[sub]

You've always got the option of using 'Recording Auto Transcode', which gives a few benefits including smaller files with H.264/AAC for downloading.

[boringgit]

I have found it's a bit awkward to scroll backwards and forwards in the TV guide - OK on a laptop, but not really possible on a touchscreen because the scroll bar is so small (I don’t have a suggestion as to how to fix that - the old method of having to click to go left or right was also not ideal - I feel like a two finger drag would be good but goodness only knows how you code that into a webpage)

What type of touch device is this? With the ipad no horizontal scrollbars appear on the guide page, but the entire blue timeline (top and bottom) can be used to swiping/dragging forward/back in time.

I stand corrected - I hadnt tried dragging the timeline - it works perfectly

I was trying to drag the guide which doesn't work.

[boringgit]

I've spent ages in the past few days setting up a reverse proxy using Nginx so I can use while I am away, I also upgraded the OS so I could take advantage of GPU transcoding... What I found out was that despite the effort and expense, CPU use is basically the same transcoding with CPU only on Server 2016 vs Nvidia on 2019.. A fool and their money

I am able to watch an "HD" station over 4G with my home server averaging 15-30% CPU use while transcoding. Perhaps a slight stutter every 2 minutes, but this is miles better than I was able to do with Plex.

I want to say something inspirational such as "you guys rock", but I'm British so that just doesnt sit right - lets go with good job - keep it up

[boringgit]

You've always got the option of using 'Recording Auto Transcode', which gives a few benefits including smaller files with H.264/AAC for downloading.

Sorry - late follow up as I am currently trying to transcode something to download via alternative software which is not going well!

Does that transcode during recording or after - shouldnt make a vast amount of difference as I have a decent box - does it use the default transcoder selected in the transcoder screen?

Lastly - if I select 1080p as the default auto transcode but the input was SD, would that not increase the size of the file?

Cheers!

[sub]

Does that transcode during recording or after - shouldnt make a vast amount of difference as I have a decent box - does it use the default transcoder selected in the transcoder screen?

It happens after the recording. I uses the Video Encoder setting to tell it whether it uses CPU or GPU for the encoder.

Lastly - if I select 1080p as the default auto transcode but the input was SD, would that not increase the size of the file?

I think it'll currently try to upscale. Whether the file gets bigger, I'm not sure - it might depending on what the source codec was. I'll try to add some logic to be a bit smarter about this, so it doesn't upscale lower resolution content.