External Player support

[gEd]

Would be really nice to be able to launch an external player to playback recordings and videos (based on file extension).
Then we could use MPC-HC with MadVR renderer and experiment with all the nice upscaling features which it has.

i.e. a feature just like the XBMC external player support http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=External_players

[whurlston]

Or you could use NPVR with MadVR (MadVR has an issue with HD playback though where it does not clear the OSD).

[gEd]

and that issue it a bit of a showstopper....given that there does not appear much appetite to resolve this, I thought an external play might be a good way around it.

[gEd]

or perhaps I could disable the OSD....

[whurlston]

and that issue it a bit of a showstopper....given that there does not appear much appetite to resolve this, I thought an external play might be a good way around it.

madshi claims it's a NextPVR issue but all other renderers work fine, sooo...

[stustunz]

I'm missing something here up scale what?
Your video card does that for you already
Or are you saying it somehow does it better?

[whurlston]

Software based upscale algorithms. A lot of people swear by madVR but since 99.9% of my content is HD, I don't see much (if any) benefit to it.

[gEd]

I was about to create a enhancement request but before I did, I searched for "external" and found this (frankly excellent) thread from my good self 2 years ago!

There are many folks (myself included) who find that Madvr upscaling really does improve video playback quality when source material resolution < tv/monitor/projector resolution (e.g. 720 on 1080). Loads of people (such as those on avsforum.com) use MPC-HC as their choice of playback. jriver has MadVR support built in. Kodi and Media Browser both support external players such as MPC-HC.

I would still really like to NextPVR also have see an option to define an external player that would be used within the recordings and videos. Not only would it improve my enjoyment and use of NextPVR, I think it would open up interest in NextPVR to a wider audience of people who want greater control over the quality of their video playback and to be able to exploit the power of their modern GPUs to achieve this. This capability becomes even more significant as people use laptops with high resolution screens and as 4K Tvs start to hit the market.

Yes I could use Kodi or J River MC (I bought a license some years ago for it's superb audiophile music playback) but for TV and video, I much prefer NextPVR as my family and I find it's handling of TV recordings and video playback to be far more intuitive.

"How hard can it be" to quote Mr Clarkson....

cheers.

John

[mvallevand]

For just playing and you still want the NextPVR UI, x-newa web client will use the Kodi external player if that is what you setup.

Martin

[gEd]

Tx Martin, I might look into x-newa further. Can I launch Kodi with x-newa full screen so it "looks like" NextPVR?
99% of the time, my family use the TV guide, TV recordings and Videos and Kodi's interface has a lot of fluff that is otherwise distracting from the purity of the NextPVR interface,