Notes on XBMC playback

[Dark_Slayer]

Greetings,

I've been using XBMC and NPVR for a month now I realize that's not very long, but I quickly took to XBMC and liked the idea of moving away from WMC with the addon

I've made some other posts about channel changing and tuning a channel in general with some problems I was experiencing. So chronologically

1. NPVR 2.5.9 (patched) and XBMC addon from dotnet devs with Frodo Beta
   
2. The above got me connected and worked with the HDHomerun Prime, but I followed a pdf guide from the wiki and set up the Prime as a Network Recorder
   
3. I heard from a few others that the network recorder and sagedct parts of my setup were no longer necessary since support was already builtin to 2.5.9
   
4. Re-install and configure with builtin HDHR Prime setup, update XBMC from Beta to RC, update addon from Dotnetdevs to latest
   
5. I had a lot of total XBMC lockups when trying to change channels with keyboard shortcuts
   
6. I also couldn't consistently tune a second channel w/o lockup even after stopping and moving to a different channel in the EPG
   

Now comes the latest update

• Updated XBMC to stable release
  
• Upgraded from W7 to W8
  
• Reinstalled/configured NPVR with R2 patch list on forums
  
• Configured the "bundled" addon from stable release
  
• IMPROVEMENT!!!!
  

I'd just like to pass along what I've found to be a noticeable improvement. Also, from my experience I was trying to always use the "Timeline EPG" to start shows, but I started using the default LiveTV "Channels" view in XBMC and I left the "Start Playback minimized" setting toggled on (Previously always toggled off). Using the channels menu and starting playback minimized quickly tunes a channel in XBMC (not as quick as NPVR, but within 4 seconds where it used to take 8-9). You can choose to go fullscreen or pick a different channel from the list, and different channels work

I wish I had more time to stress test it, but sadly I work through the week. Recording scheduling has been solid, and I haven't had routine lockups during livetv or channel changing


I think it's noteworthy that several people (who are much more informed than I am about such things) have said XBMC is poor TS player. However, I thought simply adding an external player to XBMC could fix this issue, but I couldn't get MPC HC to work for live tv streams. I setup a user-defined playercorefactory.xml file to playback all video in MPC HC. My entire library (and even recordings from the NPVR addon) would start from XBMC and playback in MPC-HC just fine, so I know that the xml was written correctly. But . . . any attempt to view livetv would stop at the MPC HC splash screen then hit the XBMC timeout.

Since the default player and addon setup is improving it's ability to tune channels quickly, I'm not going to pursue MPC-HC any further. I just added this as a note in case others had the same idea about simply re-routing video playback in XBMC. There's probably a couple people in this forum who now why it didn't work as well

[Dark_Slayer]

So long story short,

I've been using this over a month, and I have noticed a lot of real-world improvement in stability and speed

Thanks and keep up the good work

[gEd]

Same experience here with regard to using external player for playback which works very nicely but unfortunately doesn't work for livetv. I should probably report this in the xbmc forum but I haven't actually got around to registering there as I don't use XBMC that much atm.

[mvallevand]

If you want timeshifting there is really no way to use an external player with XBMC PVR files because they use proprietary techniques. I have had some success with x-newa since it can play files via the file system but it doesn't seem worthile using mpc-hc just for live tv when the NextPVR client will work better.

Martin

[gEd]

Actually what I had meant to say is that I would be happy to use the built in xbmc playback for livetv and have the external player just for recorded video/disc playback. I definately wouldnt want to have to switch between the 2 depending on whether i wanted to watch a recording or live. which is why I will continue to stick with npvr client for the time being and play around with xbmc.