[tolax]

Hi,

Apologies for the noob questions. I did some quick searching but nothing came up. Firstly (and most importantly) thanks for the work on the ServerWMC. Started at 7pm last night with a boxed Amazon Fire TV, Windows 8.1 and a HDHomeRun Prime. Within 2 hours everything was up and running. Couple of noob questions I was hoping someone would indulge me with.....

Environment - Headless i7 Windows 8.1 WMC Server, HDHomeRun Prime (Comcast), Amazon Fire TV running Gotham 13.1 from Wiki. UnRaid Server, 4+ Other Xbmc boxes (ATV2, Ouya, XBMCbuntu, Pivos etc). Everything is hardwired via gigabit ethernet.

Goal is to have 5 TV's having the option of viewing LiveTV, NetFlix or Videos from UNraid box.

Generally as I mentioned everything is working on the Amazon Fire. The channel change is bearable. Getting the occasional crash but that's the joy of bleeding edge. Questions though..

1) EPG Channel Pruning
The EPG can take minutes to bring up (so 14 days does not seem an optimum setting.... ) I'm on Comcast so there are many duplicate channels (SD/HD) and also many channels I do not have access to (HBO, Showtime etc). I was hoping to speed up the EPG (and simplify the 529 channel display) by only listing channels I am interested in. It seems I can 'cull' channels either on the HDhomeRun. WMC or within Xbmc. Is there a preferred way of doing this? Goal would be to speed up the EPG display and make the channel listings display shorter. Also as I have kids removing the Adult channel listings would be good.

2) Parental Control
On the subject of kids.... Is it possible on a per XBMC basis to limit the TV show that it will display based on their rating? So the main room xbmc can view any show. The one in the kids room though is restricted to TV shows that are rated as PG and below (it is fine to list them in the EPG - just not play them). I was wondering whether profiles would help with this?

3) Transcoding Flow Control
The UNraid server is running SickBeardAlpha which grabs some foreign TV shows that I like, stores them in an XBMC friendly format and then updates the Library so they are listed in the 'recently added' display. In an ideal world something similar would happen with shows recorded via WMC. I would prefer an MKV/MP4 format as I have a few WDTV connected via WiFi and they do not support the WMC format. Plus a smaller file size is better for transfer.

Something that went like.....

WMC records file --> nightly transcode --> Stores in correct UNRaid XBMC Series directory --> Updates XBMC Library

would be neat. The i7 WMC Server has lots of capacity so it the transcode could be done immediately that would be nice.

4) General Amazon TV Question
If anyone has any tips about best skin, best build to use, any settings that have worked well it would be appreciated. It seemed to work fairly well out of the box. I know that the lack of deinterlacing is a pain. Setting the output to 720p certainly seemed to help.

Thanks in advance for your help. Apologies if the questions were answered elsewhere - EPG is too small a term to search for.

Thanks

Tolax

[krustyreturns]

1 & 2) You can tell xbmc to only download a few days worth instead of two weeks worth. For channel filtering in general, I'd say its better to disable the channels in wmc.

Another option (and this is my answer for 2 also): You can create channel groups in wmc (they are called 'favorites' there). And by setting the configuration in serverwmc, you can set which xbmc client machine gets whichever channel group(s) you designate. So in this way you create a group for your kids tv, and a group for main xbmc system, that are subgroups of all the channels you receive in wmc. Beside restricting the channels, it also filters the recordings done on those channels (if you set it to). Its implemented by my friend scarecrow420 and has to be done in by editing the config.xml itself. Look for 'ClientRestrictions', the config file will have a dummy example.

To answer your question though, the user profile in xbmc is not passed on to the livetv interface, so we can't filter channels based on it.

3) I think there are number of tools that do this function for wmc's wtv format (I have never used any of them, so I can't keep straight what does what). Google is your friend here, I'd search 'transcode wtv batch mode'.

4) can't help with this one. You can't turn on deinterlacing in xbmc itself?

[tolax]

Appreciate the response. Disabling the channels in WMC and setting the scope to 1 day worked well.

The MCEbuddy looks like it will do what I need with regard to coversion though it hammers the CPU while it is converting. Need to look at scheduling it.

The FireTV Android builds do not seem to support deinterlacing. It is a known issue .

Thanks again for the response.

Tolax

[scarecrow420]

Just to touch on what krusty said, we dont support restricting shows based on their rating but we do support restricting clients to only allow viewing of certain channels (optionally including restricting th listing/viewing of recordings from those same channels as well if you want). The 2 main uses for this would be to present a "kids" type channel/recordings list to devices used by kids, and to present a "cut down" list of channels to lower powered devices (without having to stop the full suite of channels being presented to your more powerful client machines if you have them). If you dont want certain channels to show up for any client, then disabling them in WMC is best. If you do want them in some places but not others, set up Channel Groups (WMC favorite lineups) and then use our ClientRestrictions to lock down clients to one or more of these channel groups. You can also hide these channel groups from being displayed in the XBMC channel groups (i thought if a groups purpose was solely to lock down a client, we might not want it to show up in the XBMC channel groups list along with our actual groups like Sport, News, whatever)

On the topic of processing recordings, whilst as you said things like MCEBuddy can hammer your CPU and you may want to schedule them to run overnight, i thought i would let you know that we do support triggering external actions based on recording state changes. The most common being a recording being "completed" kicking off an app/script that will process your file and move it off somewhere else. So if you did want to do this kind of thing as soon as a recording finished, have a look at our ExternalActions (googling this phrase should find the few posts about it in this forum)