[sunstealer]

A WARNING to anyone considering buying a VBOX as a TV backend to your Kodi PVR on Raspberry Pi - Be aware that, in contrast to claims on the VBox website, there isn't a working solution for you currently - the company promote the vbox.pvr plugin as the basis of their claims but it doesn't work on the Raspberry Pi.

Unfortunately, there is a major bug in this addon that prevents it from working with external XMLTV files on the Raspberry Pi. It's probably some sort of memory allocation problem - Any programme descriptions that exceed 995 characters in length in the XMLTV file cause a crash on boot-up during XMLTV file parsing, creating a boot loop.

A bug report has been filed on Github but I don't think negge has an RPi so he can't reproduce the problem and it may therefore be difficult to get this fixed

It's a shame because this looks like a great addon if it worked - I do feel a bit let down by the claims on vboxcomm website as I partly bought the vbox due to them saying it's functions could be accessed from kodi when actually there's only a buggy addon that doesn't work on all kodi platforms.

The simple IPTV addon works perfectly and parses XMLTV files without problems, so you can use VBox to watch TV but that's not exactly a PVR as the simple IPTV addon doesn't support the recording and timeshift functions apparently implemented in pvr.vbox. It's a shame that negge didn't just add those functions to the existing simple IPTV client but I understand he wanted to implement from scratch in order to have a portable XMLTV module available for reuse elsewhere - unfortunately it's much less developed than existing solutions at the moment.

[negge]

It is unfortunate indeed, but I'd like to point out that only the external guide support is broken (and seemingly only on Pis), everything else works.

[TVGrrr]

@sunstealer I think that you're coming on a bit too strong

I have a Raspberry Pi B, Samsung Smart TV, Mac, iPad and Nexus 5 and for me this solution is nothing but great for distributing live TV and PVR.

There may be a bug in the external EPG for very long program information when using Raspberry Pi (I think that it's not very common, I never saw such a long description on my EPG) and I see that @negge is trying to help you on Github.

I think that we need to thank anyone who spends their time and contribute to the Kodi community. I also think that we need to be careful when bashing products and warn users from getting them, when in fact, they work well for most users.

[sunstealer]

@ Negge - please don't take this comment as criticism of your work, which is greatly appreciated - I am posting this as a warning to other RPi owners who may be considering buying a vbox - I bought one on the basis of their website claims that it would function with Kodi as a PVR - this turned out to be not entirely true - my relationship with them is commercial and, therefore, I have reasonable expectations of functioning that exceed any expectations I would have of an open-source, freely provided solution such as yours. No criticism of your work is implied -- I should add: please accept my apology if it came across like that.

@ TVGrrr - I understand your point and can see how what I posted could be taken as being unduly critical of Negge. That was not the intention - I am extremely grateful to him for both his work on the plugin and his efforts to address the bug I pointed out. However, I think that the website for VBox makes claims about the functioning of their device which are unsupported by reality and, as I parted with cash on that basis, I think it only fair to point out that some people may find themselves disappointed, as I did, that the product didn't live up to the claims - this is a case of caveat emptor and a post made in the VBox thread, not the pvr.vbox thread. I have been working with both vboxcomm support (who are very nice and very helpful by the way) and Negge to try to resolve the issues but I think people should know the state of play at the moment as they might, rightly, look to other solutions if they own an RPi. I think it is a little tricky for negge because vboxcomm make claims about PVR functionality on Kodi on the basis solely of his addon, which as you point out is open-source software and not their work. Although you are correct that the external EPG is the only bit that is broken, the whole PVR is effectively unusable without external EPG, at least in the UK, because the vbox also has broken EPG parsing that doesn't work on DVB-T2 transmissions and is not entirely reliable for DVB-T transmissions either. Re: your point about EPG descriptions - I have no experience of what the data are like in other countries but in the UK, they are reliably at least 995 characters on some channels, so at least for us, this plugin doesn't work at all if external EPG parsing is enabled. I am glad that the vbox is working well for you and your contribution will, no doubt, help forum users make up their own mind about whether my warning applies to them or not. I can say that the experience in the UK is not as rosy as yours, not just for this particular bug but, in fact, for a number of major bugs in the vbox itself, that the company are working hard to address at the moment on the basis of my feedback. DVB-T/T2 is quite well developed in the UK and differs somewhat in its implementation between countries, so this may explain some differences in user experience.

[t2ffn]

@sunstealer, what is your XMLTV set up like? I have the S/S2 version of the Vbox and the internal EPG is also very lacking on this model. I am looking at either having something running on my QNAP TS-453 Pro as an app, or under a VM machine running on the Qnap, although that would be the only reason for running the VM machine (Likely Ubuntu) so seems a lot of resource for only generating an XMLTV file.

I have two Kodi boxes, chrome box and Revo 3610 both running OE beta.

Would be interested to hear your external XMLTV set up.

[negge]

From what I can tell, this issue has been resolved in the latest addon version.