[mattlach]

I don't think audio passthrough is enabled in LiveTV. Think I remember reading somewhere that allowing that in a LiveTV stream was problematic and very hard to avoid audio sync problems. As I understood it, it shouldn't be available for LiveTV.

Read here: http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=284580

It is working right now (but with significant sync problems) so it is not disabled, and was working flawlessly in Jarvis without any sync problems at all.

The receiver correctly identifies and uses the encoding kodi indicates on liveTV streams.

The sync issue is new to Krypton.

If it is impossible to properly sync live TV audio with passthrough, how come Jarvis did it perfectly?

I may have to try to figure out how to downgrade back to Jarvis, as the current state is completely unacceptable.

Example:

So, here is what I suspect happened:

After I upgraded to Krypton, passthrough stopped working all together. It required me to disable "Player -> Sync Playback to Display" for passthrough to work. In Jarvis this wasn't a requirement. The reason why is listed in the config description:

(Yes, this is Krypton, I just switched the skin back to Confluence, as I didn't want to have to teach everyone in the house how to use the TV again, they already complain it is too complicated)



So the reason is that if this is enabled, resampling might be required, and the assumption is that kodi can't resample passed through audio.

But then under System -> Audio -> Audio Passthrough there's this:



It would seem as if AC3 transcoding would solve this sync problem. Is the fact that "Player -> Sync Playback to Display" is forced to be off in order to enable passthrough preventing the AC3 passthrough in the passthrough menu from working?

It seems like a mistake to disable passthrough if "sync playback to display" is enabled for this reason. Any thoughts?

The question is, how can I work around this for now?

What if, instead of using passthrough, I do all audio decoding in Kodi and present my receiver with multichannel PCM in 5.1?

If I have a 7.1 receiver (running with 5.1 speakers, two speakers are unpopulated for future upgrades) do I lose anything by going with this approach? I know it will probably increase CPU load on my Kodi box as it now has to do all the decoding, but it is a Haswell i5-4570T, so I think it can handle it no problem.

So, TLDR version, do I lose anything at all by moving to multichannel PCM with decode happening in Kodi instead of on my receiver? Will this fix my sync issue by allowing me to enable "sync playback to display"?

[mattlach]

Also,

Another thing I have noticed that happens in Krypton, but not in Jarvis is that when I am watching Live TV, and it crosses the schedule from one show to the next, if I just leave it alone and let it play, it works fine, but if I try to do any thing else, like skip or fast forward or rewind it will freeze the playback, and I have to stop it and re-start it.

This does not happen inside the same scheduled show in LiveTV, only when it crosses from one show to the next.

[janbar]

Yes an issue exists. I noticed the problem since xbmc Isengard. Before on helix and gotham that worked very well. Now seeking accross program break make me scary. I m always afraid of crashing kodi and my current show. Sadly I haven t time to learn xbmc code on the live player.

Last time skiping back to the begining of the show, because I had to cook a good meal, the player became frozen and the audio made crazy sounds. I just had the time to press the record button and kodi has crashed. Unfortunately debug was not enabled. Still the backtrace.

[raptorjr]

Yes, I experience that to. Then only thing I can do in LiveTV, or dare to do, is to pause. But after that, any skipping/rew/ff risks cancelled LiveTV. Fortunately you have the LiveTV group, so you can always use that if the show has ended.

But LiveTV in Kodi is if not useless, not very useful either when it comes to the things that a PVR should be able to do. But hard to do anything about it. People with the right knowledge don't seem to have the interest to fix it. Or the time.

[s1mon]

I just upgraded to kodi 17 using the ubuntu ppa on an ubuntu 16.04.1 box.
Now when kodi starts on startup, i get the following message:



this is probably because the mythtv backend has still to finish starting up, and kodi is already ready to go.
Previously on kodi 16, the mythtv plugin would just automatically retry to connect, and when the backend was ready, kodi connected and synced the program guide automagically.
Is there a way to get back to the previous behaviour? Maybe some setting? This is a problem for me, because if that error box pops up, the backend will shutdown after a while because nothing connected to it.

Thanks!

[teeedubb]

I just upgraded to kodi 17 using the ubuntu ppa on an ubuntu 16.04.1 box.
Now when kodi starts on startup, i get the following message:


this is probably because the mythtv backend has still to finish starting up, and kodi is already ready to go.
Previously on kodi 16, the mythtv plugin would just automatically retry to connect, and when the backend was ready, kodi connected and synced the program guide automagically.
Is there a way to get back to the previous behaviour? Maybe some setting? This is a problem for me, because if that error box pops up, the backend will shutdown after a while because nothing connected to it.

Thanks!

I'm using this patch to restore the previous behaviour. It removes the dialog and acts as though the answer to the dialog was yes:

Code:

From 232527fb21b571082aef6ea5b7268f5ad1f99fd6 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: blaster
Date: Sat, 14 Jan 2017 09:21:47 +1100
Subject: [PATCH] hide reconnect dialog and reconnect automatically

---
src/client.cpp | 16 ++++++++--------
1 file changed, 8 insertions(+), 8 deletions(-)

diff --git a/src/client.cpp b/src/client.cpp
index e79a917..52104e3 100644
--- a/src/client.cpp
+++ b/src/client.cpp
@@ -376,17 +376,17 @@ ADDON_STATUS ADDON_Create(void *hdl, void *props)
       {
         if (!g_bNotifyAddonFailure)
           m_CurStatus = ADDON_STATUS_NEED_SETTINGS;
-        else
-        {
+      //  else
+      //  {
           // HEADING: Connection failed
           // No response from MythTV backend.
           // Do you want to retry ?
-          std::string msg = XBMC->GetLocalizedString(30304);
-          msg.append("\n").append(XBMC->GetLocalizedString(30113));
-          bool canceled = false;
-          if (!GUI->Dialog_YesNo_ShowAndGetInput(XBMC->GetLocalizedString(30112), msg.c_str(), canceled) && !canceled)
-            m_CurStatus = ADDON_STATUS_NEED_SETTINGS;
-        }
+        //  std::string msg = XBMC->GetLocalizedString(30304);
+        //  msg.append("\n").append(XBMC->GetLocalizedString(30113));
+        //  bool canceled = false;
+        //  if (!GUI->Dialog_YesNo_ShowAndGetInput(XBMC->GetLocalizedString(30112), msg.c_str(), canceled) && !canceled)
+          //  m_CurStatus = ADDON_STATUS_NEED_SETTINGS;
+      //  }
         break;
       }
     }
--
2.7.4

I'm hoping that janbar will add a option to restore the previous behaviour one day

[s1mon]

I'm using this patch to restore the previous behaviour.

Thanks teeedubb! At least now I can stop searching for a setting

Maybe later I am going to recompile the plugin.
Please janbar accept this push request

https://github.com/janbar/pvr.mythtv/pull/64

[s1mon]

I made a workaround for now: instead of starting kodi directly, I start it with this script:

Code:

#!/bin/bash

sudo lsof -Pi :6544 -sTCP:LISTEN -t | until read line; do
        sleep 1
done

/usr/bin/kodi &

so kodi starts only when the backend is ready.
This works only if kodi starts on the same machine the backend is running on. I still have to test how the new plugin behaves when the backend is on a remote machine and is woken up with wol.

[janbar]

Yes I will restore a similar behavior. I had to make a quick fix to handle the krypton change. But now it is time to fix it.

[raptorjr]

Yes an issue exists. I noticed the problem since xbmc Isengard. Before on helix and gotham that worked very well. Now seeking accross program break make me scary. I m always afraid of crashing kodi and my current show. Sadly I haven t time to learn xbmc code on the live player.

Last time skiping back to the begining of the show, because I had to cook a good meal, the player became frozen and the audio made crazy sounds. I just had the time to press the record button and kodi has crashed. Unfortunately debug was not enabled. Still the backtrace.

As a developer of this addon, have you tried to get the attention of the videoplayer developers about these problems? I think it is sad that old versions of Kodi work better than new versions.

[janbar]

No I haven t. Because my english isn t enougth good to explain precisely the issues and I hope guys bench their changes. But it seems they can t complete the job due time or some materials.

[mattlach]

No I haven t. Because my english isn t enougth good to explain precisely the issues and I hope guys bench their changes. But it seems they can t complete the job due time or some materials.

Your English is much better than my French! :p

Maybe when we encounter issues like these we can help write them up in English for you to submit?

[raptorjr]

I'm actually thinking of going back to Kodi 16. To not have a reliable skip/ff/rew in LiveTV is pretty much killing my WAF =\

[janbar]

I think all your comments here are great help to improve kodi. Opening track ticket and exposing our issues are great contributions. Also MythTV allows full timeshift for liveTV and be sure only our addon provides this feature. This is also the reason why the problem impact only the mythtv addon.
It will be great if developers for the live player have a setup with mythtv.

[raptorjr]

I tried to get some help about my buffer problems: http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=306136
I think that FernetMenta is one of the lead devs behind the new VideoPlayer? I get the feel from the answers in that thread that if something isn't working it is not the VideoPlayer that has bugs.

So I guess there may be little help to get from there? Also from the suggestion that I should try another backend.