[mythtv-users] MythTV Android Frontend is now available in the Google Play Market

Ronald Frazier ron at ronfrazier.net
Mon Oct 8 02:53:47 UTC 2012


>> DF: For right now, I think you will only be able to seek if you kick off the
>> live stream and then pause it for a bit.  This is because we kick off the
>> live steam transcode on demand.  It is not queued up or stored except for
>> the life span of watching the video.  So when the video ends, and you
>> navigate back, another command is sent to the backend which terminates the
>> live stream transcode and deletes all the temporary files created.
>
> That's inconvenient (though I understand it's entirely out of your
> control). The problem is when playback aborts (either through error,
> disconnection, or intentionally), there's no way to jump back into the
> middle of things.


FYI: I was just playing around with another android app (MythTV Go).
For playback, I actually like the way it handles things. In particular

1) When streaming begins, it provides a progress update so that you
can see (to a limited degree) that something is actually happening and
you are getting closer to playback, rather than not knowing if it's
just hung (which happens on occasion).
2) When exiting playback, it asks you if you want to delete or keep
the transcoded files on the backend.
3) If you choose to keep them, then the next time you go to play that
file, playback begins instantly with no delay at all. Also, while MX
player will take you right back to the beginning, I found that Dice
Player will actually resume right where you left off.

It seems to me that a nice way to handle things (if you can figure out
all the right things to do with the API and it's all possible) might
be that, when you pick a show, rather just launching it you could
bring up a page with more info about the show. There you could have
links to play it now, or start transcoding in the background. If
transcoding in the background, you could show the progress. Actually
now that I think about it (maybe I should have done that before I
started typing), you could (if you wanted to get a little fancier)
show the progress on the menu next to each show name. Something like a
pie graph where the red slice is percent not transcoded and the green
slice is percent transcoded. Then you could choose to only watch shows
once they are completely transcoded.

Also, if I'm starting to understand this streaming stuff a little
better, I suspect a user could setup their backend to automatically
start the HLS transcoding as soon as recording is complete. This way,
for shows you know you are likely to watch from android you can have
them pretranscoded. If you then put the little indicators right on the
menu, it would be easier to see which programs are ready to be
watched.

Sorry if there are too many ideas here and in my other posts. Don't
mean to overwhelm you with stuff. :-)

Just curious, are you developing this on your own, or are other people helping?


-- 
Ron Frazier


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