Small/cheap frontend suggestions

[se99paj]

Does anyone have any recommendations on a small and cheap frontend? Probably only going to be used for watching recordings and videos in standard definition.

Don't want to spend a fortune on an overspecced machine but also want to make sure I've got something that will work.

[warpme]

Maybe some like this: http://www.asus.com/EeeBox_PCs/EeeBox_PC_EB1033/
It has GT610M so playback MPEG2/H264/VC1/Divix with hw accell & doublerate advanced deinterlace shoube be best what is available in SFF hw & Linux now...
Some opinions:
http://minimyth2.freeforums.org/my-seco ... n-t46.html

[meadrocks]

I have 2 of those PCs for my front ends, they boot off the SD card. Wifi works OK for low bitrate videos, haven't installed my antenna yet to test OTA.

[CodeSmoke]

I use Raspberry Pi's running XBMC with the MthTV plugin. Works well with a wired network, HD channels will have a. Issue over 802.11b network. Other benefit of RPi's with XBMC is all the other options in XBMC like 1Channel, Icefilms, NaviX, etc..

[johalareewi]

Does the Raspberry Pi handle programme scheduling etc. like a Myth frontend?
I have a backend already and I am looking for something small and cheap and very quiet to do the frontend basics.
It only has to handle SD recordings and do programme scheduling.
No need for music, dvd, etc.

I have a model B Pi and gigabit wired network so could give it a whirl.

[se99paj]

So I've been sitting on the fence with this for ages, as you can tell as I started this post in April last year. Unfortunately finances have been tight which has meant no new toys for a while.

But a new year provides new opportunities, I was browsing the internet last night and came across the Asus Vivomini (http://www.asus.com/uk/VivoMini/) it looks like a great opportunity for a frontend. The i3 seems to be available for £250 which is more expensive than I'd like, the Celeron is £120 but always concerned that the Celeron won't be powerful enough.

It looks great and is a perfect size, to sit under my tv, but thought I'd ask if anyone else had any experience/views?

[johalareewi]

I have a model B Pi and gigabit wired network so could give it a whirl.

So I did.
MythTV backend recording Freeview SD broadcasts.
Raspberry Pi model B with OpenELEC (dead easy to install).
Runs KODI which can play recordings from the MythTV backend via upnp.
But video is a bit wobbly so I purchased the MPEG2 licence for the Pi and now it uses the hardware decoder.
Video playback is fine (but the KODI menus are a bit sluggish).

Also tried Xbian but had a couple of hiccups before it would work (OpenELEC worked out of the box).

[se99paj]

I have a model B Pi and gigabit wired network so could give it a whirl.

So I did.
MythTV backend recording Freeview SD broadcasts.
Raspberry Pi model B with OpenELEC (dead easy to install).
Runs KODI which can play recordings from the MythTV backend via upnp.
But video is a bit wobbly so I purchased the MPEG2 licence for the Pi and now it uses the hardware decoder.
Video playback is fine (but the KODI menus are a bit sluggish).

Also tried Xbian but had a couple of hiccups before it would work (OpenELEC worked out of the box).

I decided to bite the bullet and do the same - the Pi is fairly cheap so no great loss if it didn't work out, sure I could use it for something else.

I only received the Pi yesterday so still needs some tweaking, I installed the Mythtv PVR add on but had a few issues with Kodi restarting, updating to the latest version fixed this.

The two areas that I need to sort out are:
Look and Feel - I prefer the Mythtv frontend to Kodi, I only really use Mythtv for watching recordings, on Kodi the recordings are in a submenu and when you do access them they aren't organised in the same way as Mythtv. I'd be interested to hear how you are getting on with the Kodi interface.
Powering on/off - The good news is that I have HDMI-CEC working on my tv, so I can control Kodi from my remote control, but I need to get my head around powering the Pi on/off. It sounds like some people simply leave the Pi on all the time, but I was concerned the backend would never shutdown, I did a quick test this morning and it does seem to shutdown when the Pi is inactive.

[zaphod24]

There is no suspend for the PI, so shutting it down doesn't allow it to be restarted until the power is pulled and reconnected. Since it draws <5w and is a pain to manually restart, this is the reason most folks just leave it on 24x7.

Did you get a PI or a PI2? I've been using a PI2 and love it. The Kodi interface does take some getting used to (my wife still won't use it and prefers MythFrontend) but I do like some things about it better. The thing I prefer the most is that when I am going to view live TV, it starts with a list of channels and what's on as opposed to just going to the last channel I was watching and then making me pull up a guide. You can still pull up a guide for what else is currently on while watching live TV as well.

My MythFrontend runs on a dual-core Atom machine with an onboard Nvidia card (Asus EEEBOX PC). When I bring up the guide, it tends to be a bit too much for that low-powered machine and it causes small but noticeable pauses in the audio, esp when scrolling through it. That got a lot better in one of the recent releases (.3 or .4) when they did some caching and stopped sending so many queries to MySQL for which channels were available on each tuner. The Nvidia card does a great job with playback and deinterlacing but anything that needs to run on the Atom processors tends to be a bit slow. I think fetching the channel icons and scaling them to the appropriate size for the guide (which is far as I can tell is done once per channel scrolled through while the guide is up but is done again every time the guide is dismissed and brought back up) is a bit too much for the Atoms.

[se99paj]

I went for the Raspberry Pi 2, so far Openelec has been running out the box without any performance improvements, I'm assuming the performance improvements advised for a Raspberry Pi are mainly for version 1 not 2. Although this might change as I start to use the Pi more.

I'm not a massive fan of the frontend, much prefer Mythtv, I guess this is mainly because Mythtv is fit fur purpose whereas Kodi is trying to do many things at once. I tend to only use Mythtv for watching recordings and don't like the way recorded programmes are hidden away in a submenu. I'm going to try MythicalLibrarian this weekend, from what I can tell this will automatically categorise TV Shows and Movies, and create symlinks with filenames that Kodi can understand. The end goal will hopefully be all my recordings automatically categorised and metadata added in the Movies and TV Shows section in Kodi.

Out of interest what skin are you using?

[zaphod24]

Just the standard Confluence. Kodi is pretty zippy for me on the RPi2, especially compared to my first experience on the original RPi >1 year ago.

I just recently setup the option to use MySQL as the shared video and music database for Kodi. I like it saving the watched vs unwatched and last played position when I haven't completely finished a video. It did that before, but now it's the same on all my Kodi frontends so it's like one of those DirectTV commercials where I can stop a video in one room and pick right back up in the same place in another.

I just looked up MythicalLibrarian. I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish. Any recording that is still in MythTV comes up for me under LiveTV recordings and is already grouped by TV show and then sorted least to most recent. If I really want to save something I will typically run nuvexport after making sure the commercials are 100% flagged correctly and naming the file appropriately so the TVDB scraper picks it up. I have an hd homerun prime and my cable provider uses MPEG2, so the exports I do are to h264. It looks like MythicalLibrarian will give more of the season/episode/detailed information for existing recordings that happens when I export and appropriately name the files?

[se99paj]

I just looked up MythicalLibrarian. I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish. Any recording that is still in MythTV comes up for me under LiveTV recordings and is already grouped by TV show and then sorted least to most recent.

The main goal was for all my recordings to automatically get split into "Tv Series" and "Films" then appear in the either "TV Shows" or "Movies" section. Viewing the recordings via the TV menu doesn't provide any fan art for tv shows, and the tv shows are in the same menu as the movies. Viewing the TV Show/Movies menu in Kodi the menu does provide fan art and looks much better.

But it looks like MythicalLibrarian doesn't work that well any longer, some of the tv shows get renamed and work within the TV Shows menu, but the script doesn't pick up movies or tv shows without metadata. Ideally I need a script that can rename the recording file into human readable text but split into two directories depending on if it is a tv show or a movie. Any ideas?

[johalareewi]

I have moved onto the Pi2. The menu lag was a bit too much on the model B even though playback was fine.
I did find a web site with suggestions for speeding up Kodi on the Pi.
http://kodi.wiki/view/Raspberry_Pi

I have installed OpenELEC 5.0.5 which is perfectly happy using UPNP to play freeview SD content from the Myth backend.
I have not needed to buy the MPEG2 license and playback and menu response is fine.

I have tried the MythBox addon but it won't connect with the Myth backend (I am using 0.27), and the setup screen is missing the text labels so I haven't a clue what anything means.

It would be nice to have a web browser add on for Kodi so I can run Mythweb.
Haven't found one yet.

[se99paj]

Hi johalareewi - Have you installed the Mythtv PVR addon for Kodi? this is the link: http://kodi.wiki/view/MythTV_PVR

I had to download the latest version add install manually to get this working, but it allows the Live TV and recordings to be displayed straight from Kodi, not sure if this is the same as you mean regarding UPNP.

Have you had any luck adding Films/TV Shows into the specific menus in Kodi? I haven't had much luck finding a single solution that does everything that I need it to do, Mythtv 0.28 as some significant changes to the UPNP that might be useful. I'm debating whether to move to that now or wait until it is released.

[zaphod24]

Not sure what might be different with your setup, but I have no issues with fanart for TV shows being fetched and displayed. I don't record that many movies off of cable, so I've never noticed if those fetch fan art.

For recorded TV I might just leave them in place. For movies, I'd use something like nuvexport to transcode them (possibly using the cutlist to remove commercials). My cable provider uses MPEG2 and when I want to save something I transcode it to H264 and remove commericals. After an entire season of TV has been recorded, if I wanted to save it I might use nuvexport for that as well and move the resulting files into my videos/tv folder and then delete the recording in MythTV.