Any advice?
I have old nvidia ion mainboard based setup in my bedroom working as mythtv frontend. It now has mb issues, and it seems difficult to find microatx ion mainboards.
I am thinking to buy some kind of android tv box and use it as frontend.
Has anybody done that? Is there any good guides for some box? I basically need livetv, recordings and videos to play. I use sd and hd content.
So, frontend softvare could be kodi or mythtv frontend. But I hope that somebody has experiments for working setup.. What box, what image, what frontend?
Looks like that android tv boxes have all needed, ir receiver etc. But are they really working? I don't want something that works when it wants..
Just trying to find a way to do this as painless as possible..
Using android tv box as frontend
Moderator: Forum Moderators
Re: Using android tv box as frontend
If you can find them (as they've been discontinued or ebay) the Nexus Player works great! http://www.ebay.com/itm/Google-Nexus-Pl ... Swu4BVw~fr
The Nexus Player has native mpeg2 decoding and is very fast using Kodi and google has update the boxes to Nougat...why they canceled this little gem is baffling, I have a couple and couldn't be happier as FE for MythTV and a number of streaming services.
A more expensive route but real winner is the Nvidia Shield (https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/shield/)
Otherwise I would probably suggest Amazon Firetv (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00U3 ... cesubnav_2) or Mi Box Android TV (http://www.mi.com/en/mibox/).
Generally I recommend staying away from the generic Chinese Android boxes, they are hit or miss and most of the time they are a miss!
The Nexus Player has native mpeg2 decoding and is very fast using Kodi and google has update the boxes to Nougat...why they canceled this little gem is baffling, I have a couple and couldn't be happier as FE for MythTV and a number of streaming services.
A more expensive route but real winner is the Nvidia Shield (https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/shield/)
Otherwise I would probably suggest Amazon Firetv (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00U3 ... cesubnav_2) or Mi Box Android TV (http://www.mi.com/en/mibox/).
Generally I recommend staying away from the generic Chinese Android boxes, they are hit or miss and most of the time they are a miss!
Re: Using android tv box as frontend
Search the kodi.tv forum for "START HERE - Pick the Right Kodi Box (updated Jan 2017)" and the top post guides you through the different combinations and the recommended options depending on whether you want cheap, easy, fast, 4k, stable, diy, etc.
I have used a cheap unbranded S208 Android box with 1GB RAM and it worked fine with kodi, but newer versions of kodi (v17+) will require newer versions of Android (5+) so be wary of what you purchase. Cheap boxes are fine as long as they have the correct CPU/GPU (mostly Amlogic) and as long as you accept that the OS is unlikely to be upgraded to the latest version of Android.
I believe the guy who provided Android patches to kodi left a few months ago after some patches were refused to be merged so future support may be limited.
Android box remotes that I have seen have a limited number of buttons. I ended up having to have a customized keymap since I wanted a button to delete watched recordings or call up info on the tv programme.
An alternative remote is the Flirc usb adapter that allows you to use any existing remote control and map buttons how you want or the air mouse (aka flying squirrel).
The main problem I had was pauses of a few seconds when skipping forward several minutes in very high bitrate HD streams (20mb/s) to skip adverts. I believe this is because it doesn't cache far enough ahead so spent time buffering. But for normal HD and SD it was fine, and was fine playing any HD from attached usb drive.
My box couldn't change resolution dynamically for playing 24p content, but this was an Android 4 limitation, so you had to set it to 50p or 60p.
I've never got Live TV to work satisfactorily on mythfrontend or kodi even running on the same PC. For kodi I had to alter the configuration to allow a longer timeout when tuning. Nowadays I use tvheadend for livetv.
Other than that, I found the box to be fine and would run heavy skins such as Titan well after the initial startup delay (all cheap boxes suffer a delay on initial loading of menus in the heavy graphic skins). There is an app "xbmc launcher" (or something like that) so on boot up it goes straight in to kodi. Alternatively search for SPMC.
My box had access to Google Play store and one nice thing is that kodi can launch Android apps from the menu. I don't use it but I can imagine it would be useful for running games, skype, netflix, etc. Config was simple since you could select it had a nice simple interface for setting wifi, cec, resolution, phone screen mirroring, etc.
I bought the android box since it was less than half the price of a pi 3 and required far less setup. If I were buying again, I'd probably buy a pi3 so I could run some extra services, or an odroid c2 if either were a little cheaper. But, I often read forum reports of issues.
Note that the cheap boxes normally come with kodi configured with lots of "extras". I uninstalled kodi and then reinstalled it direct from kodi.tv to start from fresh.
I have used a cheap unbranded S208 Android box with 1GB RAM and it worked fine with kodi, but newer versions of kodi (v17+) will require newer versions of Android (5+) so be wary of what you purchase. Cheap boxes are fine as long as they have the correct CPU/GPU (mostly Amlogic) and as long as you accept that the OS is unlikely to be upgraded to the latest version of Android.
I believe the guy who provided Android patches to kodi left a few months ago after some patches were refused to be merged so future support may be limited.
Android box remotes that I have seen have a limited number of buttons. I ended up having to have a customized keymap since I wanted a button to delete watched recordings or call up info on the tv programme.
An alternative remote is the Flirc usb adapter that allows you to use any existing remote control and map buttons how you want or the air mouse (aka flying squirrel).
The main problem I had was pauses of a few seconds when skipping forward several minutes in very high bitrate HD streams (20mb/s) to skip adverts. I believe this is because it doesn't cache far enough ahead so spent time buffering. But for normal HD and SD it was fine, and was fine playing any HD from attached usb drive.
My box couldn't change resolution dynamically for playing 24p content, but this was an Android 4 limitation, so you had to set it to 50p or 60p.
I've never got Live TV to work satisfactorily on mythfrontend or kodi even running on the same PC. For kodi I had to alter the configuration to allow a longer timeout when tuning. Nowadays I use tvheadend for livetv.
Other than that, I found the box to be fine and would run heavy skins such as Titan well after the initial startup delay (all cheap boxes suffer a delay on initial loading of menus in the heavy graphic skins). There is an app "xbmc launcher" (or something like that) so on boot up it goes straight in to kodi. Alternatively search for SPMC.
My box had access to Google Play store and one nice thing is that kodi can launch Android apps from the menu. I don't use it but I can imagine it would be useful for running games, skype, netflix, etc. Config was simple since you could select it had a nice simple interface for setting wifi, cec, resolution, phone screen mirroring, etc.
I bought the android box since it was less than half the price of a pi 3 and required far less setup. If I were buying again, I'd probably buy a pi3 so I could run some extra services, or an odroid c2 if either were a little cheaper. But, I often read forum reports of issues.
Note that the cheap boxes normally come with kodi configured with lots of "extras". I uninstalled kodi and then reinstalled it direct from kodi.tv to start from fresh.
Re: Using android tv box as frontend
I have an S905 box running LibreElec and Kodi with the LibreElec MythTV front end.
I don't know if it changes resolution etc., but for my Myth watching I think it's great.
Running Kodi and the Myth add-on I have access to all of my videos and the shows that get recorded (or watched as Live TV). I don't have problems with buffering, etc., but I have my box connected via cable and the S905 has gigabit ethernet.
Although I haven't figured out how to delete a show from the front end, I think it works great.
For $50 delivered, for me it's a no brainer. Be aware, that LibreElec runs Kodi better than Android and removes a lot of bloat and kernel/patch errors. Using it, however, means giving up Android 'stuff' like a web browser. I run LibreElec from the SD card, so if I want Android back I can just pull the card out (but haven't).
Andrew
I don't know if it changes resolution etc., but for my Myth watching I think it's great.
Running Kodi and the Myth add-on I have access to all of my videos and the shows that get recorded (or watched as Live TV). I don't have problems with buffering, etc., but I have my box connected via cable and the S905 has gigabit ethernet.
Although I haven't figured out how to delete a show from the front end, I think it works great.
For $50 delivered, for me it's a no brainer. Be aware, that LibreElec runs Kodi better than Android and removes a lot of bloat and kernel/patch errors. Using it, however, means giving up Android 'stuff' like a web browser. I run LibreElec from the SD card, so if I want Android back I can just pull the card out (but haven't).
Andrew