Mythfrontend on a 2016 Sony Bravia Android TV

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rocknrobin72
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Mythfrontend on a 2016 Sony Bravia Android TV

Post by rocknrobin72 »

I recently upgraded to MythTV ver. 32 from ver. 31. I have been using mythtv since 2020 and I love it. I use a Slackware 15.0 distro for the backend and I have been using Kodi on my Sony Bravia TV as a frontend and it has worked great for me as well. After upgrading to ver. 32 on the backend I noticed that Kodi did not work right anymore, I have a version 19.3 on my TV and a ver. 20 on a laptop for testing. Damaged recordings now do not show up in Kodi with yellow lettering if they are damaged and if they are not damaged the majority are showing up with the yellow lettering, but they play fine. I was advised in another forum to try using adb to sideload LeanFront and mythfrontend to my T.V. if for nothing else but to test against Kodi.

I was able to get LeanFront and mythfrontend both loaded to my T.V. and LeanFront works ok because it allows me to manually set the IP address of the backned in the settings menu. As a sidebar It has a couple of drawbacks to it. Firstly if a program shows in yellow on Kodi in my ver. 32 backend it looks like a file folder on the ICON in LeanFront instead of like a regular program ICON and when I try to select it it will not play. Other programs play ok with LeanFront. In addition it does not do commercial skips which I really like and work well in Kodi.

Now the main reason for this post. I cannot get mythfrontend on my T.V. to connect to any of my backends. I have one backend that is the ver. 32 upgrade that I mentioned and one that is still on ver. 31. When I launch mythfrontend it tries to connect, I am assuming to localhost or 127.0.0.1. It fails to connect, I try to click on settings to configure the remote backend address, a message pops up that it is trying to connect again, and then it bombs off with this message: This version of mythtv requires an updated database. (schema is 15 versions behind) Please run mythtv-setup or mythbackend to update your database.. Is there a way to program the IP address into the mythfrontend ap on the Sony T.V. via the adb ap or maybe transfer a config.xml file to the T.V. from my computer via adb so it tries to connect to the proper backend database?
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paulh
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Re: Mythfrontend on a 2016 Sony Bravia Android TV

Post by paulh »

The "schema is 15 versions behind" means you trying to use incompatible versions of the frontend and backend. It sounds like the frontend is maybe v32 and it is trying to connect to your v31 backend which have different database schema versions.

I don't use the Android FE myself so not sure how to get it to start the frontend with the backend chooser, on a normal system you would run the frontend with mythfrontend -p to force the backend selection to show from where you can either pick a backend to auto configure or manually enter the database settings.
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pgbennett
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Re: Mythfrontend on a 2016 Sony Bravia Android TV

Post by pgbennett »

If you have a problem with leanfront please open an issue in github at https://github.com/bennettpeter/android ... ont/issues . I would like to know details of problems you have and I will fix anything that is not working, or explain how it can be made to work.
rocknrobin72
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Re: Mythfrontend on a 2016 Sony Bravia Android TV

Post by rocknrobin72 »

Thanks for the response paulh. I had two backends running. One was at IP address xxx.xxx.xxx.60, mythtv ver. 31 (haven't upgraded it yet), and another at IP address xxx.xxx.xxx.69, mythtv ver. 32. They are both on the same network and the same network with my T.V. I shut down the .60 address and then I was able to get to the settings menu in mythfrontend once it timed out on trying to connect to the backend. The IP address that it showed trying to connect to was the .60 address whereupon I changed it to the .69 address. A message at the top of the screen says all changes will go into effect when the application is restarted. When I stopped and restarted mythfrontend it came back up with the .60 ip address again even though I clicked on "Save and Exit" when I got out of the Settings menu. I tried opening mythfrontend again several times and reconfiguring the ip address to .69, but it comes back up to .60 every time I restart it.

I then tried changing the database port to 6544 in the mythfrontend settings menu to see if that made a difference. Now when it tries to connect it advises that it cannot open the database whereas when the port is set to 3306 it advises it can't connect to the backend. I am assuming this means it connects to the database, but can't connect functionally to the backend with the port set to something other than 3306? I changed the database port back to 3306 for further testing.

After re-launching mythfrontend and after it timed out on trying to connect to the backend I tried selecting search from the settings menu. Here I see at the top of the page a list of mythtv servers. One is listed which is "Mythtv AV media server 32.20200101-1". I selected this one, I am assuming that the 32.20200101-1 refers to a ver. 32 backend and I still get a message "unable to connect to backend".

I would like to add that I am able to connect to both my mythtv servers, ver. 31 and ver 32. with Kodi, and the mythtv pvr client add-on, and with leanfront just in case there is a question as to whether I can connect to the backend at all.

pgbennett I will open an issue in github as you suggest as well.
rocknrobin72
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Re: Mythfrontend on a 2016 Sony Bravia Android TV

Post by rocknrobin72 »

I forgot to add the version of mythfrontend I sideloaded to my T.V. is 20220307-arm-32.0-6-ge78a0c0042.
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pgbennett
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Re: Mythfrontend on a 2016 Sony Bravia Android TV

Post by pgbennett »

Database port 3306 is correct, do not change that.

To avoid frontends accidentally connecting to the wrong backend, set a PIN that is not 0000 in each backend setup. Set a different PIN in each backend. The frontend may prompt you for a pin on startup, only enter the PIN for the correct backend.

On the v32 backend, run mythtv-setup and make sure you have an ip address and not a hosts file entry name as the backend ip address. Hosts file entries can be used effectively with Linux frontends, but with android you cannot edit the hosts file so when the android tries to connect using that name it cannot find the address.

Is your android tv on the same subnet? You could try enabling the setting on the backend to allow connection from all subnets, to test whether that helps. Note that this could allow connection from anywhere in the world, so be careful about setting it that way permanently.

You can manually change the config.xml on the android tv but it is tedious. Let me now if you want the details of how to do that.
rocknrobin72
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Re: Mythfrontend on a 2016 Sony Bravia Android TV

Post by rocknrobin72 »

Thanks for the response pgbennett. I was able to get the Android TV mythfrontend to connect. I had to change the General->backend->hostname or ip address from 127.0.0.1 to my xxx.xxx.xxx.69 address and shutdown my xxx.xxx.xxx.60 backend and it connected. I didn't have that problem with Kodi or the LeanFront frontends so evidently mythfrontend requires that parameter to be correct for a remote frontend to connect.

When I was able to connect I did notice the video from mythfrontend is jerky, the audio stutters somewhat and the audio is not synched up some of the time as well. I have a hard-wired Ethernet gigabyte connection to my TV so I don't think that would be a problem. Also these recorded programs were all older, SD black & white programs so the bit-rate should not be that high. In addition when I connect to the backend with Kodi or leanfront frontends the video is smooth. In fact the leanfront frontend is by far the best with a crisper, smoother video picture than Kodi or mythfrontend. As mentioned earlier though the leanfront frontend does not seem to support commercial skips which I really like. I tried all four video profiles that were available in mythfrontend, but that didn't seem to help much.

Any suggestions on other parameters I could try changing to fix the video/audio?
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