I've had a 0.28 chromebox backend running for many months now. I've been using either osmc or libre-elec front ends on rpi3s, and one windows pc with kodi occasionally connecting. The performance has been good, but the video signal has been choppy at times, and only recently became totally unacceptable. I decided to try using myth front end lite on an rpi to see if that cleared up issues.
I used the setup wiki pages, and ran into an issue almost immediately with front end failing to connect to the database. Long story short, this turned out to be the bind address for the sql database (but I took a meandering road to determining that). With the database sorted out, I started the front end set-up for real. That process was fairly quick and painless, but resulted with even worse video quality than the kodi frontends (even with recommended settings). Freezes, video artifacting, audio drops and stutters etc. It was quite bad, and it seemed that certain channels were affected worse than others. The strange part was that none of the TVs (or the old tivo that's still hooked up) had any issues with the same signals. This ultimately became my clue for what the issue was...
My hd homerun connect tuner was basically high signal strength, but borderline signal quality on several (problematic) channels. After some digging, I discovered that many TVs apparently have some sort of signal processing or low level amplification before displaying the picture, which would explain the difference. When I put a super cheap amplifier right before the hdhomerun, video quality dramatically increased on all frontends, all channels. Kodi and mythfrontend are now working better than I've ever managed before. Now that I have this mythfrontend set up to play with, I'm going to explore it a bit further to see what I prefer.
Ultimately my mythfrontend setup became the recommended:
- 256GB vid memory split (had this higher, but I believe it led to freezes after roughly 30 mins, and it's just not necessary)
- openmax high quality video (had to use normal when my video memory was too high)
- alsa default for audio
Strange things I've encountered:
- Theme Chooser populated a list with many options to choose from, but after downloading/installing one (aeon nox), the list was reduced to the already installed themes. I no longer have access to the other options listed before.
- Several setup options have missing images in the menu. This isn't important but I figured I would mention it.
- I'm getting a bit of strange video artifacting that looks related to interlacing if I had to guess. I haven't found any options that seem to affect it. It's minor and something that my household can deal with. But I think it's worth mentioning. It basically looks like slightly offset horizontal shifts in the image in certain spots (so a straight line becomes zigzagged). This ultimately may not have to do with myth tv specifically, but the problem is not there when watching a stream directly from the tuner to vlc.