THIS IS NOT ABOUT ILLEGAL SOURCES. Just sayin’. 🙂
I have a lot of video files coming from onlinetvrecorder.com, basically a VHS tape recorder web service. It is near the limit of what’s legal, but it still is.
I guess I’m not the only one using this service and Kodi.
So I want to hear about your experiences.
Here are mine:
Grmpf.
Current Setup:
1st gen Fire TV Stick
Kodi 17 beta 7, previously 16.0, 16.1, 17 beta 6
NAS: Synology DS414j
Router: Fritz!Box 7490 (802.11AC)
TV: Samsung UE46F6340 (model 2013)
Blu Ray Player: Samsung BD-H5500 (model 2014)
Old Setup:
synology DS112j, video files on external USB2.0 drives
Some Cisco 802.11N WLAN router
Distance between router and TV: less than 4m, with a tiny wood/gypsum(? plaster?) wall in the way.
When I do file transfers from my notebook to / from the DS414j, I get up to 22 MByte/s via 802.11N or up to 53 MByte/s via 802.11AC, sitting even further away from the router. So the WLAN is fine for what I want to do.
Installation of Kodi was easy:
First, I installed ES File Explorer via the Amazon shopping web site.
Launching the ES File Explorer on the Fire TV Stick, I started the Remote Manager (menue => Network => Remote-Manager), which starts an FTP server and tells you the URL to access it.
Then I used a PC to download the Kodi 32 bit APK and transfer it via FTP to the Fire TV Stick’s download folder, using that URL.
Back on the Fire tV Stick, I navigated to the download folder and started the installation. Done.
So far, so good.
But I’ve got trouble playing the videos.
With hardware acceleration activated (Media Codec and Media Codec Surface), every content plays just fine, like 1080p25 from youtube or other sources.
But the files from onlinetvrecorder don’t. They stutter. Even 576p25 ones.
Turning hardware acceleration off, the 576p25 files play a bit smoother, maxing out the CPUs.
The 720p50 files I have are unplayable without hardware acceleration, and with, they stutter exactliy like the 576p25 ones, not more.
Every other player plays them smoothly:
– the TV, via DLNA (also on old setup)
– the BD player, via DLNA (also on old setup, connected to NAS via PowerLAN 500 adapter)
– every other app on the FireTV Stick, like VLC, Mezzmo, Archos video, no matter if they access the files via DLNA or SMB
I tracked down the problem to missing PTS.
The files are h264 / MP3vbr, in AVI containers. Commercials are cut out with ColdCut, a GUI that hands the job over to VirtualDub with smart rendering via FFDShow, reencoding the frames between the end of the commercials and the next keyframe and performing a direct stream copy for the rest of the video.
Remuxing the files into .mp4 with ffmpeg -fflags +genpts didn’t help, neither did remuxing with XMedia Recode.
Remuxing into mkv with mkvtoolnix almost helped – the video plays smoothly, except for the places where the commercials were cut out. Right there, the frame rate suddenly goes down, but no frame is dropped. After a few seconds, fps goes up, way beyond 25, until the frames caught up and audio and video are in sync again.
So this is a 90% solution.
And I’d rather spend up to 100 Euro for hardware than remuxing all my files into something playing 90% fine.
Thus, I’d like to hear:
What hardware platform do you play your onlinetvrecorder.com files on, and what are your experiences?