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PostPosted: Fri Oct 24, 2014 10:42 am 
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Joined: Sun Apr 30, 2006 7:49 pm
Posts: 37
Location: Ottawa
Now that the update to 8.2 is completed, I've been trying to integrate Netflix. I installed the Google Chrome package 38.0.2125.104-1 from the testing repo. I ran chrome and modified the settings to set its home page to http://www.netflix.com/WiHome, and logged in, saving my password. I installed the Flix Plus plugin so that I could use the keyboard to navigate the Netflix screen.

I edited the appropriate mainmenu.xml (in my case, under /usr/share/mythtv/themes/DVR) to add:
Code:
<button>
        <type>VIDEO</type>
        <text>Netflix Video</text>
        <action>EXEC /usr/bin/google-chrome --start-fullscreen</action>
</button>



Now, there's a Netflix choice in the main menu which, if selected, pops up the screen very quickly. I can exit it with CTRL-W or CTRL-SHIFT-Q, which takes me back to the frontend (which has continued to run behind the chrome window). I can select movies, and I can play them full-screen. That's all fine. Two problems.

First problem, there is no audio. There's nothing in the logs that tells me why the audio isn't working. I'm guessing that it's because the ALSA device is grabbed in exclusive mode by the frontend. Does anybody have any suggestions for solving this?

Second problem, the fonts on the Netflix page are horribly blocky, to the point of unreadability. Any idea why that would be?


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PostPosted: Fri Oct 24, 2014 12:17 pm 
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Joined: Fri Jul 21, 2006 11:12 pm
Posts: 1194
Location: SC
Quote:
I edited the appropriate mainmenu.xml (in my case, under /usr/share/mythtv/themes/DVR)
This will get overwritten the next time the mythtv package is updated. There is a way to put your edits in ~/.mythtv and it will read them first and won't get overwritten.

Quote:
First problem, there is no audio. There's nothing in the logs that tells me why the audio isn't working. I'm guessing that it's because the ALSA device is grabbed in exclusive mode by the frontend. Does anybody have any suggestions for solving this?
Mythfrontend only uses the device when it is playing something back. You probably just need to set your default device in Service Menu --> LinHES Settings --> Audio

Quote:
Second problem, the fonts on the Netflix page are horribly blocky, to the point of unreadability. Any idea why that would be?
I am not seeing that on the sign page but I don't have a streaming account. Is it happening on other sites too?


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PostPosted: Fri Oct 24, 2014 7:17 pm 
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Joined: Sun Apr 30, 2006 7:49 pm
Posts: 37
Location: Ottawa
brfransen wrote:
Quote:
I edited the appropriate mainmenu.xml (in my case, under /usr/share/mythtv/themes/DVR)
This will get overwritten the next time the mythtv package is updated. There is a way to put your edits in ~/.mythtv and it will read them first and won't get overwritten.

True, but I also have local changes to mytharchive.py, which can't be edited that way, so I have a system involving recording original files and patches so that I can quickly locate and modify the files that have to be changed after an upgrade.

brfransen wrote:
Quote:
First problem, there is no audio. There's nothing in the logs that tells me why the audio isn't working. I'm guessing that it's because the ALSA device is grabbed in exclusive mode by the frontend. Does anybody have any suggestions for solving this?
Mythfrontend only uses the device when it is playing something back. You probably just need to set your default device in Service Menu --> LinHES Settings --> Audio

I've tried that, using all of the ALSA choices available to me, nothing ever produced sound using the test button. I'll try again using command-line ALSA tools to see if I can get it working. While my motherboard has an integral sound card, I'm using the HDMI output on my NVidia card to transmit sound. This is something ALSA can handle, I probably just have to find the right settings. I'll poke at it more later.

brfransen wrote:
Quote:
Second problem, the fonts on the Netflix page are horribly blocky, to the point of unreadability. Any idea why that would be?
I am not seeing that on the sign page but I don't have a streaming account. Is it happening on other sites too?

I haven't found any other sites where it appears. It's only in the pop-up text, descriptions and titles of the movie under the cursor. And also the text of the search box, strangely. Everything else looks good.


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PostPosted: Fri Oct 24, 2014 10:35 pm 
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Joined: Tue Aug 15, 2006 11:14 am
Posts: 1343
Location: Orlando FL
I've found that the LinHES audio setting is for the computer and MythTV can be set to output to any device separate from the LinHES setting that's why MythTV sound works and not the system sound. My issue was that My TV takes a while to start playing audio when It receives digital audio and the test audio clip was too short. I ended up running a song from mplayer in the command line after making a change to test my output.

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PostPosted: Sat Oct 25, 2014 6:56 am 
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Joined: Fri Jul 21, 2006 11:12 pm
Posts: 1194
Location: SC
neufeld wrote:
I've tried that, using all of the ALSA choices available to me, nothing ever produced sound using the test button. I'll try again using command-line ALSA tools to see if I can get it working. While my motherboard has an integral sound card, I'm using the HDMI output on my NVidia card to transmit sound. This is something ALSA can handle, I probably just have to find the right settings. I'll poke at it more later.
R8.1 had a bug with the test button but it should be fixed in R8.2. What nvidia card do you have? Can you post the output of aplay -L and aplay -l?


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PostPosted: Sat Oct 25, 2014 9:10 am 
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Joined: Sun Apr 30, 2006 7:49 pm
Posts: 37
Location: Ottawa
brfransen wrote:
neufeld wrote:
I've tried that, using all of the ALSA choices available to me, nothing ever produced sound using the test button. I'll try again using command-line ALSA tools to see if I can get it working. While my motherboard has an integral sound card, I'm using the HDMI output on my NVidia card to transmit sound. This is something ALSA can handle, I probably just have to find the right settings. I'll poke at it more later.
R8.1 had a bug with the test button but it should be fixed in R8.2. What nvidia card do you have? Can you post the output of aplay -L and aplay -l?

The card is the GeForce 210 chip, a GT218-based board.

I started a MythTV recording playing on the box and used fuser to determine what sound device was in use. It attaches to the control device, and to pcmC1D7p. That corresponds to ALSA device plughw:1,7. I used strace -eopen on the aplay binary, it was also opening the control device and pcmC1D7p, so I've got it all set up correctly, but it didn't produce any sound. This is bordering on weird. I'm wondering if it's a bitrate incompatibilty issue, but as far as I can tell MythTV doesn't force any particular bitrate on the stream.

The outputs of aplay -L and aplay -l:
Code:
[mythtv@mythtv ~]$ aplay -L
null
    Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture)
sysdefault:CARD=PCH
    HDA Intel PCH, ALC887-VD Analog
    Default Audio Device
front:CARD=PCH,DEV=0
    HDA Intel PCH, ALC887-VD Analog
    Front speakers
surround40:CARD=PCH,DEV=0
    HDA Intel PCH, ALC887-VD Analog
    4.0 Surround output to Front and Rear speakers
surround41:CARD=PCH,DEV=0
    HDA Intel PCH, ALC887-VD Analog
    4.1 Surround output to Front, Rear and Subwoofer speakers
surround50:CARD=PCH,DEV=0
    HDA Intel PCH, ALC887-VD Analog
    5.0 Surround output to Front, Center and Rear speakers
surround51:CARD=PCH,DEV=0
    HDA Intel PCH, ALC887-VD Analog
    5.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Rear and Subwoofer speakers
surround71:CARD=PCH,DEV=0
    HDA Intel PCH, ALC887-VD Analog
    7.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Side, Rear and Woofer speakers
iec958:CARD=PCH,DEV=0
    HDA Intel PCH, ALC887-VD Digital
    IEC958 (S/PDIF) Digital Audio Output
hdmi:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0
    HDA NVidia, HDMI 0
    HDMI Audio Output
hdmi:CARD=NVidia,DEV=1
    HDA NVidia, HDMI 0
    HDMI Audio Output
hdmi:CARD=NVidia,DEV=2
    HDA NVidia, HDMI 0
    HDMI Audio Output
hdmi:CARD=NVidia,DEV=3
    HDA NVidia, HDMI 0
    HDMI Audio Output
[mythtv@mythtv ~]$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: ALC887-VD Analog [ALC887-VD Analog]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 1: ALC887-VD Digital [ALC887-VD Digital]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 7: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 8: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 9: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0


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PostPosted: Sun Oct 26, 2014 10:13 am 
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Joined: Fri Jul 21, 2006 11:12 pm
Posts: 1194
Location: SC
neufeld wrote:
The card is the GeForce 210 chip, a GT218-based board.
Odd. I have 210s in 3 different boxes and your aplay is identical to mine. Can you see what you have in /etc/asound.conf? Also do you have a ~/.asoundrc? The test button should be running something like
Code:
aplay --device=plughw:1,7 /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav
Does that give you and error when run manually?


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PostPosted: Fri Dec 05, 2014 3:04 pm 
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Joined: Sun Apr 30, 2006 7:49 pm
Posts: 37
Location: Ottawa
Just a followup to say that the problem resolved itself. It wasn't anything I did, the modification times on appropriate files show that. I rebooted the box, and now notice that other ALSA programs work without needing to take any special action.

At a guess, either the kernel got itself into a weird state where it accepted mythtv audio but nothing else, or some sort of initialization was missed, and the reboot fixed it up.

So, I've now got Netflix running right on the front end. Starts up in seconds, rather than the 2 minute wait for my Blu-ray player to initialize its Netflix applet.


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PostPosted: Fri Dec 05, 2014 11:17 pm 
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Joined: Tue Aug 15, 2006 11:14 am
Posts: 1343
Location: Orlando FL
good to hear. We bought a Roku because my Sony Blue-ray player's Netflix app was piping all videos through some Sony server instead of directly from Netflix. The Sony server got overloaded on a daily basis.

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PostPosted: Sun Dec 14, 2014 1:45 pm 
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Joined: Wed Jan 04, 2006 10:20 am
Posts: 387
Location: South New Jersey, USA
@neufield, how seemless is your netflix integration with the mythtv remote? Do you use a keyboard/mouse for all interfacing with netflix?

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FrontEnd - Dell Vostro 400 3.0GHz Core2Duo NVidia GeForce210. MCE Remote


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PostPosted: Thu Jan 01, 2015 6:34 pm 
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Joined: Tue Aug 15, 2006 11:14 am
Posts: 1343
Location: Orlando FL
Just an update
I accidentally clicked on a Netflix stream the other day while updating my queue and It magically started playing. It's amazing I finally have Netflix streaming on Linux with no work arounds. It only took them 5 years.

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PostPosted: Mon Jan 05, 2015 2:13 pm 
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Joined: Sun Apr 30, 2006 7:49 pm
Posts: 37
Location: Ottawa
Big boy stan wrote:
@neufield, how seemless is your netflix integration with the mythtv remote? Do you use a keyboard/mouse for all interfacing with netflix?


Our remote is actually an IR wireless keyboard, so it's relatively seamless. The keyboard navigation of Netflix using the chrome plugin is a bit clunky, the key that's supposed to turn on subtitles doesn't seem to work for me, and I haven't put a lot of effort into figuring out how to select a particular episode of a series, but for watching single movies it works.

I'm tempted, though, to see if I can figure out how to re-enable the mouse pointer when chrome is running (full-screen above the frontend), as our keyboard has a mouse pointer built in.


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