TVHeadend and Android TV

by Xoppa

What's currently the best option to use TVHeadend with Android TV?

My experience so far (Mi Box and Shield TV):

Kodi on Android TV seems to work most reliable. including EPG, logo's, PVR and timeshifting. Unfortunately there's an issue which makes it cumbersome to browse channels (which is supposed to be fixed in Kodi 18). And most importantly, it doesn't integrate with the Android TV "experience", e.g. Live Channels. Switching between Kodi and Android TV just takes ages.

The TVHeadend Android TV App integrates with Live Channels just fine. EPG takes some time to update after starting, but seems to work okay after that. Unfortunately there's no (functional) PVR and timeshifting support. More over it is unusable because the actual streaming only works sporadically . This seems to be worse since the Oreo update. Disabling EPG-sync seems to solve it, but that's not really an option for every day usage of course. Based on the github activity there's currently no indication that this will be solved in the very near future.

haxxa

I currently use the TVHeadEnd App with the Shield running Oreo and it works fine on my end. I haven't experienced the issue described on Github. Currently that is the only optimal solution, if you need EPG and Timeshift support you have to use Kodi and wait for a fix. Outside of these two options that's it unfortunately.

BiggussDikkuss

ALL Android Kodi Krypton versions have unreliable and broken TV deinterlacing when used with the TvHeadend PVR Addons. See the Kodi forums for details.

You have to use Alpha versions of Kodi Leia on the Shield and that is early unstable software vs Krypton.

The Mi Box is complete rubbish for TV deinterlacing no matter what version of Kodi you use and even with TvHeadend and Live Channels.

It's deinterlacing picture quality is dull - half motion - and mpeg2 deinterlacing picture quality is blocky too when you view News texts as an example.

Exact same picture deinterlacing problems with any version of Android Kodi used on the Mi Box too.

Give up on using the Mi Box for any sort of reliable TvHeadend viewing. It's completely useless.

Most people are completely unaware how bad TvH is on the Mi Box unless they have another Kodi box to compare high quality full motion deinterlaced picture quality to. Like Kodi Intel Hardware or AMLogic hardware running LibreELEC Kodi Krypton.

geek-in-a-bottle

I use TvH with LiveTV. It's running ok.

However, i need to transcode the stream to get its bandwidth down to usable levels.

And my old box is barely able to transcode FHD fast enough.

Satellite FHD stream is about ~25-35Mbits, which is to much; either for the Mi Box to handle that much, or Wifi is a bottleneck.