Feature Request: TV Guide, stream performance

[mickeyjee]

I'm testing multiple tvOS IPTV apps and this app is the only app with the most frequent updates. I still encounter some issues. I will post my bugs/feature request below.

Used devices:

• AppleTV 4 (ver. 11.2.5)
• Apple TV 4K (ver. 11.2.5)

TV Guide;

• Scrolling through the TV Guide is slow with lag on both devices. I don't know if the EPG is cached or live from tvheadend. Maybe caching would increase performance?

Feature request:

• When opening the TV Guide, please add vertical browsing through the channnels. You can only browse vertically through the EPG timeline which causes the EPG to shift a lot. If you want to take a quick look what's on it would be better to browse vertically through the channel logo's on the left so the EPG won't shift to the right and left.
• Please add a dark colored TV Guide. When you got some white logo's in the channels menu, they are not visible on the Guide.

Opening streams;

• Opening streams buffers a lot. Not only with starting but also when a stream has started it stops sometimes and goes into buffering. I tried multiple options (hardware enabled/disabled, deinterlace off/blend/linear, deblocking no/medium). The same streams (TS) works perfectly in iPlayTV for example.

[zipleen]

Hi,

I'll address the EPG issues later on, but for the moment can you show in a video what you mean by slow with lag? Also, how many EPG entries and channels do you have in tvheadend (you can see the entries on the bottom right corner in tvheadend's webpage)? If you have a lot of events with a lot of channels, the epg will be "slow" as the code can't handle a very large amount of these.

On the opening of streams, there's 2 distinct cases that you're mixing:

• when starting the stream: this one is normal, the buffer needs to fill up before starting and the default still takes roughly 1sec to 2sec to start. If you want to decrease this time you can edit the server settings, go to "VLC Network Caching Level" and change it to 333 or less.
• in the middle of streaming: if you have a stable network connection this should not be an issue. streaming over the internet is not stable at all, so if you decrease the cache level specified above you'll probably run into more issues. In order to attempt to fix this, you could increase the cache level (which will make starting the channel even slower).

Regardless of what you decide to use in the cache level, the best thing you can do to debug this issues is to playback the channel using VLC for tvOS. If VLC does work and tvhclient keeps buffering, then please let me know. (I have no idea what iPlayTV is or what it uses, so it can't be a measure of comparison)