Many minor issues

[rebelkiller]

Hello!

I'm operating a LMCE-Core and two diskless in MD in my house (10.04). It is in use since a few months. In this period of time I figured out some minor issues which are more or less annoying. But I didn't manage to fix them. I would like to discuss them and maybe get some hinds how to work around or fix.

To avoid misunderstandings: I like LinuxMCE und I want to use it. I am going to expand my home automation with even more z-wave devices. (ATM I only use a USB-Dongle and a wall plug with a lamp for testing reasons).


1. Tearing in VDR
In my living room there is a 50" Plasma TV. The MD is working with an NVIDIA 8400GS 256MB graphics card connected via HDMI. When watching TV (SD or HD does not matter) there are horizontal lines (tearing?). I have already read many of those related topics throughout the internet. The PowerMizer-Settings do always reset after restarting the MD. But the tearing is always there, even if I switched the PowerMizer-Settings to the right setting. Doing this tearing gets better, but does not disappear. I also tried other possible fixes (composite on/off and so on) but none of them are fixing this problem. On the other MD I do not have tearing with an intel inboard graphics.

2. UI2 very buggy/incomplete
I use the UI2 in my living room. I already tried several skins. But all of them are buggy. E.g. the description of the "Playlist" item is missing, the descriptions of the items under "Advanced" are confusing.

3. Handling of LMCE via Orbiters
I tried iphone4, iphone5, iphone5s, Android-Tablet and weborbiter to find out which is the best. I am disappointed. I didn't get them to work flawlessly. The least annoying one is the Dianemo App. But when you try to handle TV-watching with zapping, Volume up an down und scrolling through EPG it is very frustrating because of the slow response. It even gets stuck sometimes when you press a wrong button which is not functional. A lot of the nice features LinuxMCE has are not usable with my actual setup. To be honest: in 2014 I am not going to buy me an old school Symbian phone to control LMCE. My Nokia E51 does not work at all (wrong firmware/model), by the way. My first idea was to buy one or two android apps und stick them to the wall to have a nice control station but with no really working and nice looking apps I will wait for improved app or better/other solutions.

4. Remote controls
Formerly I used MediaPortal and then switched to LinuxMCE. In the old system I used X10 remote controls to control the clients. It worked fine! But under LMCE I did not get them to work. It cost me a couple of hours with no success. The only thing that worked reliably is a Microsoft wireless keyboard. But that is not what i want. Here in Germany the USB-UIRT is hard to get so that I never tried IR-remotes.

5. Music/Video database view / LMCE as music solution
I have an MP3-Database with about 16000 Songs. Flipping through the database on the UI2 is very annoying because it is very slow and not free of bugs. The way for me to work around is to work with playlists. So for music reasons I won't use LMCE. I bought an Airport Express an attached it to the amp. Works flawlessly, but is no LMCE-solution. Squeezeboxes are mentioned in the wiki. Logitech does not offer them anymore. I could buy Sonos-Products, but is no LinuxMCE-solution,too. What is the alternative for that, when I do not want an additional amp with all those cables around?


I really like LMCE, but in conclusion I must say: LMCE has a large potential, but atm it is not "nice" with too many little quirks und problems.

Comments please! 


Greets!


Bernd

[sambuca]

Hello and welcome 

I have a few comments:
1. Do you by any chance have 50Hz TV transmissions? I suspect that the default setup of LMCE is to have 60Hz framerate, and I in some cases had to manually correct this to match it to the TV transmissions. (even after selecting 50Hz in the AV wizard - at least you should verify the framerate- I think it should be written in the xorg.log) Not sure if that still applies in 1004...

2. The titanium skins are the best afaik, and use V2 Normal Horizontal as UI.

3,4,5: I would use the new qOrbiter for android (phone or tablet). It is not complete, but I find the qOrbiter phone skin to work very well for a day to day remote, including media browsing. You might have a different usage pattern, but give it a try and report back what is missing for your use.
Also, I would use qOrbiter instead of remote controls, but that is my preference.
Logitech still sells a modified/rebranded Squeezebox Radio afaik, and this works well with LMCE (I have two).

br,
sambuca

[rebelkiller]

Thanks for your reply.

1. Tearing
I'll give it a try when I'm at home this evening (60 Hz -> 50 Hz).

2. UI2
I too use the Titanium Skin (silver) with normal horizontal (16:9), but with a German language setting. Maybe there is a problem with the translation.
 
3. / 4.
What about the lags? Do you have remarkable lags when using qOrbiter? Maybe my Galaxy Tab is too slow/old (I think it's the very first one from Samsung)

5. Music solution
At least here in Germany Logitech does not offer any Squeezebox products anymore. So Sonos or Airport express setups are the only way, when you do not want to buy used stuff.


best regards!

[sambuca]

2. It might well be missing translations.. I never seen any problems using english.

3. It is a bit slow to start up,  but I can't say I've seen delays. I'm using it primarily on an old HTC Desire HD. It could be bad network reception as well.. Although, sometimes it seems to not register screen touches, but I'm not sure whether it's my fingers or something with qOrbiter.

5. I don't think the "new" squeezebox radio is branded as such, but it looks almost the same.

And, by the way, I use 1204, I don't know if there are any changes from 1004 to 1204 affecting your problems, but newer drivers etc. might help playback issues.

br,
sambuca

[mkbrown69]

5. I don't think the "new" squeezebox radio is branded as such, but it looks almost the same.

It's called the Smart Radio UE, and runs a different firmware for their streaming services.  A "downgrade-able" firmware is available to restore compatibility with the Logitech Media Server (aka Squeezebox Server).  More info can be found in the Squeezebox Radio forum http://forums.slimdevices.com/forumdisplay.php?32-Squeezebox-Radio

I thought about getting one, but decided to just go with Raspberry Pi's. That way, I can use them for Airplay and as Squeezeslaves, and add home automation to the mix using AgoControl (as sensor platforms as well as maybe running LED lights via OpenDMX).  Still playing with it at this stage.

You might want to look into SqueezePlug, a ready to roll distro for the RaspberryPi.  http://www.squeezeplug.eu

Hope that helps!

/Mike

[tschak909]

What would it take for us to add direct support for the Logitech UE? I do think that maybe a seperate device template would be in order, at least...but can newer versions of LMS handle both UE and Squeeze clients?

-Thom

[mkbrown69]

Hi Thom!

From what I had found, the UE was meant to only use cloud music services, not local ones.  LMS wouldn't be able to support the UE radios. 

Squeezebox fans were less than enthused that the UE radio had less features than the Squeezeboxes they were used to, so Logitech added an advanced option to switch to the Squeezebox firmware.

http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?99027-Smart-Radio-and-Squeezebox-software-upgradability&p=750674&viewfull=1#post750674

I don't have one, so I can't speak to how easy it is, but it just seems like something that a wiki entry could cover.

Hope that helps!

/Mike

[Marie.O]

The lags in weborbiter, android touchoribter and iOS based orbiters all have the same reason: It takes ages to go through the proxy orbiter.

Lag is virtually non existant in all orbiters that work without the proxy orbiter, i.e. the real Orbiter and qOrbiter.

[rebelkiller]

@posde: thanks for the hint. I will take a closer look at the qorbiter for my android tablet.

1. Tearing:
VDR is now operating in 50Hz mode. But tearing is still there.

[golgoj4]

Hello!

I'm operating a LMCE-Core and two diskless in MD in my house (10.04). It is in use since a few months. In this period of time I figured out some minor issues which are more or less annoying. But I didn't manage to fix them. I would like to discuss them and maybe get some hinds how to work around or fix.

To avoid misunderstandings: I like LinuxMCE und I want to use it. I am going to expand my home automation with even more z-wave devices. (ATM I only use a USB-Dongle and a wall plug with a lamp for testing reasons).


1. Tearing in VDR
In my living room there is a 50" Plasma TV. The MD is working with an NVIDIA 8400GS 256MB graphics card connected via HDMI. When watching TV (SD or HD does not matter) there are horizontal lines (tearing?). I have already read many of those related topics throughout the internet. The PowerMizer-Settings do always reset after restarting the MD. But the tearing is always there, even if I switched the PowerMizer-Settings to the right setting. Doing this tearing gets better, but does not disappear. I also tried other possible fixes (composite on/off and so on) but none of them are fixing this problem. On the other MD I do not have tearing with an intel inboard graphics.

2. UI2 very buggy/incomplete
I use the UI2 in my living room. I already tried several skins. But all of them are buggy. E.g. the description of the "Playlist" item is missing, the descriptions of the items under "Advanced" are confusing.

3. Handling of LMCE via Orbiters
I tried iphone4, iphone5, iphone5s, Android-Tablet and weborbiter to find out which is the best. I am disappointed. I didn't get them to work flawlessly. The least annoying one is the Dianemo App. But when you try to handle TV-watching with zapping, Volume up an down und scrolling through EPG it is very frustrating because of the slow response. It even gets stuck sometimes when you press a wrong button which is not functional. A lot of the nice features LinuxMCE has are not usable with my actual setup. To be honest: in 2014 I am not going to buy me an old school Symbian phone to control LMCE. My Nokia E51 does not work at all (wrong firmware/model), by the way. My first idea was to buy one or two android apps und stick them to the wall to have a nice control station but with no really working and nice looking apps I will wait for improved app or better/other solutions.

4. Remote controls
Formerly I used MediaPortal and then switched to LinuxMCE. In the old system I used X10 remote controls to control the clients. It worked fine! But under LMCE I did not get them to work. It cost me a couple of hours with no success. The only thing that worked reliably is a Microsoft wireless keyboard. But that is not what i want. Here in Germany the USB-UIRT is hard to get so that I never tried IR-remotes.

5. Music/Video database view / LMCE as music solution
I have an MP3-Database with about 16000 Songs. Flipping through the database on the UI2 is very annoying because it is very slow and not free of bugs. The way for me to work around is to work with playlists. So for music reasons I won't use LMCE. I bought an Airport Express an attached it to the amp. Works flawlessly, but is no LMCE-solution. Squeezeboxes are mentioned in the wiki. Logitech does not offer them anymore. I could buy Sonos-Products, but is no LinuxMCE-solution,too. What is the alternative for that, when I do not want an additional amp with all those cables around?


I really like LMCE, but in conclusion I must say: LMCE has a large potential, but atm it is not "nice" with too many little quirks und problems.

Comments please! 


Greets!


Bernd

I just wanted to even though you had a negative experience with your initial install, thanks for being clear in your problems and criticisms. As a developer, it does hurt to read these things, but at the same time honest feed back is the best kind. Lastly, know that we are working furiously to bring OS X / iOS into our orbit (keeping with the pluto theme...bad joke) so you have more options for controls.

Thanks again
golgoj4