Cord-Cutting, Or How to Stream your Way to Success

I got the cat6 strung today and tried to test it with the little amlogic machine. It was glitching out and I suspect overheating bigtime. I wonder if the 104F temps I was seeing before were actually 104c

It was / is hot as hell in that room. I used a leftover heatsink from a pi for the cpu/gpu (I think it is one chip) but there are none on the ram chips. The fan was supposed to exhaust but it is sucking. Switching the pins just makes it not turn on so I guess I need to flip it physically.

Well I'm screwed. The discovery+ addon is python2. I either need to update / fix it somehow or find another image with discovery+ support.

I found a newer discovery plus addon. Tried it out with a raspbian image. It was missing one dependency but unlike libreelec with raspbian you can just apt install anything missing.

That fired it up, I signed up on the discovery site and I could browse around and see all the seasons of shows they had. It is alot. No live tv but I think maybe that works through some other plugins.

When I actually picked a show to watch dude fieros flavor town or something, it errored out saying x thing was needed at version 21. So I grabbed that addon and rebuilt it, but it has to be matched with the build name from kodi (I was on Matrix). So the version would only go to 19.

So I'm building Kodi. It is very large. Many many many dependencies. I think I started 4 or 5 hours ago. I'm building x11 and just hoping it has some form of video acceleration but I have doubts.

It went ok though I think it took like 12 hours

When I got it running I installed plex to try it out. With GL it was choppy, so I rebuilt with gles. That made it buttery smooth, though there was some tearing. Many hours of assgoblinry later I had the discovery addon working too, and it was VERY choppy. Obviously no hardware acceleration at all.

Googling around it looks like GDM is better than X11 and more "gpuish". I'm hoping it will at least properly do vsync. I'm compiling it now with GL and if that doesn't work I'll try GLES.

GDM required a whole new round of dependency pain. Libdisplay-info had to be manually pulled from git and I had to hand install it. Like copy the .a into /usr/local/lib and same with the includes then try to figure out where to tack on addition lib etc. Pain in the ass. Ninja / Meson crap.

I don't really even know how hardware accelerated video works these days. In ye olden tymes there was hardware motion comp / inverse discreet cosine transform stuff. Motion comp was so common I never had to mess with it but I did have to write the IDCT in assembly a few times (mmx etc).

Well the GDM and Wayland modes were a no go. I am thinking that stuff needs to be built into the kernel and that's a path I didn't want to go down today.

I had one other thing to try. There's a CoreElec that was mentioned near LibreElec, and I had always assumed that it was the original, and LibreElec was a fork of it or something, with the core meaning it was for x86 or more ordinary machines. This was backwards. Core is a fork of Libre, and is much more up to date.

Core has a build of Nexus which is only one revision back (latest unstable kodi is Omega, which is the one I was building myself). Nexus is good enough to run the discovery plus addon and the very demanding version specific dependencies like the one for variable bitrate video stuff.

That whole chain of stuff installed without much rancor, and played full blast. I set up the remote fairly quickly as I'd done it before, this time with no button doubling, and took it into the hot room to test it. The UI was up about 10 seconds then the screen went black. I had seen this before, the first day I got the tater it would overheat as I hadn't put any heatsinks on it or put it in a case or anything so I assumed it was cooking in the hot room.

I cranked the AC and aimed a fan right at it and after 15 minutes or so got it to play stably. The screen not blacking out also let me play a video and check the temps. Under load the highest I saw was 46c. This was rather puzzling as even with the AC on it wasn't THAT much cooler in there.

Turning the AC off, it ran for about 5 minutes and then started blacking out again. I opened up the case and physically put my fingers on the chips and they were slightly warm. Then I felt of the tv and it was volcanic. So yea, overheating TV, probably caused by the higher refresh rate of the taterbox. Ordinary antenna tv or directtv is probably 24 or 30 hz.

I brought in a monitor and let it run for 30 minutes in the hot room to test and it never had a problem, so definitely the tv. Maybe tomorrow I'll open it up and blow the dust out and try to figure out some kind of cooling solution.

Well aside from the overheating TV, it all works! I've got the live TV working through tvheadend, and the guide for that is really nice. Discovery+ basically has everything my mom ever watches outside of standard abc/cbs garbage.

I've got her running off one of my monitors right now with a soundbar. I don't know what I'm going to do about the TV. Maybe try to find some heatsinks that work and rig up a chassis fan or something I dunno.

The remote isn't perfect. The channel and volume buttons double as up/down/left/right and there's no "mode" switch, so I had to just leave them on directional. Will have to use the other remote for volume.

I will try that tomorrow. Haul it outside, take it apart and blast it all clean with compressed air.

Compressed air blast + case off + fan on it is working. Unfortunately tvheadend went all german and flipped out and now I can't get it to find channels. I guess it is possible the usb tuner is overheating.

It isn't a very hot day here, only 85 in there. We'll see if it works on a 110+ day (though those days mum turns on the AC). It really wasn't all that dusty inside, and it has some fairly good sized heatsinks on the chips.

I just use built in fire TVs and ThunderTV IPTV can’t really complain for $12.

Well it is 110 and the TV survived the day. One source of channels was off most of yesterday and this morning though. It is 15 miles away and it seems like when it is hot and clear we just won't be able to get those channels. They returned when the sky became a bit overcast.

I don't know if a higher elevation for the antenna would help, or if I should even bother. I think I will wait and see. Maybe this is only a middle-of-July problem.