Global IP TV Panel fixed

The Multimedia menu has an entry "TV Panel", which plays live streaming videos off the Internet. In Easy 6.0 and 6.0.2, the videos pause momentarily every few seconds, which makes them virtually unwatchable.

TV Panel uses the 'mpv' utility to perform the download, and mpv uses 'youtube-dl' as the download backend to get them from YouTube. Live streaming videos from YouTube are downloaded in segments. mpv downloads a segment, but doesn't read ahead, so the next segment isn't immediately ready, hence the pause. That's my understanding anyway.

I did a lot of online searching. At one stage suspected ffmpeg. I made one discovery early-on; VAAPI is broken. The 'intel-vaapi-driver' package is required; it was missing. Fixed that and continued the saga.

It took a couple of days, but eventually found that the version of mpv in EasyOS, 0.35.1, is the culprit. I have compiled 0.60.0 and TV Panel now plays videos smoothly. The caching shows that it reads ahead and smoothly transitions from one segment to the next.

Global TV Panel is created by forum member ETP. He reported the problem to me a few days ago. His forum thread:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=689   

Tags: easy