Well yes, as you are already fully aware . The recommendation is a general, and fairly safe recommend to easily get most people to a happy place. As you know, to get a whitelist that works well it takes understanding, experimenting, and possibly tweaking on your TV settings. It is really more of a option that allows for people who want to go through the extra effort, and deal with the UI repercussions, to squeeze the last bit out of their system. Furthermore that option is new, has already been changed once, and is likely to change at least once more (from Kodi, not us).
I have not familiarized myself with that option yet. If you wouldn’t mind sending me a pm with links for further reading and maybe let me know what exactly what it does and potential negatives, I would be happy to push for updating our recommend if it makes sense for the general public.
That text blob, which i’m sure you have seen us post quite a few times, is only posted when we see someones is using a setting(s) that negatively impact their experience. We are not trying to maximize everyone’s experience with that statement as that would require a voluminous amount of text, plenty of qualifiers, and is probably something that an “average user” is not going to want to absorb.
My preference is Arch, which is not the default and will have to be added. It has a library update button in the top right corner. A library update should happen fairly quick if everything is working correctly. Kodi checks the dates and should skip scanning folders that have not changed. A trick I use is to split sources between old stuff (like series that have been canceled) and new and the set content properties for the “old” source I have the exclude from library scran box checked. When I add new content to the “old” source i just go to the videos section and context menu the source and select “scan for new content”.
When you start playing a file Kodi opens it and scans the properties of the source, it then (if adjust refresh is enabled) tries to match an optimal allowed refresh and frame rate to the source it sees. If your using a whitelist you are dictating the allowed values, otherwise these are pulled from your TV’s reported settings and constrained to UI resolution and above. I believe (and I could be wrong here so don’t quote me) that without the whitelist 25 and 30fps content is normally frame doubled but 23.976 is output as is (assuming the TV supports this). This can be one of those tricky things with a whitelist. Your TV might not support 720p at anything other than 60hz, but can do 1080p in all the normal refresh rates. So the question becomes is it better to have your TV do all the scaling and force Kodi to adjust the frame rate to a highly undesirable IMO conversion, or let Kodi do a bit of upscaling to allow no frame rate conversion.
I would think any European TV would support 720p/50. As discussed at exhausting length in my previous post, 720p/24 isn’t an option, though, so then you have to choose between 720p/60, 1080p/24 and 2160p/24.
I’m not European, and I responded before getting to that post you went into more detail. But you and I were just trying to make the same point essentially that what you have going in doesn’t alway match what you can go out and a decision has to be made on how to resolve the conflict.
Regarding my opinion on the whitelist, I was the one who brought it up as an option . I actually like that the option is there. I do view it much the way I view color options on a TV, which is to say that most people are better suited to using the default settings if their not up for a learning curve and some tweaking.
While it is often recommended that one should let the tv do the upscaling for better quality, I have tried to compare Kodi’s upscaling (i.e. whitelisting or not) with my tv’s and HDfury Diva’s upscaling and can’t honestly say I can tell the difference. If there is a difference it is certainly very subtle …
After some testing and using settings of you guys, I cleared out the whitelist. I had sometimes judders and always manually setting the output was annoying. I don’t see a big difference now and don’t have any studders. So I’m very happy with it
I have 2 Problems, you maybe can help me with. I tried with thetvdb and it doesn’t work. There is no connection to the servers. I googled and saw that they had problems in november last year, but it should be fixed by now. Does it need a special port or something? It trys to get the infos and after a while it says there is no connection to the servers and if I want to stop scraping the info.
Second problem
I did bookmark the chorus2 link, so I can access kodi via web interface. But How do I refresh from there? Evereything looks different and I cant find a way to refresh a library.
The issues from last year should not be present on a new install unless you have saved NFO files in your sources. I’m not familiar with a “no connection to the servers” message. You might hit up the scraping section on Kodi’s Forum if your not using NFO files. If you want me to look at this I would need you to turn on debug logging, reboot twice, run a scan so you get that error message, then upload full logs and post that url given in a new thread as it is quite off topic to this one.
In chorus there is a menu bar at the bottom right corner of the web page. On the far right is a vertical stack of three dots that when clicked gives options for scanning the audio and video libraries. If that is missing you might check to see if you have any kind of ad blocker or similar running in your web browser that may be manipulating the page.
I only have nfo files in a handfull folders, where the scraper could not find the movies. Well, I was able to scan it today as you told me, but even though I chose thetvdb, set the language to de (german), the episode names were still in english. For example. The Legend of korra. It changes the name to the german version (Die Legende von Korra) and the seasons (book 1, book 2…) to the german version (Buch 1:xxx, Buch 2:xxx…) but then the episodes are written in english Its no big deal, just I’m so used to the german titles. I can totally live with that.
Damn I feel stupid. I thought this was all for the player It works like charm! Thank you very much!
Had you already scraped in the show before you changed those settings? If so you need to go to it in the 'TV Shows" section, context menu, information, refresh, all episodes, ignoral local and refresh from the internet.
I just used some dummy files to scan the first five episodes of that show in and everything was in Deutsch.
. The recommendation is a general, and fairly safe recommend to easily get most people to a happy place. As you know, to get a whitelist that works well it takes understanding, experimenting, and possibly tweaking on your TV settings. It is really more of a option that allows for people who want to go through the extra effort, and deal with the UI repercussions, to squeeze the last bit out of their system. Furthermore that option is new, has already been changed once, and is likely to change at least once more (from Kodi, not us).
in my previous post, 720p/24 isn’t an option, though, so then you have to choose between 720p/60, 1080p/24 and 2160p/24.
. I actually like that the option is there. I do view it much the way I view color options on a TV, which is to say that most people are better suited to using the default settings if their not up for a learning curve and some tweaking.
Its no big deal, just I’m so used to the german titles. I can totally live with that.
It works like charm! Thank you very much!