The guys behind MrMC, the media player app from the developers who originally brought Kodi to Android devices, have been quite busy since the last time I wrote about the app. They have released 4 recent updates to MrMC and are now at version 3.0.4 of the app. Those updates have brought support for the Emby media server, improved playback, new setting options, numerous bug fixes, and more.
The most notable new feature to MrMC is the addition of a native Emby client. Emby is a free media server, similar to Plex (which MrMC also natively supports), which allows you to store meta data and media artwork on a PC and have MrMC retrieve these things remotely. This keeps all that data off of your Fire TV, which frees up valuable internal storage space. This also allows multiple Fire TV devices to stay in sync with media information, so you don’t have to constantly update your MrMC library on each device separately.
If Emby doesn’t interest you and you use Plex for your media server needs, you’ll be happy to know these MrMC updates have fixed a few issues in that regard as well. MrMC now correctly displays partially watched episode from Plex when the “unwatched” filter is applied. For those of you with 3D content, there is now better SBS detection for the native Plex client in MrMC.
Another new feature of MrMC is a new option to manually select how long before the on screen display (OSD) automatically hides itself. If the screen controls seem to take an eternity to disappear after pressing play, you can now speed that up. You can also set the timeout to zero to disable auto-hiding, so you fully control when to hide the OSD by pressing the back button on the remote. I can’t begin to count how many times I’ve pressed the back button to hide the OSD just a few milliseconds after it auto-hides itself, which sends me back to the content list, so I’ll definitely be taking advantage of this new feature.
MrMC’s developers have has also made other minor improvements, like improving Blu-ray playback by enabling caching for m2ts files. They also fixed an interlacing issue with mpeg2/h264 playback and improved buffer handling by increasing the transfer buffer size.
As a reminder, MrMC is a forked version of Kodi that is developed by the two members of the Kodi team that originally ported Kodi to Android. The app does not support any add-ons at all, which is the only way it was able to be approved by Amazon into the official Fire TV appstore. Whether you think MrMC is worth buying or not, everyone who is a fan of Kodi should support the efforts of MrMC’s developers. By making MrMC open source from the start, its advancements eventually make their way into Kodi, which is doing more to improve Kodi on the Fire TV than anything else.
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It still has a bug displaying 3D MKV files as 2D Monoscopic. I reported this on their forum months ago.
Humm, thought it was reported as fixed by someone. Will check again.
Thanks! I have 1920x1080p SBS videos. The resulting image is 2D but squished horizontally. I assume it’s resizing the horizontal as well as the vertical when it should only be resizing the vertical. Kodi doesn’t have this issue.
which kodi and platform ?
never mind :) found issue and really fixed it this time.
I’ll be on the lookout for 3.0.5 :)
I’ve been using XBMC/Kodi since hacking my original XBox, but bought MrMC about a year ago after seeing Elias’s first review and comments on helping the developers. I could never get it to work correctly back then (couldn’t get audio pass-through working for one thing) so I just went back to Kodi and SPMC. Every time there’s a post about an update, I fire MrMC back up, and try again, but it seems like my AFTV just doesn’t like it. Now I can’t even get it to connect to my files on my NAS.
After this latest article, I completed uninstalled and reinstalled MrMC and SPMC. Again, with MrMC I couldn’t even connect to my NAS, with SPMC it connected just fine (both via SMB). I’m running a FTV 1, currently on RBox’s latest 5.2.4.1. Given the closed ecosystem of the FTV, I just don’t understand why I can’t get mine to work when it’s obviously a great app. Any thoughts?
start a post in the mrmc forums. that’s where tech support happens.
Which NAS do you have? I had issues with my Synology Diskstation using SMB shares with MrMC. I added NFS sharing to my video, pictures, and music folders.
For the NFS Permissions tab on the Diskstation, check Allow connections from non-privileged ports. Set Squash to “Map all user to admin” if you can’t access your files. You can set it to Read Only.
I’m using a Seagate Share as my NAS. I also have a networked backup via a USB port on my Asus TM-AC1900 router. I don’t have the degree of flexibility/control you do with the Synology–they’re just visible on the network, enter username and password and violá, I’m watching my movies.
Again, not dissing on the app or the developers, after the initial install and an hour or two trying to get it to work on my own I just let it go except for when new updates are announced. I should probably follow MrMC’s advice and start a post in the forums, but as long as I’ve got some working alternatives…
My version says 3.02. Doesn’t show an update is available. Any suggestions how I can update? Other apps show updates such as Netflix.