I recently bought a couple of FireTV Sticks from Amazon (only ARM/Android based player at the moment that has both an Amazon Prime player and supports Kodi side-loaded). I was disappointed to find that ProjectM is not in XBMC/Kodi for ARM. In fact, there are only two visualizers in 15.2 Isengard (waveform and opengl spectrum). I've had to resort to a photo screensaver plugin to make it even usable for my plasma based display (so as to not burn in and show something to look at while music plays).
What I found though is that there is an Android APK version on Google Play (other sites host the APK directly to install on other systems with a slightly crippled version). This will sideload onto FireTV just fine, although I don't think the preference pane works at all and the controls seem to be made for a touch-based product like a phone, but at least the default random display runs OK. If you start a FireTV official App music player (like Amazon's own player or Pandora), they play in the background and you can start ProjectM from either the System/Manage Applications Menu or something like a secondary startup menu like Firestarter (easily installed without rooting via adbFire). The visuals will start and the music will play just fine and evne the artist/song information will show over top of the visuals when the song changes. In short, this works well for the default FireTV apps and lets you use ProjectM with any given player as it seems to be designed for in its stand-alone version.
The problem is that I cannot get it to work with Kodi like that. If I set Kodi to launch ProjectM from the favorites menu, ProjectM will indeed start, but Kodi appers to quit when that happens as the music stops playing and all I get are the visuals. When I press the remote "return" button, ProjectM exits and Kodi automatically restarts. I've seen a YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbr9rt1f9RI) that shows Kodi launching ProjectM from the Aeon Nox skin attached to the menu on an Android setup (and at least one person in the replies claims he had it working on a FireTV the same way), but when I try it, the same thing happens as when I run it in the favorite menu in Confluence, namely Kodi quits and the music stops when ProjectM starts and then Kodi starts back up when I exit ProjectM.
I'm not sure why ProjectM was put in as the default visualizer in XBMC in the past, but was never ported to the ARM version of Kodi, but WAS ported seperately (I can only assume the developers doing those changes weren't interested in Kodi, but in making a stand-alone player) and I don't know if anyone has any interest in adjusting ProjectM to better fit FireTV (or even make such a version available on Amazon's own app store) or if anyone might have an idea why Kodi stops playing when it's started. It would be nice to have a solution for ProjectM visuals and Kodi on FireTV, either way (I don't know if it works with NVidia Shield and Kodi either as I don't have one, but thought about buying one over Black Friday's sale, but given I don't know what works and what doesn't compared to FireTV and I don't have any interest in gaming on it, I didn't buy it).
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Oddly, even though I tried a re-install before, this time something changed as ProjectM is now working fine in conjunction with Kodi 15.2 Isengard. I had tried out newer 16.3 and 16.4 betas and I had slowdown issues and other problems with them (e.g. DTS 6.1 was being detected as "stereo" and so Kodi would priortize Dolby Digital over DTS thinking 5.1 was preferable to stereo). To get Isengard running again, I had to uninstall Kodi (this time I checked to keep save files in place) and then re-install Isengard (with adbfire) and now all the sudden Kodi will keep playing music just fine while ProjectM runs. I did a cold install before and it didn't work so I don't know what changed, but at least it works now.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
I recently bought a couple of FireTV Sticks from Amazon (only ARM/Android based player at the moment that has both an Amazon Prime player and supports Kodi side-loaded). I was disappointed to find that ProjectM is not in XBMC/Kodi for ARM. In fact, there are only two visualizers in 15.2 Isengard (waveform and opengl spectrum). I've had to resort to a photo screensaver plugin to make it even usable for my plasma based display (so as to not burn in and show something to look at while music plays).
What I found though is that there is an Android APK version on Google Play (other sites host the APK directly to install on other systems with a slightly crippled version). This will sideload onto FireTV just fine, although I don't think the preference pane works at all and the controls seem to be made for a touch-based product like a phone, but at least the default random display runs OK. If you start a FireTV official App music player (like Amazon's own player or Pandora), they play in the background and you can start ProjectM from either the System/Manage Applications Menu or something like a secondary startup menu like Firestarter (easily installed without rooting via adbFire). The visuals will start and the music will play just fine and evne the artist/song information will show over top of the visuals when the song changes. In short, this works well for the default FireTV apps and lets you use ProjectM with any given player as it seems to be designed for in its stand-alone version.
The problem is that I cannot get it to work with Kodi like that. If I set Kodi to launch ProjectM from the favorites menu, ProjectM will indeed start, but Kodi appers to quit when that happens as the music stops playing and all I get are the visuals. When I press the remote "return" button, ProjectM exits and Kodi automatically restarts. I've seen a YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbr9rt1f9RI) that shows Kodi launching ProjectM from the Aeon Nox skin attached to the menu on an Android setup (and at least one person in the replies claims he had it working on a FireTV the same way), but when I try it, the same thing happens as when I run it in the favorite menu in Confluence, namely Kodi quits and the music stops when ProjectM starts and then Kodi starts back up when I exit ProjectM.
I'm not sure why ProjectM was put in as the default visualizer in XBMC in the past, but was never ported to the ARM version of Kodi, but WAS ported seperately (I can only assume the developers doing those changes weren't interested in Kodi, but in making a stand-alone player) and I don't know if anyone has any interest in adjusting ProjectM to better fit FireTV (or even make such a version available on Amazon's own app store) or if anyone might have an idea why Kodi stops playing when it's started. It would be nice to have a solution for ProjectM visuals and Kodi on FireTV, either way (I don't know if it works with NVidia Shield and Kodi either as I don't have one, but thought about buying one over Black Friday's sale, but given I don't know what works and what doesn't compared to FireTV and I don't have any interest in gaming on it, I didn't buy it).
Oddly, even though I tried a re-install before, this time something changed as ProjectM is now working fine in conjunction with Kodi 15.2 Isengard. I had tried out newer 16.3 and 16.4 betas and I had slowdown issues and other problems with them (e.g. DTS 6.1 was being detected as "stereo" and so Kodi would priortize Dolby Digital over DTS thinking 5.1 was preferable to stereo). To get Isengard running again, I had to uninstall Kodi (this time I checked to keep save files in place) and then re-install Isengard (with adbfire) and now all the sudden Kodi will keep playing music just fine while ProjectM runs. I did a cold install before and it didn't work so I don't know what changed, but at least it works now.