Apple TV "crashing out" of recordings

Channels DVR Server
#1

For the past month or so my Apple TV will kick me out of the recording I'm watching randomly back to the recordings screen where I started to watch it. Sometimes resuming the recording just causes it to immediately crash back out again. If I force quit the app and resume the recording it will occasionally work for a few more minutes.

  • I've noticed this happens more often than not near commercial skips
  • I don't see any obvious error messages in the logs
  • A similar behavior happens on my iPhone occasionally
  • Every so often I will have a freeze frame of the recording I was watching overlaid with the Channels logo and a message that says "Recording Not Found (-17)".
  • Live TV works fine

Everything has worked fine for about a year and a half and just started to become more noticeable lately.

Channels is running on a dual core i7 MBP from 2010 with an external USB SSD hard drive. It's been able to handle the recording / commercial detection / serving up recordings no problem for the past year, and the system itself is old enough where I can't update the OS anymore even if I wanted to (so I don't think the underlaying OS is an issue / has changed).

Here is the output from HTTP logging the issue when it happens on my iPhone. (looks like it starts the stream, and a new chunk of the stream is delivered every few ms, but then the phone will crash out with no obvious server log)

2022/03/22 22:01:39.029788 [HTTP] | 200 | 2.49712ms | 192.168.7.213 | GET "/dvr/files/617"
2022/03/22 22:01:39.361016 [HTTP] | 206 | 300.593309ms | 192.168.7.213 | GET "/dvr/files/617/stream.mpg"
2022/03/22 22:01:39.396030 [HTTP] | 206 | 43.743569ms | 192.168.7.213 | GET "/dvr/files/617/stream.mpg"
2022/03/22 22:01:39.599109 [HTTP] | 206 | 2.847515ms | 192.168.7.213 | GET "/dvr/files/617/stream.mpg"
2022/03/22 22:01:39.612470 [HTTP] | 206 | 186.523375ms | 192.168.7.213 | GET "/dvr/files/617/stream.mpg"
2022/03/22 22:01:39.624922 [HTTP] | 206 | 3.429276ms | 192.168.7.213 | GET "/dvr/files/617/stream.mpg"
2022/03/22 22:01:39.645449 [HTTP] | 206 | 2.611247ms | 192.168.7.213 | GET "/dvr/files/617/stream.mpg"
2022/03/22 22:01:39.664733 [HTTP] | 206 | 2.76032ms | 192.168.7.213 | GET "/dvr/files/617/stream.mpg"
2022/03/22 22:01:39.685880 [HTTP] | 206 | 2.819352ms | 192.168.7.213 | GET "/dvr/files/617/stream.mpg"
2022/03/22 22:01:39.713556 [HTTP] | 206 | 2.712181ms | 192.168.7.213 | GET "/dvr/files/617/stream.mpg"
2022/03/22 22:01:39.756133 [HTTP] | 206 | 3.602754ms | 192.168.7.213 | GET "/dvr/files/617/stream.mpg"
2022/03/22 22:01:40.036539 [HTTP] | 206 | 77.121249ms | 192.168.7.213 | GET "/dvr/files/617/stream.mpg"
2022/03/22 22:01:40.130754 [HTTP] | 206 | 73.945071ms | 192.168.7.213 | GET "/dvr/files/617/stream.mpg"
2022/03/22 22:01:40.384807 [HTTP] | 206 | 233.1052ms | 192.168.7.213 | GET "/dvr/files/617/stream.mpg"
2022/03/22 22:01:40.486564 [HTTP] | 206 | 108.269746ms | 192.168.7.213 | GET "/dvr/files/617/stream.mpg"
2022/03/22 22:01:40.649654 [HTTP] | 206 | 113.638635ms | 192.168.7.213 | GET "/dvr/files/617/stream.mpg"
2022/03/22 22:01:40.756031 [HTTP] | 206 | 122.96665ms | 192.168.7.213 | GET "/dvr/files/617/stream.mpg"
2022/03/22 22:01:41.111098 [HTTP] | 206 | 375.63051ms | 192.168.7.213 | GET "/dvr/files/617/stream.mpg"
2022/03/22 22:01:41.281508 [HTTP] | 206 | 196.096296ms | 192.168.7.213 | GET "/dvr/files/617/stream.mpg"
2022/03/22 22:01:42.103683 [HTTP] | 200 | 339.371569ms | 192.168.7.213 | PUT "/dvr/files/617/playback_time/44"
2022/03/22 22:01:42.238921 [HTTP] | 200 | 474.613891ms | 192.168.7.213 | PUT "/dvr/files/617/playback_time/44"
2022/03/22 22:01:43.650738 [HTTP] | 200 | 89.377µs | 192.168.7.252 | GET "/dvr/files/617/stream.mpg"
2022/03/22 22:01:44.023214 [HTTP] | 206 | 2.772933572s | 192.168.7.213 | GET "/dvr/files/617/stream.mpg"

^^^ Then the iPhone playback crashes.

Any help on this would be great, thanks.

#2

What is 192.168.7.252?

#3

Appears to be the IP of my iPhone.

#4

Please go to Settings -> Support -> Submit Diagnostic Logs from your device and let us know when it's been submitted so we can have a better idea of what was going on.

#5

Done. Submitted it from both my Apple TV and my iPhone apps. haven't watched anything since last night, so the logs may not contain the data you are looking for if they are truncated to a certain time frame, but if it happens again it'll be the first thing I do.

#6

Hi folks,

Ive also had several crashes while playing recordings on apple TV this past week, and I’ve also just submitted diagnostics from the apple TV testflight app

Many thanks

#7

@BrianDoherty From the logs it’s looking like you’re experiencing local network issues. During playback the app stops being able to communicate with the DVR.

Can you check your network connections and ensure that everything is stable? Is your Apple TV plugged into ethernet?

#9

Thanks for the insight here. I played with a couple of network related things and what seemed to fix the issue was not using Ethernet on the MacBook channels DVR is running on. When I switched that to just wifi everything became much more stable. I must have a bad Ethernet cable, port, or switch somewhere in the mix. Again, thanks for taking a look, I would of had no idea otherwise :grinning:

1 Like
#10

@mnwxman132 It looks like you're running into a memory leak that we've recently fixed. Let us know if you're still having these issues.