Audio drop outs - Shield DVR

Beta Community DVR Beta
#1

I am on the Beta DVR, latest version on the Shield TV.

Today I noticed on two recordings that I am getting audio drop outs every now and then. I noticed first earlier today while watching a recording of The Flash from Tuesday night.

Right now we are watching a recording of Supernatural and I am hearing occasional audio drop outs again. Seems to happen every 10 minutes or so. On tonight's recording it seems less dramatic than it did on the recording of The Flash.

I am playing the recording of Supernatural on my Pro Shield in the Living room. I watched The Flash on my 2015 Shield (16GB version) and it was doing it there too, so am suspecting maybe it's a DVR issue rather than an App issue.

#2

I am still seeing this issue. It seems to only be occurring on recordings from the CW network.

I am currently watching a recording from last night of Supernatural.

Recordings from the other networks don't seem to be doing this.

#3

Does changing the Surround Sound option make any difference?

#4

No.

#5

I have been doing some testing tonight with the HDHomerun DVR by recording some stuff on the CW and I getting the same audio drop out with their DVR so it has to be something with that one channel, the hardware or my network I guess.

I am going to take this issue over to their forum to see if we can narrow down what it may be.

#6

I often have audio issues with CW. (Their secondary audio often caused errors with remote streaming.) It's a problem with their broadcast, not with Channels.

#7

Well, while I am glad I am not the only one, what you're saying makes sense and I had a similar thought that maybe it has something to do with them.

On some recordings it's not as bad as on others, but annoying all the same.

#8

When viewing live TV or recording, both SD's HDHomeRun and Channels just spit out what comes down the line, including any errors in the stream.

If you use Channels DVR (and tuner sharing), and change the bitrate of your stream (ie 1080p 6MB, or anything else), it runs the stream through a transcoder which will correct some of the issues (such as the bad SAP on CW) using its own version of ffmpeg. Sometimes adjusting the playback bitrate (even while on your home LAN) can resolve some issues.

#9

I was just doing some more testing for the past 45 minutes and watching the CW live rather than watching a recording. I did not get the audio drop out one time. Playback was fine the whole time. So, it seems to only occur when I DVR it.

We never watch Live TV so I hadn't had any chance to notice this before.

#10

It might be related to also missing audio packets in the stream and timestamp data. MPEG2 is quite resilient for live streaming, but playback of recorded live MPEG2 streams can sometimes introduce corruption and problems.

Since it's playback related to DVR files, I recommend using transcoding (changing the format from "Original" to something else), which may help your situation.