Commercial skip takes longer than Commercial

Channels Apple TV Troubleshooting
#1

I've been a Channels DVR user with AppleTV for over a month now and it's performed very well. I love the feature the automatic commercial skip.

Suddenly, on a commercial break, the television went black and stayed black for a long time (estimate about 90 seconds). Then the commercial was over and channels started playing the content normally. This behavior continued for the next show we watched until I turned it off.

It also stuck when I tried the 30 second advance during a blackout. It stayed stuck if I closed the app and reopened it and selected watch. Also, I note that the "commercial skip" note in the upper right was not displaying and screen was indeed black as in no signal (although the Sony TV did not display a signal loss notice.)

I started a show again and when it stuck again on a comskip, I opened my iPad and tried it at the same time frame (love that sync feature) and it skipped the commercial fine on my iPad.

I closed the app and checked the dvr and everything appeared normal including all the logs I could find. I went looking in the forum and found this link:

So, I deleted the channels app on the appletv and downloaded again and it's back to normal. But for how long? Why? Anything else I can do to help diagnose a fix? It's annoying behavior from an otherwise well-conceived app.

#2

If this happens again, please go to Settings and then Submit Diagnostic Logs. This will give us information about what is going on behind the scenes.

#3

Thanks. Actually I did that the first night I experienced the problem. Should be about 7:30 EST 22 January. I can give you my WAN IP or some other identifying information if that would help but I'd prefer to do that through some secure communication method.

#4

I’ve noticed recently that my recordings take much longer to start. Not sure if this is related to what your experiencing.

I also noticed, I went from a small HP Micro PC that was running ChannelsDVR to an Alienware Alpha PC and it skips commercials instantly without any delay. The HP would delay and spin for about 5-8 seconds before resuming.

#5

For me, I find that rebooting my WD PR4100 works. I also went in and set it to empty the “trash” weekly. Currently, I am using 10 of 12TB and maybe that’s been an issue. I haven’t needed to reboot in about a week.

#6

I was able to find the dump! Thanks for reporting it. I'm looking into what happened.

#8

Are you able to plug your Apple TV into ethernet? Is your DVR plugged in via ethernet?

I'm not seeing any obvious issues in the file other than those very very long seek times. I see it took 30 seconds for the client to find where to start again.

Do you regularly have this issue or did it just happen every once in a while?

#9

The DVR is on ethernet (running in a container).

The AppleTV is WiFi 5GHz about 12 feet away from a Ubiquiti AP which reports a good signal and low utilization (when I check).

I have used channels on this setup about 5-6 weeks without any issue until this happened. As noted, once this problem started, it continued every time I used the app for two days. When I reached peak annoyance, I first checked the container DVR and host for problems and found none. Then I tried it on another device and it worked fine. Then back to appletv which had the delay (next day, not in your logs). At that time I concluded it was the appletv and deleted/reinstalled the app and it worked fine again.

The next day I started this thread. Thanks for following up.

#10

Would you happen to have the DVR logs from that time? It could shed some light on what was happening.

#11

One of my 4k ATVs does that also. The other three, (another 4k and two non 4k) do not. All are connected via ethernet cable. I find if I delete the app and reinstall it solves the problem temporarily.

#12

Doesn't look very interesting...

2020/01/22 18:00:00 [TNR] Opened connection to 1068875E/0 for ch5.1 WPTV-TV
2020/01/22 18:00:00 [DVR] Recording for job 1579734000-3 from 1068875E ch5.1 into "TV/NewsChannel 5 at 6/NewsChannel 5 at 6 2020-01-22-1800.mpg" for 29m59.436416124s
2020/01/22 18:00:01 [DVR] Waiting 29m58.229264809s until next job 1579735800-4 ABC World News Tonight With David Muir
2020/01/22 18:00:01 [DVR] Processing file-170: TV/NewsChannel 5 at 530/NewsChannel 5 at 530 2020-01-22-1730.mpg
2020/01/22 18:00:02 [IDX] Generating video index for job 1579734000-3
2020/01/22 18:00:03 [DVR] Running commercial detection on file 170 (TV/NewsChannel 5 at 530/NewsChannel 5 at 530 2020-01-22-1730.mpg)
2020/01/22 18:04:32 [DVR] Commercial detection finished with 6 markers.
2020/01/22 18:30:00 [DVR] Marking expired job 1579734000-3 NewsChannel 5 at 6
2020/01/22 18:30:00 [DVR] Starting job 1579735800-4 ABC World News Tonight With David Muir on ch=[25.1]
2020/01/22 18:30:00 [DVR] Waiting 5h4m59.784706693s until next job 1579754100-1 The Late Show With Stephen Colbert
2020/01/22 18:30:00 [SNR] Statistics for "TV/NewsChannel 5 at 6/NewsChannel 5 at 6 2020-01-22-1800.mpg": ss=100% snq=91%,88%-93% seq=100% bps=10902496,7742592-15176864 pps=1036,736-1440
2020/01/22 18:30:00 [TNR] Opened connection to 1068875E/1 for ch25.1 WPBF
2020/01/22 18:30:00 [DVR] Recording for job 1579735800-4 from 1068875E ch25.1 into "TV/ABC World News Tonight With David Muir/ABC World News Tonight With David Muir 2020-01-22-1830.mpg" for 29m59.784659388s
2020/01/22 18:30:00 [TNR] Closed connection to 1068875E/0 for ch5.1 WPTV-TV
2020/01/22 18:30:00 [DVR] Finished job 1579734000-3 NewsChannel 5 at 6
2020/01/22 18:30:01 [DVR] Processing file-171: TV/NewsChannel 5 at 6/NewsChannel 5 at 6 2020-01-22-1800.mpg
2020/01/22 18:30:01 [DVR] Waiting 5h4m58.426742311s until next job 1579754100-1 The Late Show With Stephen Colbert
2020/01/22 18:30:02 [IDX] Generating video index for job 1579735800-4
2020/01/22 18:30:02 [DVR] Running commercial detection on file 171 (TV/NewsChannel 5 at 6/NewsChannel 5 at 6 2020-01-22-1800.mpg)
2020/01/22 18:34:46 [DVR] Commercial detection finished with 8 markers.
2020/01/22 19:00:00 [TNR] Closed connection to 1068875E/1 for ch25.1 WPBF
2020/01/22 19:00:00 [SNR] Statistics for "TV/ABC World News Tonight With David Muir/ABC World News Tonight With David Muir 2020-01-22-1830.mpg": ss=100% snq=100% seq=100% bps=11859040,10496416-14497056 pps=1126,997-1377
2020/01/22 19:00:00 [DVR] Finished job 1579735800-4 ABC World News Tonight With David Muir
2020/01/22 19:00:00 [DVR] Waiting 4h34m59.023393782s until next job 1579754100-1 The Late Show With Stephen Colbert
2020/01/22 19:00:00 [DVR] Processing file-172: TV/ABC World News Tonight With David Muir/ABC World News Tonight With David Muir 2020-01-22-1830.mpg
2020/01/22 19:00:02 [DVR] Running commercial detection on file 172 (TV/ABC World News Tonight With David Muir/ABC World News Tonight With David Muir 2020-01-22-1830.mpg)
2020/01/22 19:07:08 [DVR] Commercial detection finished with 4 markers.
2020/01/22 19:07:09 [DVR] Deleting /shares/DVR/TV/NewsChannel 5 at 6/NewsChannel 5 at 6 2020-01-22-1800.mpg
2020/01/22 19:07:15 [DVR] Deleting /shares/DVR/TV/NewsChannel 5 at 530/NewsChannel 5 at 530 2020-01-22-1730.mpg
2020/01/22 19:26:34 [DVR] Deleting /shares/DVR/TV/ABC World News Tonight With David Muir/ABC World News Tonight With David Muir 2020-01-22-1830.mpg
2020/01/22 23:35:00 [DVR] Starting job 1579754100-1 The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on ch=[12.1]
#13

I have noticed the same thing on my setup in the last week or so.

Synology NAS DVR (Wired)
Apple TV 4K (Wired)

My entire network is 100Mbps connections and tested my speed test via troubleshooting to confirm connection speeds.

Rebooted everything and everything is updated been running this setup for a long time nothing changed.

#14

And you also have your Quality setting set at Original? Is this something that is happening frequently for you or just every once in a while?

I have a potential fix that would require running the latest beta of the DVR and AppleTV app, but I'm not sure what the actual issue we're running into here is.

#15

Original.

Fine for a few weeks, then happens and consistently happens until deleting/installing app. Other users in this thread reported the same behavior.

#16

Can you go onto the UniFi app and see what rate the Apple TV is connected at?

Are you able to plug in an ethernet cable to the Apple TV to rule out any intermittent network interference?

#17

Typically the wifi tx rate is 400Mbs and rx rate is 364Mbs (rx is the AppleTV receiving rate from the ap). The long term WiFi experience of AppleTV is 99%.

When this first happened I immediately went to the UniFi controller to see if there was anything wrong with the AppleTV connection and it was fine.

The second time this happened I put it on ethernet 1Gbs which didn't make any difference. I also rebooted the AppleTV to no avail. User "spud" in this thread Commercial skip takes longer than Commercial that says all of their AppleTV's are on ethernet and they've experienced the problem on one AppleTV.

So, I'm pretty confident network issues are not a problem.

#18

Same as other users have reported, Original Quality. Fine for a few weeks then have to delete the app.

#19

This is very strange. All of us use Apple TVs too and have not noticed anything similar.

Instead of delete/reinstall the app, can you try simply restarting the app (click TV/Home twice and swipe up on Channels). And also try rebooting the Apple TV.

#20

Yes, I agree it's strange. I think the developers are sharp enough if they witnessed this happening, we wouldn't be having the conversation. On that same note, I appreciate the fact the developers haven't just dropped this as "an aberration" and are still trying to get to the bottom of it. Thank you.

I also note, I have only seen this on one AppleTV4k (although I use this one the most). Another user I linked to earlier said it was only one of his AppleTV's. We're starting to repeat suggestions and questions. Can we fortify some points?

  • Problem doesn't occur until after apparent time or usage (weeks)
  • Problem persists across reboots
  • Problem occurs whether on Ethernet or WiFi
  • Problem has not been seen on every AppleTV on same network
  • Problem occurs on original (non-transcoded) and immediately tested on another device in transcoding & original and did not occur. This appears to be an AppleTV app problem instead of a server or network problem.
  • Problem is temporarily solved with a delete/install

One great attribute of this problem is: once it starts, it persists. Perhaps some additional logging would assist the developers. It really "acts" like it's waiting until a timeout because it "seems" to take about the same amount of time to start playing again.

As for your suggestion above, I believe (but can't say for with absolute certainty) that I did release app and restart and that didn't work for me so I tried a reboot.

I am here to help the Channels Developers solve this problem.

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#21

Not sure if it was mentioned or relevant but what model of Apple TV are people with the issue using? 32GB or 64GB? I had two Apple TV 4K units. One 64GB in the Den used all the time and never had an issue and the 32GB in the bed room that occasionally I would watch a recorded program on at night before bed. That one I immediately noticed that there was sometimes huge delays in commercial skipping. I thought about returning that one to Apple and replacing with 64GB one figuring it had something to do with the lower memory but never did as I rarely watched recorded content on it so issue was tolerable for me as sometimes it skipped in reasonable time if not as fast as my 64GB unit. I've since replaced both Apple TVs with new nVidia Shield Pros so not sure about the state of issue anymore with the Apple TVs. Just food for thought if available memory/space in those units play a role.

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