EXPERIMENTAL: New MPEG-TS Rewriter for HLS (TVE)

Latest build has some small improvements to the rewriter. It shouldn't have a big impact on anything.

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Well shucks. It doesnā€™t seem to solve the issue for me.

Do I need to completely restart the Channels DVR server after clicking this feature on?

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Nope. As soon as it's enabled any recording or live stream that starts after it will be using it. What issue are you experiencing?

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How did you add espn plus into channels? I donā€™t see it under the tve options?

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I toggled this new feature on and started a live viewing of Discovery and a few other TVE channels. I have also setup some random recordings just to test it out before my next actual wanted recording occurs on Sunday.

Is it normal that once the live stream starts there is a brief pause and then the channel starts playing normally? I've never seen this occur before so I am wondering if that is the new writer "kicking in" as the stream starts up. It did that on every channel I started up.

By the way, I did notice that before that pause the picture quality looked pretty pixelated and then after the pause the picture quality is really good.

Monday is my big Discovery channel recording day, so I set up some random recordings tonight.

The issue is the same as before, when I use tools like VideoRedo or ffmpeg to cut the commercials out, and then re-encode, the tools give me errors, and wonā€™t re-encode the video, or QuickStream Fix.

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@Lawreb can you start a new thread that goes into details about what youā€™re doing and what the errors are?

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@Lawreb can you start a new thread that goes into details about what youā€™re doing and what the errors are?

Eric,
After further testing, Iā€™m discovering that as long as I donā€™t do the QuickStream Fix first, it does indeed give me back the capability to cut/re-encode. I would like to reserve judgment on this.

I wish it were Monday, because then I could give a more definitive answer. I have a few long recordings on Monday nights that fail 100% of the time, but they donā€™t air any other days of the week.

Iā€™ll be able to give better feedback on Tuesday next week.

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I was watching a recording from the history channel last night and I was getting frame drops. It was enough to notice on the screen where it seemed to pause and then would continue.

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I recorded several shows on different TVE channels overnight, including Discovery. Everything seems normal here, no playback issues or errors.

@Eric
Im excited to try this out and thanks to you folks for diving into this.

I know this is an ask.

Id love to try out the new changes, but I have a ton of passes. It appears discovery has fixed (temporarily?) what was going on because I noticed commercial detection on deadliest catch last night was optimized and flawless again.

Would there be a way to try this fix out on a per show basis?

Ive got so many passes that Id like to sandbox the new changes and really do a big stress test on a mix of Discovery, OTA, M3U freebies, etc without affecting my main recordings that are scheduled - just in case....

Otherwise, I will enable the experimental button, and try things out during the days when I dont have main recordings scheduled - it just may take longer to provide feedback.

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There is not a way to do that.

Thanks anyway. Ill set up some manual tests

As a test, I recorded EVERYTHING on the two main Disco brand channels overnight. I even extended some shows 2 hours, just because I seem to have issues with shows that are 3 to 4 hours long. I sent them through my normal workflow to cut/re-encode, and they all looked good. Again, it's not the shows that I was having trouble with, but it's looking good so far!

Thank you for working so hard on this issue.

I am still getting frame drops even on the live tv on the history channel. So it seems it doesn't matter if I have it record and watching it local or streaming live. I did go ahead and submit from my living room player. Let me know if you need me to submit from the server. Its not horrible it just does it about every 10 to 30 seconds and the dropped frame rate ticker keeps rising. You can also visibly see the missing frames on the screen.

I (almost) never watch live TV, but I tried watching the History channel just now. I see a little stutter about every 6 seconds or so when watching live.

Cant find the m3u and xmltv data to enter into channels.

You have to navigate to ip:port on browser to view that info I believe. It has been a while since I set it up.

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@eric

I set up a huge amount of test recordings on some discovery, OTA, m3u free streams, and other networks. Too many to watch all of them from start to end, but they appeared to be fine when scrubbing through each of them.

All the recordings had perfect lengths and commercial detection worked as expected.

I have enough confidence in to leave the experimental rewrter on for now, and
Ill continue to test in real life usage.

Thanks to the team