I have 2.5 gigs free on all my devices, yet the pause resumes after only 3 minutes. I can keep hitting pause and get up to a half hour, but why should I have to hit pause every 3 minutes to get that buffer built up. This is the only reason we still have a TiVo, so I can get my wife setup with her show in the bedroom, pause it, and then she can fast forward through commercials before falling asleep.
Your device doesn’t have enough room for the buffer. Devices like Apple TV and Shield TV have more storage and longer buffers.
There’s a way to add storage to your device using an OTG cable. You can look into that.
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abilty to set remote buffer (on DVR server or an arbritary nfs/smb) would solve this. This would also help with the feature request of converting buffers to record, when u decide to record a show late while watching.
If you set your At Home streaming bitrate to 8mbps it will force transcoding and will use a remote streaming buffer. You'll find that it uses more resources on your server and is slower to tune into a channel (channel flipping is slower), but it will give you a larger buffer on the server.
This is an inherent trade-off of buffering on the server vs client: Using a client buffer we can talk directly to the HDHR in a way that tunes in a fraction of a second. Using a server buffer, we are talking to the DVR and tuning can take a second or two.
I would have to see the diagnostics from your system, but that doesn't sound like how the system behaves. We calculate how much free space your system has and we reserve 500MB that we don't use. We then will use the remaining free space for our buffer, up to 16GB. If the player is resuming after 3 minutes it sounds most likely that you have far less free space than that and will have to use an external storage if you need more.
I have 2.0 to 2.5 gigs free on all my devices. Its something I pay attention to all the time. 3 minutes is a constant across all devices.
The devices are all FireTV 4K Max.
Can you submit diagnostics right after you've experienced this pausing and unpausing?
Unrelated to OP but this raises new question. On forums we have discusrd recording a live show and loosing your bufffer in the recording because buffer is on the client. Would this solve that issue.
Ie. I am watching [Random TV Show]. I have 20min of buffer. I hit record. Would this also save my buffer into recording?
As it works now with buffer on client. I loose buffer in recording
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No, because the buffer would be the transcoded stream in HLS format, and Channels records the original untranscoded stream in MPEG-TS format.
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Dream crusher.
Lol.
I use FireTV 4K Max devices and I also didn't like the short pause time. I bought OTG cables for the FireTV devices and 32GB USB3 flash drives. Moved the Channels app to this added memory and now I can pause for more than 2 hours.
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I have 8 of them.
It cost me about $12 each to add the memory. And I didn't need to upgrade all of my devices. It solved my problem, so good luck getting it resolved another way. Maybe you could just record the shows that you want to delay when you start watching.
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2.5 gigs is not enough to go beyond 3 minutes of buffer, that's pathetic.
Have you sent the diagnostics from the app after experiencing this?
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No, I assumed it was the same for everyone since its the same on all 8 of my FireSticks. I wasnt aware that if transcoding is enabled that the buffer stays on the server. If that were available as a setting but without transcoding, that would be a great solution. Since the functionality is already there...
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The "larger buffer on the server" I believe refers to the brief intermediary buffer that the server keeps for all streams it serves to clients.
It is my understanding that the live buffer is exclusively on the client, regardless of your streaming quality settings.
In short, if you want a larger live buffer, you have two options:
- use a device with more internal storage (or add additional storage that can be adopted by your device), or
- reduce the streaming quality so that the incoming streams are reduced in size. (This won't actually increase the space the buffer can use, but it will allow more content to fit in the same space.)
I would've figured 2.5 gigs free would get me more than three minutes. It actually does if I keep hitting pause every three minutes, I can get all the way up to 40 minutes of buffer by doing that, but Channels unpausing itself every three minutes even tho theres plenty of room left kind of sucks.
I also dont see the need for the buffer to be local, it hangs up on 3/4 of the 30 second skips anyway, so how is having it local helping? Plex 30 second skip is seemless and that buffer is stored on tbe server.