Hallmark TVE Picture Quality

I have Spectrum and half the time and mostly during the hours between 8:00 and 9:00pm the audio and video stutters and pixilates real bad no matter what show you are viewing. Could this be an antenna not positioned right at the cable provider?

I first started using Channels DVR in January of 2020 and noticed this picture quality issue with the two Hallmark TVE feeds. I initially thought is was a quality issue with CDVR, but in testing feeds and recordings on any other TVE channel, it seemed that Hallmark's feeds were the only impaired streams. I also noticed that playing the recordings back through the Channels DVR app, they just looked bad. But if I navigated to the actual .mpg file and played it with VLC, it looked a little better.

I believe that the Hallmark Channel and Movies & Mysteries TVE feeds have improved in quality within the past month. Maybe they upgraded their encoder setup or whatever. All I know is that the motion artifacts I had initially noticed via the Hallmark TVE feed seem to have virtually disappeared or gotten much less noticeable.

This is no slam on Channels DVR. I now understand how it stores these TVE feeds has no impact on the quality. It is a simple case of the weakest link affecting the end-result. And that weak link has been the encoding on Hallmark's end. Hopefully they continue to improve their streaming quality.

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I know this is old thread but i found it while searching because of same issue. Thought i would respond in case others come here via the same reason. Hallmark channels streams really struggle with motion. I noticed it is worse on my newest and most expensive tv. After messing around with settings on my tv, i was able to improve it dramatically. I am not smart enough to know what I did, but changing preset settings on tv did the trick.

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Great! After more months of recording Hallmark movies, I'm back to not thinking Hallmark's TVE streams are that great with motion. I tend to download the recordings from my Channels DVR server to my desktop and edit out the ads with Adobe Premiere Pro. This lets me archive them as slightly smaller files on my Plex server. But I can easily tell which movies are recorded from the Hallmark TVE streams vs. other channels'. I've just gotten used to it. I subscribe to Philo, and the same movies via it's stream do not have this motion artifact issue. But I can't archive movies for the long term from Philo as I can from Channels DVR. So I live with it.

It isn't Channels DVR's fault as the software just records what is sent from the stream source. Maybe it's intentional to push people to watch via a provider. Who knows. Maybe when everyone goes 4K, Hallmark will upgrade their streams to solid 720p. If the streams suddenly improved, so would our Channels DVR recording quality.

Please update to this thread if you notice any changes to the quality. I would be thrilled if it suddenly improved.

Every try VideoReDo software? If you insist on archiving commercial free, it was made just for that purpose, with it's own ad-scan that works pretty good. I while back I had been using VAP:

software that manages your incoming raw TV files, batches them through VideoReDo and preps them with ad-scan for user review of final commercial cuts, then post-processes however you choose (handbrake or just leave them without re-encoding).

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Hallmark has made some changes to their streaming website this week. It's possible they improved the quality issues as well.

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This new Drama Channel works, only show up under Xfinity TVE for me though.
The other Hallmark channels i have via Philo, and will not load gives error.
i think that was reported in another thread.

So is that the third Halmark channel that wasn't previously available via TVE? I'm not seeing a "watch live" option on the Drama website.

Shows up for me on their website: https://www.hallmarkchanneleverywhere.com/hdlive.html

Strange, I don't see anything like that. And after upgrading the server and the clients, both of the original Hallmark channels are broke.

and a minute later I clicked on your link and got this. Still can't load any streams.

Okay, I re-scanned Hallmark, and Hallmark Movies and those 2 channels are working now. When I attempted to re-scan for Drama, it says I don't subscribe, so apparently that's my problem, which is strange on another level based on my Spectrum package.

How's the bit rate and picture quality compare to the old stream?

I am seeing weirdness with Hallmark too. I can't watch on TE or their website -- authentication just kicks me back to the cable provider selection without error. I am rescanning channels now but it is taking forever -- not optimistic.

Yep. Got "chrome auth_timed_out" on every single channel. Something must be up. Trying again.

Continuing here because my issue seems wider than Hallmark:

https://community.getchannels.com/t/did-latest-update-break-xfinity-tve/23712/2

So it seems the image quality is much improved however it is still choppy during high motion scenes. Anyone else experiencing similar issues?

It is 100 percent fixed on my end. Are you sure it isnt “ soap opera “ effect you are experiencing? I am not sure how to explain it but google does a good job. You can adjust your tv settings to compensate if that is the case.

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Same here, everything is looking great finally!

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You could subscribe to FrndlyTV and try this docker container: Frndly TV for Channels

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