Hallmark TVE Picture Quality

That is really bad. Are you watching in the browser or app? Do you have Adaptive Streaming enabled? Could you update to the latest beta and try again?

It's the same quality via the app on my fire stick 4k, my Android phone or via Chrome on my laptop. I've downloaded the original file and that clip is from the source file bring played in VLC. I try and run the most current beta and just confirmed it's up to date. I just noticed that adaptive streaming option today. It’s defaulted on, any recommendation? Thanks

The new Adaptive Streaming setting is fine to leave on.

Could you email [email protected] with the Recording Log of the video you posted? You can get to it from the gear icon on the show listing.

There's something very strange going on there that we'll need to dig into further. I just wanted to re-confirm that the video you posted the segment of is the same one that you sent us the screenshot of the details for. Is that correct?

I've tried emailing Hallmark Everywhere support a couple of times and have not back from them. Is there any way to increase the quality or find a better source? When I've viewed Hallmark via Philo or Sling, there are no issues with the picture quality. Is there any way to use those sources for the channels DVR?

There's no way for us to use a different source. Our system works by using TVE logins on the network provided streams via their websites.

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Any chance that Frndly could be supported for TVE?

I emailed Frndly back in august about this and they said they had no plans to work with TV Everywhere as they wanted to focus on their core functionality.

I also emailed hallmark asking them if they could add Frndly as an authorized login to their website stream, and they never responded lol.

I poked at this a bit and verified we're using the highest quality stream they offer on their website.

I also tried their Android app and the exact same stream is shown there. I guess the stream on their website/app just isn't very high quality. You can email [email protected] to tell them you're not satisfied with the quality of the video shown on their website/app.

On the other hand the quality i see in tve is much much much better than the quality i used to see in roku on the hallmark app

So thats something :slight_smile:

It gets worse with hallmark - i use mcebuddy to recontainer hallmark movies to mp4 while extracting subs and removing commercials - When playing back directly on roku in plex the audio sync goes crazy - transcode fixes issue - there is something very strange to their streams

I hear you, the picture quality is quite poor especially on a 65" TV. I've tried emailing Hallmark several times and I have never received a reply. Anyone else have success or alternatives?

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