Hangs/stall during skip forward/next/commercial

Hi,

I have a recurring problem for the past month or so where playback just hangs when I try to skip forward, back, or use "Skip Commercial". This happens both on Android TV and through the web player. It does not seem to be specific to any particular channel or program, and it only happens after Channels has been up for several days. It started last month and has continued this month both with regular releases and pre-releases.

The stall will sometimes catch up if I'm patient and let the app sit there for a few minutes (the further I seek, the longer it takes). If I try to skip again, the lag will once again kick in. Once the problem occurs, it happens for any recording from any channel and for any seek in any direction. Force stopping the app on Android TV (NVidia Shield Tube), clearing cache, etc have no effect. Obviously, those don't apply to the web player.

Restarting the Channels server seems to temporarily fix the issue, but it will recur given sufficient time. I'm running Channels Server 2024.09.12.1557 on Win11 23H2.

I submitted diag logs ac3704a2-5cc0-408a-93e3-a04507069d4c last night.

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Hi. So you are running under Win-11 and have a CDR server glitch every 2-3 days and the only way to fix it is reboot the server. Sounds familiar. I've been running CDVR server under Ubuntu Linux on a mini-PC and since January the CDVR server has been randomly crashing every 2-3 days and taking down the OS with it. Only fix is to hard reboot the box. My solution to achieve stability was to schedule a system reboot at 6 am every day. That would be my suggestion to you. Set up a Windows Scheduler task to reboot every morning at an appropriate time.

This is definitey not the norm on either OS. I run Channels on an Intel nuc with Ubuntu Server 22.04 and it has never rebooted on its own. My advice is to check your logs to see what is causing the issue. How to Check and Configure Ubuntu Logs - Sematext

@thedoc31 For windows, look at the event viewer and see what is causing your system to reboot.

In either case i seriously doubt it is Channels. If it were we all would be screaming on this forum.

Exactly, I would be reading the screaming. Firstly, it doesn't reboot on it's own. CDVR locks up and crashes taking down the OS with it, necessitating a hard reboot. Back in January I looked in the forum and didn't find a single mention of this, so I figured it was a problem with my mini-pc. I have 2 of these mini-pc's and the second one running Ubuntu 22.04 was stable and ran for weeks with no crashes. So I installed CDVR server on that one and although I didn't set it up from the welcome screen, the channels-dvr.service was enabled and running in the background. No problem for a couple weeks so I made the switch with the problem system and set it up from the welcome screen. It locked up and crashed 3 days later.

In the intervening months since, I have tested a lot. I've done fresh installs of Ubuntu Desktop 22.04 & 24.04 and Ubuntu Server 20.04, 22.04 &24.04 on both of these mini-pc's, installed/setup CDVR server on the virgin systems and put them in service. Not a single installation on either mini-pc would run longer than 3 days before crashing. I've come to the conclusion there must be some sort of negative interaction between a running CDVR server and the hardware of this mini-pc that goes way south after 2-3 days of running.. So, the current situation is CDVR server running under Ubuntu Server 22.04 with a system cron job that reboots the OS @6am every day. This seems to work just fine.

P.S. thanks for the article link on Ubuntu logs.

  • K

@slampman @kelson I don't want to conflate issues here. Neither Windows nor Channels crash on me. Channels just gets intolerably slow when attempting to skip commercials or rewind/fast forward a show.

Restarting the process every day is a poor workaround for what seems to be a recent problem somewhere with Channels server. Drivers, transcoders, not sure. I'm hoping the dev team can weigh in or give some troubleshooting guidance based on the diag logs I sent in.

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My money is on your hard drive being the culprit.

Anecdotal reports with no evidence is—unfortunately—worthless.

To the OP: you have submitted logs, but have you directly contacted support so they can associate your logs with your issues?

Also, no one commenting about issues has provided any details to the community about their hardware/network. No offense to your magical thinking, but while the internet may never forget what is posted, it cannot ever know what isn't shared. If you won't give details to the community when asking for help, you're only asking for wild-assed guesses.

GIGO

I'm in agreement with @slampman - when I had random server hang-ups and issues skipping/rewinding it ended up being a hard drive was starting to fail. It didn't show up in inital tests, but a more throrough disc check showed it was starting to fail. Replacing the drive resolved all the issues for me.

Interesting thought, but I wonder why it would only appear after Channels server is running for a period of time. I would expect it to be happening all the time but failing drive is certainly possible. I have 2 10TB drives in a Raid 1 set hosting the data, and it's also where I store all my photograph RAW files. Lightroom seems fine, as does playing videos directly on my PC instead of streaming through Channels.

Intel's RAID tools don't give me a good way to test the drives individually as far as I can tell, but I'll see if I can find some other method. For what it's worth, the SMART data on both physical drives is fine.

The Win11 PC where Channels runs is my primary desktop. Intel Core i7-12700k processor and 32GB DDR4-3600 on an ASRock Z690 Extreme WiFi 6E motherboard running the latest BIOS. No overclocking. NVidia RTX 4070 Super video card, latest drivers. The PC is hardwired to a gigabit switch, as is the NVidia Shield. Internet connectivity is FIOS gigabit fiber. Speedtests show symmetric performance around 950Mbps. Channels speed test also shows low latency and good throughput.

I will also email support; I forget sometimes that the community isn't the only source of support. So used to other companies only having one or the other these days.