Intermittent quick pause

I posted about the AppleTV not have the issue yesterday. :man_shrugging:t2:

Thank you for trying.

Yes. I'm not certain about SiliconDust's viewer, but I believe Channels' player is based on mpv, which in turn was forked from mplayer2, and is based upon libavformat, which is the library behind Ffmpeg.

A custom player has to be used because most OTA streams are MPEG-2 encoded, which most operating system playback libraries do not support. (This is the reason why PIP support is not included, among other niceties that system media players enjoy.)

Also, I know that the Channels developers have found problems exposed in the underlying software, and committed their fixes upstream to be shared with the community. Other than their limited library, I am unaware of contributions that SiliconDust have made back to the open source development community. (Although, I would love to be shown wrong on this point.)

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I can use PIP on Android TV 9.0 and my Android 10 Phone using the HDHomerun app. My FireTV stick 4k on FireOS 6 does not.

I’m having a similar issue (DVR on powerful windows server) on my fire tv 4k (which is wired to my gigabit network). Playback gets very jerky sometimes and audio gets out of sync. Very annoying. Never had this issue in the past (been using channels for over a year with this fire tv 4k).

Anything I can do to diagnose further and or help with betas/debugging?

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Yes when this happens hit the back button once.... Should go away for a bit until it happens again. What I see is a very fast studder..... Is it the same as you see?

That’s very interesting that it happens on both. There may be something specific about your content source that is causing issues we aren’t generally seeing. This isn’t a wide spread issue that we’ve seen.

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I also started noticing this a few months ago. It's usually only once per channel tune within 5-15 mins of starting to play. Some channels do it more often, with a solid 100% TV signal across the board. Fire TV 4K, HDHomerun Duo and Connect. I've analyzed network and broadcast signals and there's nothing pointing to packet loss or signal drops.

edit: It does seem to help just hitting scan back 7 seconds when I first tune in. Surround is off and using software decoder as the hardware decoder is still not reliable with SD channels.

We made a fix for this intermittent quick pause in the latest beta. Please try it and see if the issue is resolved

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How does one access the beta for FireTV? I'm in the Android beta program, but that appears to only be the Google Play version. Also, I use Channels and not the Channels DVR. Thanks

The beta is only available for the dvr version at the moment.

With the latest version it doesn't buffer if there is a video glitch, but we've had some odd behavior where it will just jump back to the beginning of the buffer and start playing without sound. We can fast forward to current time and not lose anything, but it's a problem that's never been there before. I was monitoring the signal and wifi using the command line hdhomerun_config.exe tool from a laptop on the same Wifi Access Point when this happened and it didn't appear to be anything network or signal related.
It seems like there is either audio loss or reset to the beginning of the buffer at random times with the update. It was definitely better before, even with the occasional buffer. I was able to remedy some wifi issues that I think were the root of the problem I reported before with intermittent buffering.

The next time this happens can you submit diagnostic logs so we can see what happened?

Will do. Thanks

I just had a video glitch and it did buffer for a second, then the audio was gone. Before the recent version changes it would just buffer and continue on if there was an issue.

Also, it said I was behind and warned me before exiting to the guide when I tried to go to the menu. It had not been paused or reversed since it was tuned.

Diagnostics submitted around 7:54p EDT. Thanks

This looks like issues with a corrupted stream. Can you also send the diagnostic logs from the DVR?

Right now I'm just using it for live TV and not DVR. As I mentioned before, I've been testing with the hdhomerun_config command line utility and resolved some wifi issues that were causing the quick buffering at times before (Unifi AP acting up). I now get almost 100% clean streams barring a blip in the TV signal. With the previous versions before the recent changes, it would just buffer for a second and continue without issue if there was a signal interruption. Now, it seems to try to just play through it, but that causes other issues with audio cutting out or going a couple seconds out of sync when it happens. Handling the errors with a quick buffer was much more stable than trying to play through the error as it does now.

I also uploaded around 10am EDT an issue where a local station shows their station ID full screen, but at a lower resolution (480p, I believe) than the main stream. It causes Channels to hang, revert to the start of the buffer and act like it is buffering. If I scan forward to current, it will continue to play. Before the latest versions, it would eventually start playing again on its own. I'm sure this isn't a standard way to broadcast the video stream.