have you rebooted it? I only say that cuz I have one and it's a strong enough box that it never fully closes cdvr, so the only way for cdvr to do a complete refresh is reboot. I have yet to try prismcast again but I'll look out for this when I do.
Yeah on Windows it should be taskkill instead of pkill. Maybe @bnhf can make the change in the code with an OS conditional.
Issue on v1.5.2
Providers filter dropdown on the Channels tab acting wonky on Brave, Firefox and Edge.
Either doesn't dropdown, or if it does I can't scroll.
I actually made the change in the code BUT he did an update and boom back to cmd.exe window message
As I said im not worried as im on a dedicated PC for Channels and Prismcast
Lol, you can't change the code unless you're willing to do it with every release.
Awesome, thanks, let me know if I can help with any further testing.
Yup when i did it i thought i needed to do so for it to work BUT seems just fine with no change and the cmd windows shows the error
I just looked at doing that, but there are actually multiple commands used that don't work in Windows environments. Several have to do with "refreshing" Chrome itself, to keep it healthy. pkill appears to be the only one you're seeing, but others are likely failing behind the scenes.
It can be done of course, but it's not a straight swap one command for another to achieve the same functionality.
I have been running prismcast on my M2 Mac Mini for a couple weeks, with mostly positive results. I really only want to use it to view sports on ESPN channels. I have not had any issues watching games live on those channels over the past few weeks. But yesterday (after I had just upgraded to 1.5.2) I attempted to record a MLB game in the afternoon. Around 2hrs 37min into the recording, when the stream goes to a commercial break, the video is frozen at the end of the commercial. The rest of the game had the actual audio playing from the game but with a static image on the screen of the commercial. Anything I should attempt to try to prevent this from happening again?
It’s going to happen from time to time. This isn’t a PrismCast issue per se…it’s a Chrome, site-specific, and network issue…and a bit of a Channels DVR issue. The issues occur because “something” happens to the video stream…that something can be:
- Chrome misbehaving.
- The site you’re using for ESPN flakes out or has an issue.
- Network/Internet connectivity hiccup.
- System isn’t able to keep up with what’s going on (e.g. you’re trying to stream a bunch of things or running an LLM simultaneously on your machine or whatever…). That’s going to cause issues as well.
PrismCast tries it’s best to detect and recover from these situations…Chrome becomes “less reliable” shall we say, after a few hours…so PrismCast restarts it on a regular basis to keep it performant.
When sites flake out or network issues occur…PrismCast tries to detect those as well and self-heal, informing Channels DVR along the way. Works 80-90% of the time these days. If PrismCast triggers its recovery logic too aggressively, you’ll have streams always restarting with just modest streaming delays. It’s a balancing act.
One thing you can try: use a different site for ESPN…the different sites (ESPN.com vs D+ vs Hulu etc) all have different characteristics and some may work better for you than others. There’s no rhyme or reason necessarily…it’s very dependent on your own circumstances.
TL;DR: there is no magic bullet. Unlikely to be version-dependent, but open to the possibility that it is…but since the only changes between 1.5.1 and 1.5.2 were adding some more Spectrum channels, seems less likely. 
(unless it was a different version you were upgrading from).
Ensuring that streaming is always as reliable as it can be is a major focus area for me…trying to make PrismCast more bulletproof in imperfect conditions is a major reason why I created it. Appreciate the feedback, as always…hope the context helps folks understand a bit more of what’s going on.
Oddly enough, it was a Spectrum commercial that caused it to freeze up. I've got an hour and a half of guys talking about baseball while the words "Spectrum Business" are on the screen.
I just looked at doing that, but there are actually multiple commands used that don't work in Windows environments. Several have to do with "refreshing" Chrome itself, to keep it healthy. pkill appears to be the only one you're seeing, but others are likely failing behind the scenes.
It can be done of course, but it's not a straight swap one command for another to achieve the same functionality.
This is already on my radar and slated to be addressed more holistically in an upcoming release…appreciate folks raising it.
Just out of curiosity, I really wanted to use Prismcast, but was unable to because I was experiencing stuttering under Docker on Unraid. Do you know if that is planned to be looked into or addressed in the future? If not, it's okay. I'm just curious. Also, I'm curious if there's anything I can do on my system to mitigate such stuttering. I know others have experienced it, I just am curious if there are any workarounds anyone's found, or any potential ways I can help debug. I'm asking more or less if I can contribute in any way with my system. I always like to find ways to give back when I can.
You could try upping shm_size to 2gb.
Otherwise, what are the specs on your Unraid host?
I'm running an i7-12700K and 128GB of DDR4. My Docker containers all run off a Samsung, I believe a 980 Pro SSD.
Getting inconsistent results with the Providers API /providers/yttv/channels?refresh=true
It's not returning all the channels that appear on the YTTV Live Guide and returns a different amount each time it runs.
Maybe it needs to wait for the page to fully load?
In particular it's missing these channels that are in the YTTV Live Guide
ESPN in 4K
FOX Sports Plus 4K
NBA TV in 4K
NBC Sports Bay Area Plus
NBC Sports California Plus
That hardware should be quite adequate. Although I primarily use a Mac Mini M4 for PrismCast (as I don't use it for much else), the container testing I've done has been on a 12th gen i3 running Docker in a Proxmox LXC -- and I haven't seen any stuttering.
Definitely try upping the shared memory setting, and there are others you could potentially play around with to allocate more resources to a container, but those would be changes that would apply just to you.
A chatbot could likely guide you through possibilities. Maybe other Unraid users as well, for ways to deal with containers that require significant resources in Unraid environments?
It has full access to the entire pool of memory and the entire CPU, all cores.
Maybe I'm comparing it to the LinkPi encoder output a little bit too much. And this is browser capture, so that could be what I'm seeing. And it's perfectly normal, possibly.
Stuttering? No -- not normal. There are numerous people using this project successfully on hardware platforms with lower specs than yours.
Maybe I'm comparing it to the LinkPi encoder output a little bit too much. And this is browser capture, so that could be what I'm seeing. And it's perfectly normal, possibly.
Stuttering isn’t normal. Would be helpful for me if you could post a real example BTW, so I can take a closer look. I, in general, have no plans to directly dive into Docker-specific challenges. If you want the best experience, I would encourage you to run PrismCast natively on macOS. It’s going to have the best performance characteristics - both due to Apple Silicon being quite capable for this sort of thing, and the ability for Chrome to use hardware acceleration.
Anecdotally - I would say that issues like you’re describing inevitably point toward resource issues - be that CPU or memory. @bnhf is the official PrismCast on Docker expert, not I though. You might want to run an experiment for yourself and simply shut everything you can down on the machine and substantially over-resource PrismCast and see what happens. If it works well, you can start to methodically adjust the variables until you discover a sweet spot, perhaps.