Thanks for the reply! Unfortunately, I already have IPv6 disabled in my UDM Pro settings and have for a while. I agree that the issue seems to be the lack of any real buffer when watching Live TV through the HDHR Prime. In most cases, the underruns recover really quickly—usually within half a second—but the buffering pause is what makes it noticeable. The simplest workaround I’ve found is to pause Live TV for 3 seconds to give the buffer a little room, which got me thinking about whether a setting or feature could help handle that kind of thing automatically.
I am having very similar issues as OP. Even wired I get the network issue. This started happening probably two weeks ago or so. I recently put in a ticket and was told to Go to Settings -> Playback -> Streaming Quality and set Original Quality Delivery to Stream. But this did not resolve anything.
I have pretty much hit bedrock in terms of troubleshooting this after putting in more hours than I would care to admit.
Are you also watching on AppleTV? I'd be curious to see if you also are getting these audio underrun issues that seem to be causing the problem. Next time you're watching TV if you open a browser you can navigate to http://IP_OF_DEVICE:57000/log
That will give you expanded logs. If you get a buffering pause, you can check the log and see what caused the error. Would be really helpful if someone else could confirm the same issue.
@eric @tmm1
Hey guys – just wanted to ping you one more time in case you had any thoughts on this issue. I’ve been digging pretty deep and have done a ton of testing, documenting, and ruling things out. Still seeing the audio underrun problem persist and would really appreciate any insights or direction you might have. Thanks for all the work you do on Channels – I know this stuff can be hard to track down.
So here is what I am seeing after some experimentation. Over the past few weeks the number of menu bar pauses has increased dramatically. Maybe a change in the channels software, or something Apple did in the latest TVOS update.
BUT, I did discover that all I have to do to stop the menu bar pop up/pause is to press pause for a couple of seconds after I change OTA channels and let the ATV buffer build up. Once I do that, no more unexpected pauses.
Tuner sharing is off on my system, but it made no difference if it was on or off, it's the local buffer in the ATV that is the key.
So, it appears that a simple solution would be for the Channels ATV app to have the option to create a small buffer on channel change. My YTTV app has the option to select a normal or reduced buffer, so something like that maybe. TVE streams always have a buffer on Channels so they don't have the issue.
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Not for nothing, but a few HDHR issues seem to have popped up since their newest firmwares came out. Timing seems suspicious.
The UPnP one in particular.
**HDHomeRun Firmware** (20250117beta1):
* ATSC3: Fix problem handling 4K test broadcast from Canada.
* ATSC3: Fix problem where incorrect parental rating could be applied.
* TECH5/DEV: Fix problem with ATSC3 "forward" output format where power-save mode could activate stopping operation.
* TECH5: Auto-restart demodulation when needed on older ATSC1-only models.
* HDD models: Improve handling of a failing hard drive.
* UPnP: Only announce services using the primary IPv4 and primary IPv6 address.
* MDNS: Improvements to MDNS handling.
**HDHomeRun Firmware** 20250130beta1
* Add signal strength/quality to the channel scan results
If you have concerns that this has affected you post in the HDHR Forum or file trouble ticket ... I have 2 Primes and 3 4 tuner devices and do not have this problem. Silicondust if you report it will look at your units remotely.
Thanks, I’ll definitely reach out to them as well. The reason I’m focusing here is because the issue only occurs when watching through the Channels app on my Apple TVs. If I use Plex or the HDHomeRun app on the same Apple TVs, the issue doesn’t happen. It also doesn’t occur when using the Channels app on my Fire Stick.
Just to clarify—are you using your HDHR Primes specifically with Channels on Apple TV?
Thanks for the reply, and that is good to know. I am still on stable release 20230713 but might be worth giving the beta release a try and seeing if I get any differing behaviors.
I am on the beta, have been since it came out. No difference in the issue
This is exactly what I’ve been doing as well. At this point, a setting that introduces a preset delay whenever a new channel starts playing seems like it would be a great solution. The real annoyance for me right now is that if I want to rewind and rewatch a play, I then have to go back to live, pause again, and then hit play. Not the end of the world, but a delay setting would be a really nice quality-of-life improvement.
I also started looking into other, more involved ideas. Since this always seems to happen when the audio buffer hits 0 during an underrun, I wondered if it might be possible to adaptively slow down the stream slightly when an underrun is detected—then speed it back up gradually once the buffer recovers. Kind of like an on-the-fly delay that only kicks in when needed.
Not sure how practical that is, and honestly, the static delay option seems like the most straightforward and sensible approach.
Does not even need to be much of a buffer. I am hitting pause play for less than a second and that gives just enough audio buffer to keep it going. A zero audio buffer just does not work well. Even my Dante audio gear has a few milliseconds of buffer.
That’s good to know. I’ve been more conservative—usually pausing for about 3 full seconds, which gives me around 10 seconds of audio buffer.
I use a Harmony remote and I bet I could write a macro that would do this for me. It's a really sketch way to fix this but its better than the dozen or so pauses I had last night on every channel I was trying to watch while we were under a tornado warning.
No only use FireTV Devices.
Been running Channels with just .4 seconds of audio buffer and I have no pauses or menu pop ups. No audio underrun errors.
That's point four seconds, not 4 seconds!!!
This part of the code is very finicky, and every new tvOS release seems to affect it some way.
Thank you guys for all your debugging so far. We've made some changes based on your observations in the latest prerelease. Let us know if it helps.
If I don’t use tuner sharing then how does an update to the DVR software help? it seems that the fix needs to be made in the tvOS app not the DVR software running on my Mac?
Oops my bad. The beta is uploading now.
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Interesting, I see now that as soon as I change channels there is 1 buffering pause listed in the stats. I don't see the pause on screen, but the stats say it happened. Novel way to attack the issue, create a pause as it tunes.
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