Looping playback (Max Headroom effect)

I am having trouble with TVE recording on CNN.The recordings will often loop once or several times, or even indefinitely until skip forward is used. The loop seems to be about 3 - 5 seconds. There are no log file entries at the time of the recording, nor during playback. I haven't noticed it on any other channels.

This happened on msnbc the other day for some weird infomercial - it went away after a few hours

I have noticed this happening as well, on recordings for local stations from HDHR.

This is not possible on HDHR recordings. Please check the dvr Log from the time of the recording

Maybe I am not describing it correctly. I have a recording from a local channel off of the HDHR. When watching the recording I get about 9 minutes into it, then it skips back to around the 8:30 mark. It continues and repeatedly skips backward for the rest of the program. I can recreate it from the recording everytime. Multiple FireTVs. When I view the file directly from the server it plays without issue. I submitted the logs from the client.

Please submit diagnostics from the FireTV when this happens and post here when uploaded

I submitted diagnostics from the FireTV yesterday around 6:00 PM central. Do I need to do it again? Thanks.

If you're at home your FireTV should be set to Home Streaming Quality: Original

FWIW - I noticed that there was some kind of glitch in one the recordings that exhibited this behavior. When watching the recording on the Fire TV stick, it would loop one or more times at the point of the glitch. If I watch the same recording on the server using VideoLAN, I could detect some kind of tiny discontinuity at the same point in the recording, but it would continue past it.

I suspect that I have a network issue being caused by my router firmware (LEDE), and/or a pair of Netgear ethernet switches that I have cascaded, and that the issue my be interfering with the Fire TV stick, and the Channel app's ability to cope. I plan to refresh/update the router firmware, and to completely reconfigure the network to hopefully get the network working well again. I'll let you know what the results are, but it will be a week or so before I can do it.

Also, for me anyway, this seems to be a problem with CNN. I haven't noticed it on any other channels.

happened to me on msnbc

I rebuilt my network using the Orbi mesh network. It definitely improved performance in general, but didn't change this problem. The most recent occurrence of it was during Anderson Cooper's show on 12/30/2019 at 5:00 PM Pacific. The loop is in the recording (I have it if you are interested). I'm not sure, but I think I've seen this happen in real time, but it was while watching CNN Go on a Roku TV. If that's the case, then the problem is being broadcast by CNN.

Definitely observed this happening on a live stream using the Channels web client. Next, I'll try to see if it happens on CNN Go using their standard web client. It seems like this has to be a problem on the CNN side. There would be no way for a client-side glitch to cause a stream to repeat the previous several seconds of data, yes?

Does the dvr Log show a disconnect and reconnect?

No. In the case of the Anderson Cooper episode I mentioned earlier, the log seems to be in order. The only thing I noticed is the "discontinuity detected" and "skipped" stats:

2019/12/30 18:00:30 [MTS] Statistics for "TV\Anderson Cooper 360\Anderson Cooper 360 2019-12-30-1700.mpg": skipped=556 unhandled_packets=0 discontinuity_detected=17 transport_errors=0 invalid_pts=0 invalid_dts=0 saw_pcr=true saw_pmt=true highest_pts=14471.430689

It happened again tonight. This tie,it is in a completely different environment. Different server, network, and Fire TV stick. The only constants are CNN, the Channels server (Windows), and the 4k Fire TV stick.

In this occurrence, the stream looped back once at 19:19 about 2 seconds. I submitted a report from the client, and I saved the section of the log containing the recording job entries. I also saved the recording.

FWIW, this appears to be an issue with recordings, not live viewing.

Edit: this is incorrect. I definitely observed this on a live stream that was not was not behind real time.

I also observed a very similar behavior while using CNN Go on my Android phone, using the mobile network. In that case, the video froze and the audio looped back about 3 seconds then continued. The video resumed after 30 seconds or so.

Is this a protocol issue? If so, can it be detected and corrected in a recording?

I caught this again, and this time I had CNN Go running simultaneously. I was watching CNN's TVE feed and I noticed that the CNN Go stream was running about 20 seconds behind the TVE stream. When the TVE stream looped, I watched the CNN Go stream closely, and did not see the loop. Then I fired up the Windows HDHR app to watch the cable feed as well. I noticed that the cable feed was about 20 seconds ahead of the TVE stream.

So, could this be a (crude) mechanism in CNN's TVE feed to keep it synchronized to real time?

This is still a big problem for me on CNN. I submitted logs with a support request on 4/15, but no response or acknowledgement yet...

Please click-and-hold on the Check for Updates button on the DVR web UI.