With clients=1 if you’re seeing those buffer overflow errors, it means the client isn’t downloading the stream fast enough. Usually this means your available bandwidth is too low, and you’d need to set the transcoding rate even lower.
I agree it sounds like a flaky connection, but he LTE speed test consistently shows around 12Mbs download. Streaming Youtube TV over LTE to my iPhone has no issues so this would suggest the issue is with Comcast. That doesn’t make sense either as when I stream over Comcast via wifi I don’t have issues there either.
I haven’t had transcoding issues on my network when streaming to my Mac, but I’ll retest that tonight to see if that still works well.
Can you try PiP and see if that’s more reliable.
I’ve narrowed down the issue. Here’s what I found:
- When I transcode locally to my Mac it works
- When I transcode locally to my iPhone (0.7Mbs) it works
- When I switch to LTE and transcode to my phone (0.7Mbs) it works fine
- I setup a personal hotspot and connect my Apple TV. Before loading channels on my Apple TV I try to watch the same channel from my iPhone and immediately hit the issue I’ve been seeing.
I’m not sure why setting up a personal hotspot causes these issues. I’m also not sure why other streaming apps don’t seem to suffer as Channels does when setup as a hotspot.
I’ve done the same thing with my iPhone without problem.
Which version of phone do you have?
I have an iPhone 7 (Verizon)
I’ve been testing all sorts of cases where I reboot my devices and can consistently hit the issue when using the hotspot. The last attempt I did the following:
- Fresh reboot of everything
- Created the hotspot
- Loaded the Channels on the Apple TV and started to stream a channel. The channel streamed fine for about 10 seconds or so I stopped the stream. I then restarted the same channel stream after another 5 seconds. I then encountered the same problem I’ve been seeing.
@ts01: who is your cell provider?
Unfortunately depending on your plan and the provider, speedtests really may not have much value. Some providers “cheat” by whitelisting well known speed test apps/sites to which give an inflated speedtest result.
Some providers have “special features” like TMOs binge on (and other providers also have something similar) that either reduces the quality or bandwidth of traffic it determines to be streams by using traffic shaping either to well known streaming sites or unknown video traffic differently.
Most providers treat Hotspot traffic different from traffic originating from the phone itself (both in billing and in bandwidth limits)
@tmm1: is it possible to select/add an option to force the connection via TLS/SSL if it does not already use it for remote access on tvOS? on a longshot that the TLS/SSL traffic cannot be detected as streaming video by the cell provider and would not be affected adversely if the above is happening…
Loging in to the remote DVR works great.
When I close the app, not quit out of it, the ‘logout of DVR’ toggle is gone.
Wondering if its supposed to be persistent?
Full SSL support is planned once we get approval from Let’s Encrypt.
The logout option should show up any time the remote DVR is being used (i.e. not in your home)
I finally got around to connecting my ATV4 to the hotel wifi, and now I’m 10 minutes into an episode and it’s running great (bandwidth dependent, had to put it at 2Mbps).
The only issue was that I couldn’t connect to my ATV4 from my phone on the hotel wifi, I had to tether it to my phone to do the authentication then back to the hotel wifi. Not an issue with Channels, but thought I’d share for people who might not understand why they can’t authenticate their Apple TV.
Thanks for sharing. I suspected some wifi networks might not allow p2p communication. Thankfully you only need to authorize once (which you can also do at home) and then the ATV remembers your remote DVR address and login.
I think both iOS and tvOS are using software transcoding when streaming recordings remotely. For live TV, transcoding is done with whatever is selected on Channels web UI (software or hardware), but recordings don’t seem to respect the setting. It’s just an assumption (captions always show on recorded tv streaming, and apparently ffmpeg still doesn’t include captions in hardware transcoding).
Huh should be using same transcoder for everything. You can confirm by looking at the logs.
Weird… on any recording, any channel, except CBS, it respects encoder selection:
2017/08/11 10:19:57 [HLS] Starting transcoder for file-167 at 0s (encoder=h264_videotoolbox, resolution=720, deinterlacer=linear, bitrate=4000)
…but for shows recorded on CBS, I get remux…
2017/08/11 10:21:40 [HLS] Starting transcoder for file-234 at 0s (encoder=remux, resolution=720, deinterlacer=linear, bitrate=4000)
Remux means the recorded file is already in h264 and of the right bitrate
I see the button (Remote DVR Access) on the AppleTV, settings menu, while remote. I use the link to authorize the AppleTV, I see a “Done!” message on the web browser of the laptop I used (on same remote wifi as ATV),
The screen on the ATV does not refresh on it’s own, and when I click on the OK button on the “Remote DVR Access” screen, it disappears, but I don’t see the turners show up. It continues to show “No Tuners Detected”…
I see no indications in the server log of any activity that would seem to indicate there was any connections made.
What do I need to look into?
Submit diagnostics from the app
I had the same issue and found that quitting and restarting the beta app on tvOS after authorising caused it to show up correctly.
Basically found the same. I quit the app and restarted the ATV and how see all my tuners via DVR…