I have channels running with the HDHomeRun on Xfinity as well as the TV Everywhere. We are currently out of country with a decent connection. Channels is on the struggle bus with the HDhomeRun channels (even SD ones) giving me "bad signal" constantly. The TV Everywhere ones stream just fine. This worked perfectly at home before I left, so I'm not sure what to look out for, how to fix it. Plex, running from the same server, is having no issues at all. Of course, I have no way to debug this remote, but it's frustrating to see.
What device are you trying to watch on? What version number is the Channels app on there?
Does the Support > Logs on my.channelsdvr.net show any errors?
What is the exact error message you're seeing on your TV? I don't think we have a message "bad signal" in our app.
It said "poor signal" and at one point "dropped signal" in green letters. this is an example from the logs:
2022/08/23 17:04:10.535673 [HLS] Probed live stream in 510.117788ms: mpeg2video 704x480 tt 1870184bps
2022/08/23 17:04:12.588650 [HLS] Session ch810-d132791FD-5b98c16a0bdd started in 3.035881804s
2022/08/23 17:04:12.589864 [ENC] Starting encoder for ch810 in /volume1/ChannelsDVR/Streaming/ch810-d132791FD-5b98c16a0bdd-2926444511/encoder-1-2277498510 at 1 (0.485544) (encoder=h264_vaapi, resolution=480, deinterlacer=hardware, bitrate=7488, segment_size=0.01)
2022/08/23 17:06:13.843074 [HLS] Stopping transcoder session ch810-d132791FD-5b98c16a0bdd (out: 2m3.341622s, finished: false)
2022/08/23 17:06:13.882199 [ENC] Stopped encoder for ch810 in /volume1/ChannelsDVR/Streaming/ch810-d132791FD-5b98c16a0bdd-2926444511/encoder-1-2277498510 after encoding 1 to 99
2022/08/23 17:06:13.882519 [HLS] ffmpeg: ch810-d132791FD-5b98c16a0bdd-remux: [mpegts @ 0x7024700] Dropped corrupted packet (stream = 1)
2022/08/23 17:06:13.882540 [HLS] ffmpeg: ch810-d132791FD-5b98c16a0bdd-remux: [mpegts @ 0x7024700] Dropped corrupted packet (stream = 2)
Can you take a photo?
What upload speed is your internet connection at home rated for? Have you tried lowering playback bitrate at the client end?
Sometimes this is superimposed over the picture, others it goes black. Channels for FireTV (stick). Channels running on Synology at home. SD stream.
It will also at time say "unstable signal." Same color and placement of that text.
That message is not from our app.
It's coming from your TV.
I would guess the hdmi port is flaky, or your don't have stable power from the usb you're using.
Hmmm....oddly ONLY happens on the homerun channels, which is why it's weird. If I tune to the numbers up in the 1000's, which are the TVE channels, I never get that message.
What could be different about the homerun channels stream vs. the TVE ones that this TV is freaking out about?
Not sure, very strange. I wonder if it's the FireTV itself that's crashing or something.
How do you recover from this error? Does pressing back bring you to FireTV Home Screen? Or channels app?
Try changing Settings > Playback > Advanced > Video Decoder to Software
It will say poor signal, then freeze for a blip, then play for a bit, then hesitate and show that message again. It lets me change channels, move to the TVE ones, etc. in doing some debugging while sitting here:
HD channels from homerun never show "poor signal" though they will glitch a bit.
SD channels oddly have the most issues. 809 and 810 are subscription channels, but not DRM'd. They are in SD and they both barf when pushed through to the TV.
I'll try your decoder suggestion.
Update: no difference -- still get the message. Seems localized to these two channels in particular. Very odd. Bigger thing: I get the SAME MESSAGE when viewing this over my iPhone using the channels app, so I think this is the HDHomeRun injecting that text (or the cablecard). I never saw this in the house when I was there, so I will need to debug this when I can see the HDHomeRun menus from inside the house...
Okay then it must be coming from the cable feed itself. Maybe they're having issues on those channels.
You should see the same thing in Plex on those channels
What happens if you use the SD’s HDHR app to view these channels live? Do you get the same message?
Update: I'm back in CR and this time I had an AppleTV with me. First, the app is so much better on the AppleTV than the fire stick. Even in moments when it's buffering, it's more graceful. I haven't had anything resembling that message I was talking about above.
I am baffled by the buffering, however. The "server" is in my home, 40MB up speed, rock solid. I am currently in a hotel getting 40MB down to my room. It should be more than enough to get a 7MB stream, yet I get frequent pauses on both SD and HD content. What can I do to look into why the pauses would have happened?
Were you having these issues with recorded content or Live TV? There's a lot less we can do with Live TV other than increasing the amount of time we pause at the start to increase the buffer size...
If you submit diagnostics after a session when you've experienced what you think is bad quality, we can check it out and see if there's something we could do to improve the situation.
Turning on the Stats (pull down on the screen and go over to Options) will have some details about how much cache is available, the current download speed, how many timeouts have been experienced recently, etc.