TVE - TiVo Stream play speed and audio sync issues

Channels DVR Server Troubleshooting
#1

So let me start by saying that I believe ~3 weeks ago this was not an issue - unfortunately I tend to update my server with the pre-release version every few days and this has now been an issue for more than a week, at least. In a nutshell, I'm TVE-only and when I select a channel from the guide there is a brief period where the audio works, then the picture appears and is at like 5x speed for a couple of seconds, then it usually settles down mostly. Audio is behind, and there is still stuttering most all the time.

I thought this might be a ARC or CEC issue, but CEC is disabled on most of my sticks and they all exhibit this behavior, though some to a lesser degree it seems. The main TV and soundbar are the worst. I have an Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K as well and while it showed this behavior briefly about a week ago it has been fine ever since.

Happy to provide more info. For sure the TiVo sticks worked great at first and I strongly prefer them to the Fire TV sticks now so they're on all my TVs.

#2

Submit diagnostics from the app after it happens

#3

Just submitted two instances, from 2 different channels to see if that helped any.

#5

I'm seeing a similar issue with TVE channels (on all clients, Android, Fire, iOS and tvOS). I've seen it on Comedy Central and Food network. Both live tv and recordings. It will play fine and then vid will pause (audio continue) for a few seconds and then vid will speed up to catch up with the audio. It happens occasionally. I haven't taken out a stop watch to see if it's random or every so many mins. If I watch those channels in the Philo app, they work fine. I'll have to check what it does in a browser to see if it's a TVE issue or Channels issue.

#6

@tmm1 I haven't seen any sort of reponse, much less an update on this from either ticket submission?

In any event, I want to report here that changing the Surround Sound mode on the TiVo to manual, then going down to the Advanced Settings at the bottom and setting Dolby DRC mode to off (instead of Line, which mine was set on), seems to have made the issue much less impactful and possibly resolved it (too early to confirm for sure).

Hopefully this is useful to others as well (@jgarwacki I know you said all clients so there is likely a Channels DVR component, but hope this helps a bit).

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#7

We're tracking this issue. It appears to be some kind of bug in the android audio api, where it starts playing audio but won't return how much has played. It's not clear if there's anything we can do on our side to prevent this from happening, as it seems to be random.

In some other cases, we've seen that trying to send 6ch audio can cause this, but in your diagnostics you're only sending 2ch and its still happening.

I'm glad you found some OS settings that seem to help. Keep us updated on whether it returns.

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#8

I appreciate the update. After further testing my change only fixed it temporarily.