Unpredictable skipping/fast forward during remote playback of recordings

I’ll gladly test it again! Will report back tomorrow.

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Okay, remux playback of OTA andTVE completed recordings appears to be very smooth. However, I am now running into a different issue with both OTA and TVE recordings in progress. Playback stops 5-10 seconds in. I would send logs but it does not appear that the logs have any record of these remux sessions, even when being played remotely. They DO show up in the Activity panel on the Settings page.

If I start transcoding, the sessions show up in the logs.

Edit: upon further testing, completed OTA recording playback (even completed) while remuxing is flat-out broken, at least on both tvOS and iOS. Either hangs and refuses to play anything or exits out of the player completely.

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Thanks a lot for testing.

Everything on the DVR side looks fine, however I found a bug on the tvOS/iOS app which was causing these problems. I've uploaded a new beta Channels DVR app to TestFlight with a fix.

Thanks for the reply, unfortunately I’m still seeing the same behavior on both tvOS and my iPad Pro even after grabbing the latest beta. Not sure if it is affecting other platforms; I don’t have any other devices with me to try on.

Just wanted to add that this bug makes the player behave very differently than the bug with the old remuxer; there is instantly closing of the player even while the video is paused and I am seeking with the Apple TV remote. I’m assuming it crashes as it is trying to preemptively fetch the video from the timestamp the cursor is on.

If it doesn’t crash, the playback jumps to a completely random point, and after it tries to resume playback it may jump to another 2-3 random points before crashing. With the previous remuxer, it would jump a lot but usually not beyond 5-10 minutes of where I wanted to seek, and I didn’t see the sudden exiting of the player often.

Can you submit diagnostics from the app when this happens

Yes, I’ll try to send from my iPad shortly.

Just sent diagnostics from playing back two OTA recordings. The player crashed immediately after showing one frame in both cases.

Thanks. We are working on a fix.

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Great, thanks. I’m sure you may already know based on logs/your own reproduction of the bug, but with the latest server and app betas the player simply skips to live when trying to playback (remote remux) an OTA recording in progress.

Also, my old OTA recordings without the new streaming indices seem to play wonderfully. In my very limited testing, I’ve seen no sign of the original scrubbing bug. Perhaps if the new bug is hard to squash, a temporary fix might be to disable the new m3u8 generation for new OTA recordings?

The bug is fixed we are just doing our final testing to avoid pushing out another build that barely works :slight_smile:

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Alright the new beta is up on TestFlight.

Hopefully this is it! I’ll try it out later this evening.

All of my recordings (completed and ongoing) are good now! Thank you for pushing out the fixes quickly.

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Yay!

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Within the last few weeks I’ve noticed issues fast forwarding as well, though I’m not sure if it’s the same issue. In my case, I’m watching on tvOS. At the beginning of this month, I switched from OTA to a HDhomerun Prime, but I don’t think the problem started until this week Or perhaps last week. Anyhow, if I try to fast forward, I can hit the remote and sometimes it jumps ahead, but many times nothing happens, it continues to play. I end up pressing it a lot because it doesn’t react as well as it used to. It is very unresponsive. I have not tried the transcode option yet.

What kind of remote? You're saying you click FF and it doesn't show the timeline or the FF icon? Sounds like it's running out of batteries or doesn't have good Bluetooth signal to the ATV.

Does the settings tab show Home checked for Quality set to Original?

It’s the AppleTV remote. I charged it within the past week I believe. Sometimes I get the timeline, sometimes I don’t. I do get the spinning icon sometimes as well. Even when I don’t see the timeline pop up, I see the white light on my AppleTV go out in time with the button presses.

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Could you try running a speedtest from your dvr: Frequently Asked Questions

We have some stuff in the development pipeline which will reduce bandwidth requirements for seek/ff and make it almost instantaneous.

I got about 250 Mb, about 6 ms latency and I think it was under 2 for jitter

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