Web player issues (stuck in remuxing)

Channels DVR Server
#1

I can’t watch anything in the Channels DVR interface. When I find a program in the guide I’d like to watch, when i click on “Watch Now” nothing plays. Instead I get a “Remuxing” feedback that never ends (I’ve waited as long as 15 minutes). I get the same problem if I try to watch a program that is recording.

Why is any “remux” happening at all? I’ve never seen anything like this on our TiVo Bolts that have 4 tuners and can each record and play back live or recorded programming in essentially real-time. I get almost the same performance with Windows Media Center (on my Win7 PCs) with the exception that some issues can crop up if recording more than 3 high-bitrate sources simultaneously.

I can’t imagine what is happening, but I checked a recording file in Windows Explorer and see that it is saving a file with a .mpg extension. This seems problematic because all of our Xfinity programming that is not local is sent in an H.264 format.

Any ideas what might be going on?

Thanks!

#2

What browser and device are you using? Does the time counter next to the remux message increase?

#3

Using Firefox ESR (v52.9.0, I believe). The time counter next to the Remuxing label continue to increase and I’ve never seen it stop.

#4

Remuxing is necessary for watching in a web browser. It’s basically just reformatting the video stream into something the web browser can play. The codec is not changed, as most browsers can play h264 (which is why its remuxing and not transcoding).

Can you try Chrome or Edge to see if its any different? I assume you’re on a Windows machine?

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#5

Yes, the remuxing makes sense for viewing in a browser. Is there any way to have recorded TV link by choice to VLC aside from doing it manually (what I’ve been having to do)?

I’ll try it in Chrome and in Edge when I get home. Yes, this is using Windows 10. I’m trying (unsuccessfully so far) to ween myself off of WMC on Windows 7.

Thanks!

#6

If you right click copy link on the Watch Now button, you can paste that into VLC. You can also change the end of the URL from “hls” to “stream.mpg” for VLC, since it doesn’t need remuxing.

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#7

That’s a nice time-saving tip - Thanks!

#8

Okay, I tried using Channels DVR in Chrome and Edge as well last night. They both responded to the Watch Now button in a very similar fashion as in Firefox. None of them ever got to actually playing the video.

When I copied the link accessed by a right-click on the button, pasting it into VLC with the “hls” replaced by “stream.mpg” resulted in being able to play the video. It’s not a very easy way to “see” what’s on a number of different channels briefly and quickly.

#9

If you have any other phones or tablets it would be useful to try from one of their browsers as well.

When you try on your computer and it never starts playing, what does the Log tab show?

#10

I suspect perhaps the hardware transcoder on your machine is not working correctly. At the bottom of the Settings tab, change the web player to use software transcoding and see if that fixes the issue.

Please copy/paste the CPU/OS section at the top of that page here.

#11

Thanks for following up.

I’ve tried both hardware and software transcoding with the same results. I’ve also turned off commercial detection and another option that had been checked by default - not knowing if they might have any impact or not.

I’ll check the logs that have been created and also copy the CPU/OS section here when I get home to try it.

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#12

I went to the guide and selected Watch Now on three different programs. The second one actually played but there were so many dropped/stuck frames that it was really unwatchable. The first and third attempts didn’t seem like they would ever play. Here’s the log from those three attempts:

2018/08/01 01:07:34 [TNR] Opened connection to 1316D974 for ch627
2018/08/01 01:07:37 [HLS] Probing live stream for codec/bitrate took 2.4563708s
2018/08/01 01:07:37 [HLS] Starting transcoder for channel 627 from 127.0.0.1 (encoder=remux, resolution=720, deinterlacer=, bitrate=6000)
2018/08/01 01:08:21 [HLS] Stopping transcoder session ch627-dANY-ip127.0.0.1 @ 43.3433s
2018/08/01 01:08:21 [TNR] Closed connection to 1316D974 for ch627
2018/08/01 01:08:32 [TNR] Opened connection to 1316D974 for ch623
2018/08/01 01:08:33 [HLS] Probing live stream for codec/bitrate took 1.2418198s
2018/08/01 01:08:33 [HLS] Starting transcoder for channel 623 from 127.0.0.1 (encoder=remux, resolution=720, deinterlacer=, bitrate=6000)
2018/08/01 01:08:54 [HLS] Stopping transcoder session ch623-dANY-ip127.0.0.1 @ 19.436078s
2018/08/01 01:08:54 [TNR] Closed connection to 1316D974 for ch623
[mpegts @ 000000000148c040] Dropped corrupted packet (stream = 1)
2018/08/01 01:09:04 [TNR] Opened connection to 1316D974 for ch620
2018/08/01 01:09:05 [HLS] Probing live stream for codec/bitrate took 1.5409077s
2018/08/01 01:09:05 [HLS] Starting transcoder for channel 620 from 127.0.0.1 (encoder=remux, resolution=720, deinterlacer=, bitrate=6000)
2018/08/01 01:09:34 [HLS] Stopping transcoder session ch620-dANY-ip127.0.0.1 @ 28.061366s
[mpegts @ 000000000140c040] Dropped corrupted packet (stream = 1)
[mpegts @ 000000000140c040] Dropped corrupted packet (stream = 2)
2018/08/01 01:09:34 [TNR] Closed connection to 1316D974 for ch620

#13

The CPU/OS section of the Settings page:

OS
Windows Microsoft Windows 10 Pro
10.0.17134 Build 17134

CPU
4 cores / Intel® Core™ i5-2500K CPU @ 3.30GHz

RAM
15.90 GB
79.0% free

#14

Does that same recording play fine on VLC?

Can VLC play the hls urls?

#15

I’ve tried several programs in VLC by using the copy link option from the Watch Now button and changing the “hls” to “stream.mpg” and they’ve all played properly.

#16

Okay, so that means the underlying recorded file is fine, and streaming it directly works as expected.

What if you use the HLS url in VLC? That will tell us if the transcoded output is completely broken, or if its the web player that’s misbehaving for some reason.

#17

The HLS url plays fine in VLC. I can even just replace the channel number with another and it’ll play just fine as well. Interestingly, with VLC stopped but left open, I clicked on some Watch Now buttons from the Channels DVR Guide and several times the program would begin playing in the browser - although more hesitantly. I closed VLC and the behavior in the browser seemed to remain the same. About 1 out of every 5 to 10 tries will actually play video.

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#18

What kind of video card is in your PC? Can you check for any driver updates?

#19

The video card is an inexpensive SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 6570 2GB DDR3 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready Video Card (100324L) that I bought back in late 2011 to be a little better than the onboard graphics of the I5-2500K. When I installed Windows 10 (just a couple months ago), I simply accepted the driver Windows installed for it and haven’t experienced any issues anywhere else.

I think I should also point out that I’ve experimented with lower web viewer resolutions in case it might make a difference to reduce the transcoding effort, but it doesn’t seem to.

#20

In an earlier post you mentioned trying it on any phones or tablets. I have a LG G6 phone and a Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 8.4 tablet, but when I go to the Play Store, I see nothing called Channels. Is the Android App named something else or is there an APK file I need to download?

Thanks.