I have seen glitches on my Mac Mini. I just watched the 2 hour premier of “The Son” without 1 glitch. Maybe has to do with the New firmware on my Prime. 04/06/2017 (I think that is the date). Also, on the latest DVR as of 4/8/2017.
And COMSKIP was perfect.
Still issues for me. Saturday night live was only thing being recorded last night. HD prime latest beta firmware and beta DVR software, glitches in several portions of the show.
Spoke to soon. A lot of glitches with Masters Golf. I was watching delayed a bit.
I am starting to think there may be an impact from watching a show while still recording. I cant be 100% sure, but it seems my glitches could have aligned with when I started watching SNL and fast forward when I hit commercials. Is this a limitation of the DVR?
When did this start happening for you in the Mac?
Ok, did some testing and I did not have any problems. Recorded with 5 tuners. Two OTA and 3 cable (using HDHR Connect and Prime). Shared a OTA tuner to watch at same time. I had no video or audio problems. And I tested watching recordings while it was doing some commercial detection. Also tested watching a show while it is recording and had no problems with video or audio. The only thing my system does is Channels and Plex. Using a Q6600 quad core with 8 gigs RAM and a Nvidia GT 730 with passive cooling.
Not sure I have never had a glitch. I am sure I have reported before. Mainly the problem is pretty limited. And I am pretty sure I had similar problems with the FIOS Equipment. But sometimes it does get a bit worse but have no idea why. Most of the time it is fine. I would say intermittent.
Given that other windows users are not having any issues, it seems this might be an issue that’s specific to only some setups…
The specs posted so far are more than enough for Channels, and the disk speeds are plenty as well.
That leaves the network, so it’s worth double checking that you’re using gigabit on both ends. On windows, run this in the command prompt or powershell:
wmic NIC where “NetEnabled=‘true’” get “Name”,“Speed”
For example, I see:
C:\Users\tmm1>wmic NIC where "NetEnabled='true'" get "Name","Speed"
Name Speed
Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller 1000000000
and then go to http://my.hdhomerun.com, click on your PRIME, click System Status, click System Log, and look for lines like this:
19700101-00:00:03 System: network link 1000f
19700101-00:00:04 System: ip address obtained: 10.0.1.4 / 255.255.255.0
If both ends show gigabit speeds, then consider swapping out the network cable that’s attached to the PRIME. We’ve heard several isolated reports that the ethernet cable that comes with the PRIME can cause issues.
I’m going to try swapping 1 gig switch that the prime and DVR PC are connected to a long with Ethernet cables.
I’ve put out another build for mac/windows which contains additional logging. Please upgrade to it, and next time you notice glitching check the logs for any messages.
Invoke-WebRequest -Method Put http://127.0.0.1:8089/updater/check/2017.04.10.2142
I have gigabit on both ends with brad new shielded CAT6 cables. I upgraded to the newest DVR software but I haven’t had issues yet since upgrading to the beta FW on the primes. What exactly is the beta fixing?
The beta PRIME firmware fixes a long-standing but very rare bug on the PRIME’s ethernet firmware which could cause the network connectivity to drop randomly. There are many threads on the SD forums about this issue, such as https://forum.silicondust.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=113&t=33934
The 04.08 DVR increased the per-recording buffer from 16MB to 24MB. Video data from the HDHR is written into a buffer as quickly as possible, and then another thread writes from the buffer to the disk as quickly as possible.
The 04.10 DVR adds a “WARN” message to the logs whenever the buffer space runs out. Outside of PRIME firmware issues or ethernet cabling issues, this is one of the few places in the DVR that could be causing glitching. However, even 16MB is plenty of buffer (8 seconds minimum), so the only way it could be overflowing is if the disk wasn’t fast enough. The disk metrics I’ve seen so far are more than fast enough, so it’s unclear if this is the source of the problem or not. If the new log message shows up during recordings, then we will know for sure that the bug is in the DVR.
I think you may be right. I just started a few recordings on my windows DVR, then started watching one of them and skipped ahead. When I got to the point in the video that was recording during my skipping, I saw some glitches.
That is mostly when I see problems. I do this maybe 25%. I have less problems when watching after the show completes and COMSKIP completes.
Interestingly if I try the same steps on Linux DVR (QNAP), no problems.
I also watch in-progress recordings on my main Mac Mini DVR all the time and have never seen this problem there either.
Tried the same test on low-powered WDMyCloud 2TB, with three recordings at the same time, and still no problems.
So it appears to be something specific to windows version of the DVR.
Atleast I can sometimes reproduce now, so it should be easier for me to debug it.
Alright, I think I figured out what’s going on here…
The problem only seems to trigger when you are watching an in-progress recording and skip multiple times or try to fast-forward/rewind. It has to do with how anti-virus software works on windows…
@Jay78412 and @Scottteller What antivirus do you have installed? I’m using the standard Windows Defender.
Now that I finally know what the problem is, I will try to implement a fix tomorrow morning.
I am just using Windows defender installed from Windows 10.
Okay here's a workaround to try. Open the Windows Defender settings, and at the bottom add an exclusion for channels-dvr.exe:
Tomorrow I'll work on a real fix that doesn't require this workaround.
I am also using Windows Defender for anti-virus. I have added this exclusion, and will see if the glitches go away. Thanks so much for continuing to root cause this issue!