Continuity errors and Chrome browser.. (1 Viewer)

Hagfish16

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Hi all- new MP user here (v1.11).. I installed it yesterday for live OTA hdtv (pinnacle pctv 800e). My goal is to stream TV to my Kodi boxes (Fire TVs) with the PVR addon. I had used another plugin a few days ago that works great with WMC, but found that the plugin does not work with the nightly builds of Kodi (Isengard).

Anyways- I got things configured with media portal pretty quickly and was off and watching tv.. I noticed some artifacts, began to check the tsWriter log and noticed a high number of the dreaded continuity errors. I should note that this PC is my everyday PC (Win 7 64 bit / quad core amd 3 ghz / 4 gb ram / AVG antivirus disabled). I noticed after a restart that streaming to kodi was improved, and the errors were either gone or much less prevalent so I began opening apps one by one.. One of the first I opened was Chrome- immediately the continuity errors started fast and furious. Even if I wasn't actively browsing sites- the continuity errors would spew over and over resulting in artifacts/buffers etc. Killing the chrome processes result in little to no continuity errors. I've also found that using firefox results in far less "CE's".

So I'm left with a few questions.. Is TsWriter and/or streaming server meant to run on a box where the user will run little or no other apps? It seems really touchy. Even if a browser or process is spiking the cpu just a tad or using a little disk i/o- it doesn't seem like it should have such affect on the stream. It's not like the processor is pegged. During the errors it was never above 10 percent utilization, and Chrome can't be taxing the disk i/o that much I wouldn't think, especially when it's idle and not browsing pages.

One last note- the network is all wired gigabit. Sorry for the long post- just really trying to figure out if Live TV is really that touchy as far as running other light processes- or is it something in my setup that I need to continue to hunt down? Thanks for any thoughts/suggestions.
 

mm1352000

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    Hello and welcome! :)

    Short answers to your questions are that live TV should not be that touchy, and in general TV Server shouldn't have a problem co-existing with other software.

    There are a few "gotchas" to watch out for:
    • software that wants to use the same tuners that TV Server will use
    • software that heavily uses storage and/or CPU
    • security software that scans TV Server's program, config, timeshift or recording directories
    • software that wants to use port 554 (default RTSP streaming server port)
    I've not come across any reports of Chrome causing problems before, so this is new territory...

    Regards,
    mm
     

    Hagfish16

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    Thanks for the reply. Can't think of anything running on my pc that would be an offender of any of those things except that I do have Windows Media Center configured for live tv- however, it is never running while I have TVserver going. Maybe there are background WMC processes mucking up the streaming? I went ahead and did a little testing just running Mediaportal locally on the same PC as TV server without any addons/back ends. It ran fine without any continuity errors even with Chrome running with as many as 4-5 tabs open..
     

    mm1352000

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    Based on your result with MediaPortal, I'm curious about your signal strength and quality. Are you confident that it is okay? ...for all channels? In short: can you be sure that the variation you're seeing is not related to varying signal strength/quality?

    Another tip...
    Please try the DPC Latency Checker:
    http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml
     

    Hagfish16

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    Dowloaded the latency checker and everything was in the green. It reported my PC should have no issues streaming.. As far as signal- here is an example channel of one that plays perfectly with no CE's on the local machine, but many CE's when streamed to a backend / addon. Seems plenty strong to me- and there are actually many rain clouds in the area.

    Finally- I know it's not really fair to compare- but just to state the facts- when I was using WMC and the kodi addon for that- the stream was fine without artifacts. The reason I switched over to MP/Tvserver is that the nightly builds of Kodi now support live tv de-interlacing on the Fire TV / Android (Awesome!). Mediaportal addon works with the nightlies- so I'd love to get everything working correctly. Thanks again for the support

    wfaa_signal.jpg
     

    HTPCSourcer

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    Hi,

    You mention that your WMC isb still active. A standard MePo installation will deactivate this by Windows policy. Note that WMC is alsu using port 554 and can interfere with MediaPortal. It might be that the WMC services embed themselves into Chrome when the latter is started, but that's just va hypothesis. Try to deactivate WMC services in the MePo config and test ifverrorsb still occur.
     

    Hagfish16

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    Same old story unfort. Disabled the WMC services from TV server setup and restarted.. Relaunched TV server to make sure that it reported them stopped, which it did (everything was green). Same results as yesterday- TSwriter reports tons of ce's while Chrome is open, many many less when Chrome is closed, but still some pop up here and there (maybe every few minutes rather than every second). They increase significantly if I do any browsing regardless of browser, or run any other applications that use disk or cpu. Again- they all but disappear regardless of what program I might be running if I do everything locally on the same machine, whether it's mediaportal or kodi.
     

    mm1352000

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    Dowloaded the latency checker and everything was in the green. It reported my PC should have no issues streaming.
    You've got to run it while observing the continuity errors. Did you do that?

    As far as signal- here is an example channel of one that plays perfectly...
    Seems plenty strong to me- and there are actually many rain clouds in the area.
    Okay... so I take this to mean you're confident that your signal strength and quality is okay.

    ...with no CE's on the local machine, but many CE's when streamed to a backend / addon.
    Have you tried using a non-standard streaming server port?
    Also have you looked at the output of "netstat -an"?

    Something seems fishy with your network performance. Currently I can't explain it...
     

    Hagfish16

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    Jeez I don't know what to think right now.. After reading your post I ran the latency checker again while trying to reproduce the CE's.. Nothing- not one.. Currently I'm running chrome, firefox, and a few other apps on the server pc and I still can't get an error! I'm starting to wonder if it is a signal problem after all.. The rain clouds here have started to thin out a bit.. Even if that's it- I still don't understand why it didn't affect local TV playback on the server pc, as well as the fact that from my screen shot above (when the errors were spewing) I had a signal of about 90-95% even with the weather.. Anyways- I'm fully expecting the errors to return just given how weird my probs have been. Will report back- thanks again for the support.
     

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