Freezing viewing recorded or Live tv on Clients (1 Viewer)

[mm1352000]

Again MM1352000 thanks so much for your patience and help.

You're very welcome... and thank you for your persistence. Many people would have given up quite some time ago.

I may have found the problem. On a fluke I decided to pull the cable company installed amp / splitter out of the chain. It has been there since the beginning so I didn't think anything of it. I pulled it out and started timeshifting from all 6 tuners simultaneously for 20 minutes and I saw 3 continuity errors, that coincided with my starting of the 4th stream. Since then I have seen very few if any continuity errors. Certainly no where near what I was seeing before. The strange thing is that the signal levels as shown in the ceton screen are very much the same as before. Maybe the amp / splitter was introducing noise (it is an active splitter / amp)?

Hmmm, possibly... or maybe the amp/splitter was pumping up the signal too much. Signal that is too strong can be just as much of a problem as signal that is too weak.

On another note, I see this frequently on startup, where the tuners show as NA NA in the tv service screen. Stopping and restarting the service brings them to normal.

I do see what you mean from your log files.
To be completely up front with you: there is definitely something flaky about the CableCARD tuner detection. In some environments it is fine; in others like yours it is okay sometimes; in others it doesn't work at all. I think I've only seen problems with real networked tuners - ie. the ETH 6 and HDHR PRIME. The tuners are detected in time (sometimes up to 10 minutes)... but if everything was working properly they should be detected within a few seconds of TV service starting.

When I first added CableCARD tuner support I spent hours upon hours trying to debug this. Although I made a few improvements, I never felt like I really got to the bottom of the problem. Part of the difficulty is that I need access to a tuner for extended periods of time in order to troubleshoot. As you might know from my profile, I live in NZ so I can't debug this here locally. The only person on the team with a CableCARD tuner has a PCIe InfiniTV 4 which doesn't seem to show the problem. Attaching a debugger also seems to change the behaviour. So this is a tough one...

mm

 

[mguebert]

Well I was wrong the problem still is occurring. I don't think it is the tuner anymore. I was watching the first playoff game and in the 1st half it froze twice. In the second half it must have froze 20 times. After looking at the tvservice logs for the server I did not see any continuity errors, I also was running latency mon and during the freezes no latency problems were seen.

So I was starting to think it was a client problem but the curious thing is that on a couple of occasions I could hear the tv upstairs freezing at the same exact time on a different channel. So I am enclosing more logs.

Also another curious item, I am watching the second football game and I am into the second half with zero freezing. I wonder if it's possible there is something wrong with the Intel SSD I am using. It is an older 40g model, and smart data is good.

 

[mm1352000]

Hello again

Don't know when you are talking about specifically (in terms of first and second games) but there are discontinuities on the server side at about 15:40. The IPTV source filter log also shows later discontinuities, which the TsWriter log does not. I can't explain that... but AFAIK you can trust the IPTV source filter log.

mm

 

[mguebert]

There were two football games on today, I was watching the first one time shifting. The second one was recorded. There was not one single freeze on the second game, until the recording ended and I had to go to timeshifting mode. Then I started seeing freezes. It appears to be related to time shifting. I know I was watching the latency mon and process manager in windows during the freezing and there wasn't a correlation.

 

[mguebert]

Not sure what this means, but we were watching tv today and the channel just quit and went back to the guide. I tried to select the channel again and got a tuning failed error. Checked the tv service and all of the tuners showed NA.

Can you give me any more ideas?

BTW I disabled the Intel Nic and switched to the onboard intel NIC and still have the freezes. I am running out of ideas. I really want to get this fixed as I like MP quite a bit. Especially with argus used as the scheduler for recording.

 

[mm1352000]

Not sure what this means, but we were watching tv today and the channel just quit and went back to the guide. I tried to select the channel again and got a tuning failed error. Checked the tv service and all of the tuners showed NA.

Tuner detection and/or network issue. The tuner was detected when the TV service started... then undetected (ie. TV Server detected it was removed) some time later:

[2014-01-12 10:48:15,101] [Log ] [11 ] [INFO ] - Detected new OCUR/DRI device Ceton InfiniTV Ethernet (00-80-81-c9)

[2014-01-12 11:37:45,399] [Log ] [29 ] [INFO ] - UPnP device Ceton InfiniTV Ethernet (00-80-81-c9) removed

Can you give me any more ideas?

I am well and truly out of ideas.

mm

 

[mguebert]

MM1352000,

I have done some further troubleshooting, I have created a 8gb ramdisk to eliminate disk performance. I still experience freezing. I then loaded a competitor program NPVR (using sageDCT as a network tuner). I launched mediaportal and watched live tv, I experienced freezing within 10 minutes. I then launched NPVR and watched the same channel for more than 3 hrs with no freezing or stuttering. So I think that successfully eliminates my PC, Network, and Tuners as the suspect.

Please understand I am not trying to place blame, I really want MePo to work. NPVR lacks the polish and features I want from MePo. Is there any help you can give me.

 

[mm1352000]

Understood.
Are you able to give me access to your server with TeamViewer? I could do some troubleshooting...

 

[mguebert]

Absolutely I have no problem with this idea, great stuff. Let me get it setup

 

[mm1352000]

Great.
I've started a private conversation with you so you can share the connection details once you're up and running.