Live TV view freezes on channel change (2 Viewers)

[Barry King]

Please go ahead and merge. I did switch away from the IR Blaster forum as you requested. I believe 2 of the links you show above are identical however I would very much appreciate any help or insight you can offer on my problem.

Thanks,
BK

 

[mm1352000]

Okay, the 2 "Live TV view freezes" threads have been merged to here.

Now the question is what is wrong.

At the time you provided your last set of log files you had set the audio codec setting to "ViXS Transcoder". That's a very strange choice, and it won't work. MediaPortal has been falling back to using ffdshow. Please go back to LAV.

Additionally, please can you answer 4 questions:

1. Do recordings work?
2. Did you learn your STB's remote control commands or did you select an existing STB (in the TV3 Blaster plugin)?
3. If you view the output of your STB independently of MP after a failed channel change without stopping and restarting TV in MP, what does the STB output show?
4. If you change the channel directly on your STB after a failed MP channel change without stopping and restarting TV in MP, what does MP show?

[edit: In case you're wondering, I'm asking the above questions because I don't see an obvious problem in your log files. Therefore I'm wondering if the STB is actually outputing something that MP can show.]

 

[Barry King]

Hello MM, the codec you seen in the logs may have been my attempt to try anything that would work. I have switched back to the LAV codecs as requested.

answers to questions above,
1. No, pressing the Record Now option causes the TV screen to freeze
2. Yes, I learned my remote through MP
3. The requested channel is being output by the STB. blasting seems to work correctly
4. The frozen frame of the failed attempt does not go away until a stop and start is made of MP Live TV no matter what channel you select the STB to be on.

As an additional observation, I have observed the logs in the tvserver_TVService.log and find that after seeing a log indicating that the IRBlaster was successful

"TV3BlasterPlugin: Blast Successful"

After this no other logs are generated until such time that I exit the MP application or turn LiveTV off/on. I know this because I waited around 4 minutes before doing these actions to see what the log file would show.
The same is true for the tvserver_MPFileWriter.Log

BK

 

[mm1352000]

Thanks for the answers Barry

1. No, pressing the Record Now option causes the TV screen to freeze

Sorry, I should have been clearer. When I said "recordings", I meant recordings that are scheduled in advance. Do they work?

2. Yes, I learned my remote through MP

Okay.

3. The requested channel is being output by the STB. blasting seems to work correctly

Without meaning to be pedantic: when you checked this, you actually viewed the output of the STB, right?
(I want to clarify that you're not making this statement based on [for example] the channel number shown by a mini-display on the front of the STB.)

4. The frozen frame of the failed attempt does not go away until a stop and start is made of MP Live TV no matter what channel you select the STB to be on.

Okay.

As an additional observation, I have observed the logs in the tvserver_TVService.log and find that after seeing a log indicating that the IRBlaster was successful

"TV3BlasterPlugin: Blast Successful"

This message means that IRSS thinks it was able to send the command successfully. IRSS cannot confirm that the remote control was learned successfully, or that the STB actually received the full command and acted on it successfully.

After this no other logs are generated until such time that I exit the MP application or turn LiveTV off/on. I know this because I waited around 4 minutes before doing these actions to see what the log file would show.
The same is true for the tvserver_MPFileWriter.Log

Yes, those log files would not be expected to show anything more. However, I would be very interested to see the TsReader log after waiting 4 minutes.


Based on all that you've said about this issue so far it seems like your tuner/capture card is causing this. In my opinion whatever the STB is outputting during channel change is confusing/disturbing the card's encoder, and the encoder is not able to recover until it is reset. Stopping and restarting TV in MediaPortal is one way of resetting it.

To be really specific, I think that the reason that you see the frozen picture is:

1. The card is not outputting anything at all, OR...
2. The card is outputting that frozen image.

If you wait 4 minutes then collect the TsReader log, I should be able to see which of these is actually happening. From your earlier log files I suspect it is more likely to be the second option.

The thing that confuses me is that I thought you were using this same setup successfully with WMC. Can you confirm?

...and one last thing: I'm interested to know if MediaPortal enables you to skip backwards and forwards (left/right keys) after the channel change... or what happens if you pause (space bar) wait 5 seconds and then unpause (space bar again)? If my theory about what's going on is correct, you should be able to skip back into the buffer from the previous channel and see normal video, and then if you skip forward again you should see the freeze frame from the channel that you tried to change to.

Regards,
mm
P.S. Thanks for your patience - it's much appreciated.

 

[Barry King]

Hello MM, actually recording does seem to work. When a recording starts I get a message indicating that times shifting has stopped, the LiveTV screen goes black and any attempt to turn LiveTV back on indicates that there is no card available. The recording is of the requested channel and it is not frozen.

Since my S-Video output of my STB is connected to my tuner card I connected the RCA output of the STB to one of my television inputs and find that at least on the RCA output the channels are changing as requested through MP channel changing.

As for the logs, the log file shows a regular stream of logs while watching a channel until a channel change is requested through MP at which time when the LiveTV freezes those logs stop. I would have expected if the channel had been changed and established correctly that the stream of logs under the new selected channel would have been occurring as well. Unless MP was having problems receiving the signal from the tuner card in some way.

You are correct that I had this working fine using WMC.

As for the pause, skip back and skip forward you are correct, I can skip backwards to see video before the freeze and when I skip forward past the point of freeze all I see is the freeze frame. If I pause and resume I can skip forward to catch up to real time but all I see is the freeze frame. The channel I see in the freeze frame is the channel I am switching from, not the one I am switching to.

I will add the Tsreader log file from my server ASAP[DOUBLEPOST=1452522974][/DOUBLEPOST]Here is the log file as requested. The timestamp to watch for is a change from 15:41 to 15:45

Thanks,
BK

 

[mm1352000]

Hi Barry

Thanks again for the answers.

To be completely honest, I'm pretty much out of ideas for solving this problem... and there's only a few more tests I could suggest to learn more about what is happening.

As for the logs, the log file shows a regular stream of logs while watching a channel until a channel change is requested through MP at which time when the LiveTV freezes those logs stop. I would have expected if the channel had been changed and established correctly that the stream of logs under the new selected channel would have been occurring as well. Unless MP was having problems receiving the signal from the tuner card in some way.

I have a different interpretation. To me it looks like the stream of log entries does continue. For example, if you look at the latest log file you provided...

Channel change ends here:
[2016-01-10 15:45:12,063] [ a259bc8] [4644] - Run() - Elapsed time from pause to Audio/Video ( total zapping time ) : 1137 mS

...and video + audio apparently continues until you stop TV:
[collapse]
[2016-01-10 15:45:12,349] [ a259bc8] [2018] - Demux : Video to render 0.828 Sec
[2016-01-10 15:45:12,350] [ a259bc8] [2018] - Demux : Audio to render 0.779 Sec
[2016-01-10 15:45:12,653] [ a259bc8] [2018] - Demux : Video to render 0.812 Sec
[2016-01-10 15:45:12,654] [ a259bc8] [2018] - Demux : Audio to render 0.770 Sec
[2016-01-10 15:45:13,369] [ a259bc8] [2018] - Demux : Video to render 0.797 Sec
[2016-01-10 15:45:14,044] [ a259bc8] [2018] - Demux : Video to render 0.756 Sec
[2016-01-10 15:45:14,244] [ a259bc8] [2018] - Demux : Audio to render 0.764 Sec
[2016-01-10 15:45:15,049] [ a259bc8] [2018] - Demux : Video to render 0.752 Sec
[2016-01-10 15:45:15,252] [ a259bc8] [2018] - Demux : Audio to render 0.764 Sec
[2016-01-10 15:45:16,655] [ a259bc8] [2018] - Demux : Audio to render 0.753 Sec
[2016-01-10 15:45:17,255] [ a259bc8] [2018] - Demux : Audio to render 0.705 Sec
[2016-01-10 15:45:18,058] [ a259bc8] [2018] - Demux : Video to render 0.746 Sec
[2016-01-10 15:45:20,457] [ a259bc8] [2018] - Demux : Video to render 0.715 Sec
[2016-01-10 15:45:25,063] [ a259bc8] [2018] - Demux : Video to render 0.713 Sec
[2016-01-10 15:45:29,267] [ a259bc8] [2018] - Demux : Audio to render 0.692 Sec
[2016-01-10 15:45:29,955] [ a259bc8] [1f44] - CTsReaderFilter:ause() - IsTimeShifting = 1 - state = 2
[2016-01-10 15:45:29,955] [ a259bc8] [1f44] - MPAR/Reclock not found
[2016-01-10 15:45:29,955] [ a259bc8] [1f44] - CTsReaderFilter:ause() - END - state = 1
[2016-01-10 15:45:29,955] [ a259bc8] [1e30] - Vid/Ref : 252.852, B-frame(06), Compensated = 18.252 ( 0.459 A/V buffers=00/01), Clk : 17.792938, SampCnt 532, stallPt 2.500
[2016-01-10 15:45:29,981] [ a259bc8] [1f44] - CTsReaderFilter:top(), state 1
[2016-01-10 15:45:29,988] [ a259bc8] [2018] - CDeMultiplexer::ThreadProc - Flush
[2016-01-10 15:45:29,988] [ a259bc8] [2018] - demux:flushing
[2016-01-10 15:45:29,988] [ a259bc8] [2018] - demux:flush audio
[2016-01-10 15:45:29,988] [ a259bc8] [2018] - demux:flush video
[2016-01-10 15:45:29,988] [ a259bc8] [2018] - demux:flush subtitle
[2016-01-10 15:45:29,989] [ a259bc8] [1f44] - CTsReaderFilter:top() done, state 0[/collapse]

If the stream from the tuner had completely stopped, I wouldn't have expected to see any "...to render..." entries at all.

@Owlsroost
Your interpretation of what TsReader is receiving would be most welcome.

As for the pause, skip back and skip forward you are correct, I can skip backwards to see video before the freeze and when I skip forward past the point of freeze all I see is the freeze frame. If I pause and resume I can skip forward to catch up to real time but all I see is the freeze frame. The channel I see in the freeze frame is the channel I am switching from, not the one I am switching to.

Yeah, this matches what I'd expect if the card were outputting the frozen frame.

One last question: does the audio also stop, or is it only the video that freezes?

 

[Barry King]

Sorry to hear you are unsure what the problem is. My feeling is that since all worked well with WMC and the fact that changing channels at the STB with STB remote works without freezing that there must be some MP to tuner card incompatibility of some kind. Recordings are working with channel changes which has solved one problem I was having. This would also suggest to me that there is some kind of incompatibility with MP LiveTV? However, I can re-establish LiveTV through an off to on transition of LiveTV and although this is annoying I can deal.

To answer your question on audio, the audio stops completely. No continuous output of a sound byte or continuing audio on the new channel. Just no audio at all ?

Currently I am trying to get guide info loaded using xmltv which is proving to be challenging. Unfortunately the issue being seen with WMC using zap2it is also being translated to xmltv as well. Data is not loaded due to an incompatible non-numeric entry in one of the xml fields which requires a numeric entry only. I am going to attempt to remove this field completely for entry and if this allows proper loading of the file then I will run the file through a pearl script or something similar to automate the procedure.

If you can think of any other information I can provide for the freeze issue, please feel free to ask.

BK

 

[Barry King]

Good news, I opted to go with zap2xml which after remapping and loading etc. ended up loading correctly. So I am now recording series correctly. Unfortunately I still have the issue where if a change the LiveTV either from channel, guide, keyboard or remote the LiveTV window freezes ? Changing the channel from the STB with the STB remote works fine, No freeze. As I said with the freeze I can clear by stopping and starting the LiveTV. However I have noticed that when I do this the LiveTV appears to start on the channel I was changing from and then moves to the channel I was changing to with no freeze.

Question: Is there any way to automate this such that when I select a channel from the guide that a stop and start of the LiveTV feature occurs ? Also, is it worth trying a previous release of MP since this is a pre-release and if I do this will I have to re-configure MP again ?

Thanks,
BK

 

[mm1352000]

Hi Barry

However I have noticed that when I do this the LiveTV appears to start on the channel I was changing from and then moves to the channel I was changing to with no freeze.

That's an interesting observation. Could you please attach another set of log files showing this scenario.

Question: Is there any way to automate this such that when I select a channel from the guide that a stop and start of the LiveTV feature occurs ?

No.

Also, is it worth trying a previous release of MP since this is a pre-release and if I do this will I have to re-configure MP again ?

I don't think previous releases will be any different, but you're welcome to try. As long as you don't do a full uninstall at any stage then I don't think you'll need to reconfigure MP.

 

[Barry King]

Here are the logs for the following procedure:
1. started MediaPortal Watchdog and pressed Proceed
2. after startup I pressed Guide on my remote. {ie. No LiveTV active yet}
3. pressed a channel on the Guide which started LiveTV
4. Took a few seconds for LiveTV to establish and by that time the new channel displayed
5. Pressed stop on the remote to stop LiveTV which presented back to the Guide
6. Pressed a different channel on the Guide and LiveTV presented immediately
7. Observed that the channel initially displayed was the old channel. Then observed MediaPortal
switching the channel on my STB to the new channel with no freeze.

This currently is my work around for using MP. I first have to stop the currently viewed channel which brings me back to the Guide and then search the Guide for a new channel to switch to. Any interaction to change the channel with LiveTV active and displaying causes the freeze. If I stop and start LiveTV I observe the action described in 7 above.

Logs are attached,
BK