No smooth playback of live TV (1 Viewer)

[hol353]

I have been using MP1 for many years on my current hardware (old but worked well with MP1). I've now reformatted my HDD and installed MP2 to give it a try. Looks really, really good except...

Occasionally, live-tv becomes jumpy after a period of time (e.g. 20 minutes) and then goes smooth again and later jumpy again. By jumpy I mean it seems to drop frames every second or so. Really noticeable on horizontal pans. Seems like something kicks in in the background and does something that affects live tv. I haven't noticed the problem on recorded TV or movies although I haven't watched many.

I've tried lots of things. I've turned off EPG grabbing, fiddled with the nvidia display settings, put the timeshift buffer on it's on HDD, swapped from LAV filter back to Microsoft's built in codec. CPU usage sits at around 10% or lower when live tv is running.

Q: Is there an equivalent to the MP1 shift 1 screen that shows lots of details about refresh rates, frame rates, moving graphs, resolution etc? That was really handy in trying to diagnose problems like this.

I haven't got MP1 installed on this setup yet. I've been trying to avoid doing that.

Any other suggestions that I can try?

Dean
--- Post updated ---
Sorry logs attached. Note that it was jumpy around 18:40 29/09/2016:

 

[morpheus_xx]

Q: Is there an equivalent to the MP1 shift 1 screen that shows lots of details about refresh rates, frame rates, moving graphs, resolution etc? That was really handy in trying to diagnose problems like this.

Yes, please check http://wiki.team-mediaportal.com/2_MEDIAPORTAL_2/9_Reference/Statistics_Renderer?highlight=f10.

 

[HTPCSourcer]

Hi Dean,

Your server log is taken at INFO level. Can you please set it to ALL as explained under "Adjusting log levels for diagnostics" here? Then please try to reproduce the issue and post the new set of logs.

One thing I noticed is that the tuner card reports very low signal levels. This may not be an issue as drivers may report non meaningful signal levels, but it may also be an indicator of some real signal issues, due to a badly oriented dish or a cable problem. Since you say that Live-TV is usually OK, it is unlikely that the server signal really is the source of the problem.

 

[hol353]

Your server log is taken at INFO level. Can you please set it to ALL as explained under "Adjusting log levels for diagnostics" here? Then please try to reproduce the issue and post the new set of logs.

Will do proper server logs on the weekend.

Thanks for the tip about how to show renderer stats. Interesting... What does F11 and F12 do exactly? They seem to greatly improve the smoothness of live tv. In particular going to vsync. Perhaps I'm imagining it though. I'll keep fiddling...

When I produced the logs the tuner signal was probably low due to the terrible weather (thunderstorms etc). We use a UHF TV antenna to get free to air tv.

Thanks for the tips.

 

[Cordraconis]

I will jump in on this also, as I have the same stuttering problem, so maybe I can help finding out. (It is not related with my Tuner card instability - which I hope somebody will look into eventually.)
Right now I have changed from the LAV codec to the microsoft one, changed interlacing settings around, framerates etc... so maybe we can agree on a baseline for testing?

The problem is in general with how the client part plays the video: recorded TV plays fine in VLC player, but in MP2 it stutters. I noticed MP2 does interlacing and disabling it in the LAV codec improved matters some. Enabling it in VLC player (many options there) gives mixed results.
It is NOT related to processing power: I maxed out all cores and even the GPU at the same time with a mining program and impressively VLC player gets by on the hyperthreading part (=unused part) of the CPU alone. With full GPU-load there are some in-frame glitches dough. No stuttering.

After many hours of poking around in the firewall, I finally connected a client on my laptop to the HTPC server: same stuttering on the laptop.
I even managed to siphon off the RTSP stream of the active TV tuner card to a VLC player on my laptop: No stuttering, and a bit more details, again because of no deinterlacing.
And it it a 6-year old laptop, so again not CPU related.

F10 is informative on both HTPC and laptop, and going trough the F11 switches gives Vsync as winner, but still no sigar.

questions or tips?

 

[morpheus_xx]

F10 is informative on both HTPC and laptop, and going trough the F11 switches gives Vsync as winner, but still no sigar.

Can you post screenshots of this?

Also some more questions: what screen refresh rate you have set up in Windows? I expect you have PAL TV source as well (50fps?). Having a matching Windows refresh rate=50Hz is also a key to smooth playback (at least to avoid "micro stutters").

For further tests you can also playback a recording inside GraphEdit, there you can test different decoders / video renderers to narrow down the different component's impact.

 

[Cordraconis]

OK, but might take a few days.

From the top of my head, I think Windows is on 1080p and 50Hz.
in the beginning the red line smoothly decreased(halved) every few seconds, but after changeing I-don't-know-what it stays fairly constant with even some peaks UP! the green and blue lines are jagged.

I'll take sceenshots both from the HTPC and the laptop client, so we can compare. Hang on.

 

[hol353]

vsync seems to fix the judder problems on my computer. Anyway to make this the default? Everytime I close MP it goes back to 'default'.

 

[Cordraconis]

I got the requested screenshots, and then some more.
All systems are Windows 7 64bit. The laptop system is a .vhd native boot (junk/test system), but besides some HDD/swapfile overhead, it runs directly on the hardware.
I used a .ts test recording from National Geographic on all systems.

The screenshot names are self explanatory.

Morpheus, since I don't have the time or knowhow of your dev/test team, but I do have some unused virtualisation capability ;-), I wanted to recreate the problem inside a VM with a full MP2 install and the .ts file. Then I wanted to put VNC in there and give the link to you/your team to test stuff for a few days. (You might want to make a sleeping schedule with the other devs around the world.)
To my suprise there was no stuttering inside the VM! (Tested on my TV. As I do about 90% of all the "work" in my HTPC in VNC from work, I have to be carefull for interpreting full-frame-video. F10+screenshots and logfiles are objective dough...) Also I used full screen mode, as in windowed mode the resolution is automatically lowered inside the VM.

This confirms a theory I have: both VLC player and the VM decode the video data and then pass everything on to windows with the question to paint everything on the screen.
MP2 however, tries to do everything itself, including painting the video on the screen, and there happens the stuttering problem.

I haven't got around to trying the GaphEdit yet (neat program!), and probably that will take some days too. Remember the VNC remark above... I have to be physically in fromt of my plasma TV for that.

 

[Cordraconis]

erm... has there been any progress on this or my screenshots?
Been busy and then on holiday with my family, but now I still have some days off to try some stuff out.