Skipping

[lemming]

Hi
I recorded Hellboy 2 on TV4 a few weeks ago, and finally got around to sitting down and watching it with the kids. Recorded OK, but I noticed about a third of the way in, I lost the ability to skip forward through the adds. CNT left or right just stopped working. I have never been able to navigate using the time line bar thingy, so bailed out and finished playing in VLC. Is there an obvious reason the skip stopped, and should I be able to click on the timeline, and move back and forth?? Only a minor problem, but would be nice to sort. Am running NPVR 2.03 with what I believe to be the latest patchs...

Cheers

[sub]

Hard to guess why exactly. If we'd been earlier in the release cycle, and the problem was reproducible on this recording, I could have provided a patch to collect more info. Unfortunately I'm not well placed to make patches at this stage.

[Reddwarf]

I'v seen this happening a few times, somewhere during playback of a recording skipping stops working and the timeline shows zero in both ends. I cannot reproduce it at will since I'v found no pattern in it. I guess if it occurs again I can burn the entire recording on a dvd and mail it to you for debugging.

[lemming]

Hi Sub

Still have the recording if its any use, let me know....

What about the skipping along the time line??. Works fine on a client, but not on the server. Anything dumb to look for??

[whurlston]

I've seen this happen on my QAM channels. On one station, it is guaranteed to happen whenever an ad for the local news comes on. There is an obvious glitch during playback at the beginning of the ad and from that point on, I loose the ability to skip. I don't know what they are injecting into the stream that cause it. VLC is usually the only player that will allow me to skip past that point. All DirectShow players fail regardless of the filesource/decoders used. Repairing the stream with VLC (or sometimes VideoRedo) usually fixes it.

[sub]

Hi Sub

Still have the recording if its any use, let me know....

What about the skipping along the time line??. Works fine on a client, but not on the server. Anything dumb to look for??

When playing directly on the server, it has access to the timing.info, and should be good at skipping. When you playback from client, it doesnt have that, and instead has to try to guess at the time line by looking at timestamp samples from the beginning and end of the recording, and unfortunately the broadcaster can do all sort of screwy things with those. If you're lucky it'll guess about right. If you're unlucky the timestamps will make no sense at all, and give the application some entirely wrong estimate of the time line - which leads to shitty skipping accuracy. (as mentioned above, these can sometimes be greatly improved by running through remuxing utilities)

Yes, you can click on the timeline, but it'll only be as good as the time line as mentioned above.