A few windows client questions

[time_lord]

Ok I think I have an idea what is causing OSD problems. I applied win updates, rebooted, OSD working. I can pause for a short or long time, resume, FF, and the OSD is displaying as expected. But if I alt-tab to another app and come back to nextpvr a minute or 2 later, the OSD is no longer working (wonder if anyone else can replicate this).
Update: I got lucky; it did not consistently work after a fresh start, like I thought it did.
I can return to the guide and back into watching something and the OSD is still broken.

I use the client because I often use it windowed (not maximised) and alt-tab away to other tasks (let tv buffer a few minutes) and return to client periodically. I find it easier to task switch like this (rather than use in browser and switch tabs, and I often have dozens open) and find it more responsive.

[time_lord]

Did anyone else have any thoughts regarding the various issues I mentioned in my initial post?
I've continued to have problems, so eventually out of desperation I have switched back to 4.2.5, and all problems are gone (OSD always works, FF/RW, no freezing on FF/RW or audio loss). This is on my new hardware, win 11 and with the new quadHD card.
It pains me to think I cannot use 7.0.5 and keep the software up to date :-( ... any other suggestions as to what could be going wrong for me with v7?

[Bobins]

I use the NPVR client all the time driving my main TV and Kodi for a couple of the smaller ones elsewhere in the house.

My personal experience is the the Microsoft decoders are not as reliable as the LAV ones.
On that basis you need to ensure you've installed the latest 32bit LAV codecs (YES 32bit!) and set all the decoders to LAV.
I personally don't have issues with the OSD.
When you moved from V4 to V7, did you start completely fresh or did you copy across things like the database or config file?

Ray

[mvallevand]

Given your major problem with not showing the OSD which you need to figure out first I didn't go through the whole list

2 - LAV will help and if not I expect my yauiclient works better and stay tuned for yauiclient 3.
3 - I don't know a setting to change the default to for en or eng in NextPVR.exe but again yauiclient can do this.
4 - You probably have thumbs enabled which you can't see without the OSD fix the OSD problem or disable thumbnails, or try yauiclient.
5 - The OSD you can't see also requires an ESC fix the OSD problem or disable thumbnails, or try yauiclient.

Martin

[time_lord]

Hi Ray, yes when I moved from V4 to V7, I copied across the database and config file.
It hadn't even occurred to me to update LAV codecs - I still had what I initially installed, 0.70 (circa 2018)! I saw in some of the later releases improvements to sync'ing between video and audio.

With the latest LAV codes it's made a massive improvement! I haven't had audio out of sync, or audio not playing after FF or RW. Also, the OSD is way more reliable! It keeps working for longer, still works after long pauses... mostly. I did pause last night to 10-15 minutes and then the OSD was not working after that.
It appears to me that maybe when the transport stream is a bit messed up (we've had horrible weather here for the last few days), maybe the OSD is therefore affected and no longer appears? (Sub might know if that makes sense.)
When the OSD stops working, I can only get it going again by restarting the client. I thought maybe a bad state is retained in the tuners, so I turned off the 'keep tuners primed' setting, but it made no difference. (I've also made sure thumbs are off.) I noticed that when live tv is playing and the OSD is not working, I still have to press ESC twice to return to the parent screen, so I assume the OSD component is still in the UI, just not visible.
FYI, just returned to client - has been paused for the last 23 minutes and after resuming, OSD is still working.

So V7 is much better now and the OSD breaks much less frequently. I might try seeing, for a couple of days, how well V4 works with the new codecs, but I never had OSD problems with V4. I did notice that V4 was much slower to respond to keyboard actions since I've had V7 installed, so there must be some interference between the two. (When I run V4, I ensure V7 npvr service is not running.)

[BrettB]

I use the client because I often use it windowed (not maximised) and alt-tab away to other tasks (let tv buffer a few minutes) and return to client periodically. I find it easier to task switch like this (rather than use in browser and switch tabs, and I often have dozens open) and find it more responsive.

I definitely wouldn't try using the browser interface for playback long-term or in the background--good call there. However, I would suggest that you consider yauiclient. In addition to simply running in windowed mode, it actually allows you to have multiple windows playing multiple recordings and/or channels at the same time (great for watching/monitoring multiple sports simultaneously, etc.). I know that Martin has made some really significant improvements to it recently (including supporting more platforms, local thumbnails, and speed improvements) in a v3. But, I don't think that has been released yet. I'd suggest that you keep an eye out for the release announcement for it.

So V7 is much better now and the OSD breaks much less frequently. I might try seeing, for a couple of days, how well V4 works with the new codecs, but I never had OSD problems with V4. I did notice that V4 was much slower to respond to keyboard actions since I've had V7 installed, so there must be some interference between the two. (When I run V4, I ensure V7 npvr service is not running.)

I would suggest that it is well past time to move on from v4. There are already some things that are very broken in v4 and will never be fixed. It is probably best to focus your attention on getting any problems with the current v7 worked out.

It sounds like you've made good progress with the current LAV filters. That's great. You still didn't post any logs, though, so it's difficult for us to guess what might be causing your problems. If you can recreate the problem, get a set of logs (using the browser interface Settings | Log Files button to ensure they are complete), and then post along with the approximate time that the problem started, we might be able to see a correlating error, etc. in the logs. Sometimes there are also Windows Event Log messages, those are typically for UI clients not the native Windows .exe client. But, you could also take a look there.

It's been a long time since I've actually used the native Windows .exe client, so I'm rusty on that. The most common issue is usually solved with the latest 32-bit LAV filters as you discovered. Since your remaining problem seems to be focused only on the OSD, I'm wondering if it might be Video Renderer related. I recall some users having problems with that in the past. You might want to try out different settings for that.

[Bobins]

My question about whether you'd copied across the config file after installing V7 was a concern that you've could have ended up with a config file that didn't include settings for some of the things changed since V4.

When I made the upgrade from V4 to V6 then V7, I started with new clean config files and tweaked a few of the settings that I had changed in the earlier versions.

Ray