Slow / delayed resume after skipping while paused

[BigMoose]

Mine is far from "not too bad" - this is general skipping of HD recordings, not just from a pause. As I say, sometimes the only thing for it is to exit and resume playback. Annoyingly it's intermittent and seems more likely to do it when the wife is watching something than when I have the machine to myself to play around!

[Bathman]

I've found skipping to be poor ever since I switched to NPVR.

In fact the pause after I press the skip button is that long I now no longer skip through the adverts.

The skipping problem only occurs with TV Recordings and Live TV. Divx and DVD are fine.

Is it a TS problem?

[Reddwarf]

The skipping problem only occurs with TV Recordings and Live TV. Divx and DVD are fine.
Is it a TS problem?

I'v found that a short skip (forward or backwards) helps when npvr hangs after skipping. Have you tried it?

[imilne]

With GBPVR you could just go clickity clickity clickity and skip as fast as you could press buttons on your remote, and even if the video couldn't keep up you could always see your position in the timeline. NPVR just doesn't seem to be able to do that. Hopefully things will improve though.

Iain

[griffy]

Surprised that SUB didn't port the TS player across as GB-PVR was/is working 100%

[sub]

Surprised that SUB didn't port the TS player across as GB-PVR was/is working 100%

I have to laugh when I see comments like this. Rose coloured memories of things were generally considered crappy at the time...

When I was still working on GBPVR, people were continually complaining about it's crappy TS playback (for example, it was never able to get the duration or skipping anywhere near accurate (relied on guessing from the bitrate)). I think people have either have selective memories. I'm not claiming the current TS playback is perfect, but I'd rate it as a lot better than GBPVR's in lots of ways.

[BigMoose]

I'v found that a short skip (forward or backwards) helps when npvr hangs after skipping. Have you tried it?

This is what I do and it mostly solves the problem. Sometimes not and I end up exiting and resuming playback. I'm also fairly sure it's only live TV and recordings that this happens with. Would logs from when it happens show anything useful?

[johnsonx42]

Sub,

.ts playback in NPVR is indeed far superior to GB-PVR. I'm sure most people who felt playback and skipping was oh-so-perfect in gb-pvr were actually using the DVR-MS mux or one of the MPEG muxes. I used DVR-MS, with which skipping and comskip were nearly perfect. You've VASTLY improved .ts playback and skipping since the GB-PVR days, but it's still not as good as DVR-MS was. In particular, .ts still seems much less tolerant of a less-than-perfect bitstream than DVR-MS. I know there are technical reasons why that is the case, and that improvements are not trivial.

I still think there is something not quite right with your code in regards to the skip timing. Just after you introduced the timing.info and made a couple of patches to fix a few things, you had it just about perfect. 10 seconds skips were precisely 10 seconds in either direction. Now forward skips are around 3 seconds too long, backwards skips the same amount too short. Comskip jump points are also off by similar amounts, but it seems more unpredicatable lately (so the adjustments afforded by the comskip offset parameters you added are not as helpful as they initially were). Lately I have had more trouble getting a really good, clean signal, so some of the more random behavior I've been seeing may be due to that.

I'm wondering if you've put any more thought or effort into an idea we talked about in a thread quite awhile back, of making jumps only to I-frames. I suspect that some of the problems people have with skipping acting funny are caused by the decoders not always handling jumps into the middle of a frame sequence and hitting a bunch of P- or B-frames before getting a proper I-frame. I think, but certainly am not sure, that this is what causes it to just freeze sometimes after a skip, or to resume playback in choppy slow-motion.

[mvallevand]

The skip values NPVR send mvpmcx2 are exactly what I expect to see and it is working very well. However I have noticed in several of BrettB's logs that the first Timing.Info value is not always valid and I had to adjust for it.

If you look at this recent example he looks to be streaming at about 16 Mbs but the Timing.Info includes some start up time. Without adjust all skips on this file would be about 6.5 seconds off.

Code:

0,0
6349,503088
7207,3437768
8065,5282424
8938,7127080
9796,8971736
10670,10313304
...

Martin

[BrettB]

If you look at this recent example he looks to be streaming at about 16 Mbs but the Timing.Info includes some start up time. Without adjust all skips on this file would be about 6.5 seconds off.
Martin

This is a VERY INTERESTING observation, Martin. And, since different tuners (maybe even different channels on the same tuner?) have different startup times, it would also explain why the offset parameter values we need to set are different for different recordings!