Skip Problem

[johnsonx42]

What's interesting about Graham's logs vs. mine, is that while my skips are all off by 3-4 seconds (forwards skips are long, backward skips are short), my logs always show that a 10 second skip is actually a 10 second skip, and reports position after the skip within a second of the desired skip point (which just means that whatever is causing this, NPVR honestly 'believes' it's doing the skips correctly). That's why I've never posted logs about this problem, as there's nothing in the log indicating a problem. I was actually a little surprised to see blatant evidence in Graham's logs where mine show none.

edit: I'm starting another thread now to avoid any further hijack of this one. This one is about the video freeze after skipping.

[Graham]

Curiouser and curiouser.

I have watched the same recording using Videos and using Recordings. I get randomly unreliable skips with both.

When a skip works well (skips and quickly restarts both video and audio) then the timeline is displayed as an OSD. When the skip works badly (video or audio or both freeze for ten or twenty seconds or more) then I do not see the timeline displayed as an OSD. Does the timeline display (e.g. the calculation of the current position for the display) have a glitch in it?

Thanks

[Graham]

I have uploaded a recording. Skips froze for me with some of the freezes lasting tens of seconds ... perhaps even a minute or more.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/63058072/bears.ts

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/63058072/bears.timing.info.txt

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/63058072/bears.log

Hope this is a bit helpful.

Graham

[donschjr]

Can't help with the problem but I can confirm a similar problem here to the point where skipping isn't usable. When I try to skip the and get a freeze the only way to fix it is to hit pause then hit pause again and then the play will resume with the skip otherwise my video will stay froze indefinably.

[BigMoose]

Is this with SD or HD content? Or both? I think mine is now fine on SD (mpeg2) content, but with HD (H264) I have the freezing after a skip issue. I believe I read somewhere that this is down to the MS decoder being crap for skipping and I think the PDVD11 one is better and skips mostly OK. However it is crap in other ways (frames from ages ago flash back over and over again) which make it fairly unusable. I was using the PDVD11 decoder for a while but gave up due to this issue and went back to the MS decoder and my skipping has now got noticeably worse. Would be nice if there was an H264 decoder that worked well with UK HD satellite broadcasts!

[mvallevand]

Playing the bears here with no major skip issues (ffdshow audio and video) it's an SD file so it shouldn't be too bad.

Code:

2012-02-19 15:59:36.116    [DEBUG][1]    Current position is: 81.9530029296875
2012-02-19 15:59:36.116    [DEBUG][1]    Asking for position: 141.953002929688
2012-02-19 15:59:36.117    [DEBUG][1]    Using timing.info, jumping to time 141.953003 (offset 85608808)
2012-02-19 15:59:36.118    [DEBUG][1]    After skipping position reports as: 142.014999389648

However near minutes 4,5 and 6 there is visible data corruption on both the PC and PCH and if I try to skip during the pixelization it freezes on the PC.

sub this file reminds me that on the NMT you dont read the external thebears.ts.Timing.Info that you read on the PC.

Martin

[Graham]

However near minutes 4,5 and 6 there is visible data corruption on both the PC and PCH and if I try to skip during the pixelization it freezes on the PC.

Now here's the thing.

I am late to NPVR because all of my previous attempts to migrate have been abandoned because NPVR could not cope with my crappy broadcast reception. I currently use pvrx2 to record in dvrms format and the recordings often have glitches in them. During playback of a dvrms recording some glitches last tens of seconds and playback of video and audio stops and then starts again. Other glitches are momentary and appear as pixellation for a frame or several that lasts for a second or less. Previous versions of NPVR (and TS recording in GBPVR) did not cope well with these glitches with playback symptoms that included jumping forward by 30 minutes when hitting a glitch in the recording.

The current vesion of NPVR has not displayed these symptoms but it may be that it is glitches in the recording caused by glitches in the broadcast that are causing the skip problems. My own attempts to skip during playback of the bears suffered badly at about the six minute mark in the file and this should be visible in the log file.

Thanks for looking at this.

[Reddwarf]

Is this with SD or HD content? Or both? I think mine is now fine on SD (mpeg2) content, but with HD (H264) I have the freezing after a skip issue. I believe I read somewhere that this is down to the MS decoder being crap for skipping and I think the PDVD11 one is better and skips mostly OK. However it is crap in other ways (frames from ages ago flash back over and over again) which make it fairly unusable. I was using the PDVD11 decoder for a while but gave up due to this issue and went back to the MS decoder and my skipping has now got noticeably worse. Would be nice if there was an H264 decoder that worked well with UK HD satellite broadcasts!

I'v found that the PDVD12 decoder works better for H.264 content, freezing occurs only rarely since I changed to PDVD12. You can get it by downloading the trial version of PowerDVD. Look for the folder VideoFilter in Cyberlink\PDVD12\Common and copy it to a safe place before registering the filters in it.

[BigMoose]

Thanks for that, I'll give it a go later and see if it's any better than PDVD11 and skips better than the MS decoder

[Graham]

I tried PDVD12 and MS and LAV and ffdshow and they all seemed to have similar skip problems.