live tv 'glitchy' until I pause and then play

[Pob]

Try the attached patch. It fixes the pre-play when using timeshift with TS.

Worked for me, thank you!

(no change to live preview of HD crashing though)

[sub]

Worked for me, thank you!

(no change to live preview of HD crashing though)

I havnt seen anyone else report live preview crashing yet, and it works fine with our HD H.264 channels.

[johnsonx42]

Try the attached patch. It fixes the pre-play when using timeshift with TS.

Mixed bag for me. It seems to correct the issue on some channels sometimes, while at other times the glitch is just the same as before; it will now also randomly dump back to the main menu after a channel change. It seems far more unstable now in general; gbpvr 1.3.7 as packaged seemed very stable (even the glitch was reliable), but with the patch it behaves more randomly and unpredicatable like 1.2.13 did.

It also did something very strange to the play bar on some channels; before, the play bar always showed 0:00:00 on the left with the total length of the current show on the right (like 3:00:00 for a 3 hour movie), with the portion present in the buffer showing in green. With the patch sometimes the play bar has something like -596523:-14:-08 on the left.

I've attached the logs dir, in case there's anything useful there.

[sub]

Mixed bag for me. It seems to correct the issue on some channels sometimes, while at other times the glitch is just the same as before; it will now also randomly dump back to the main menu after a channel change. It seems far more unstable now in general; gbpvr 1.3.7 as packaged seemed very stable (even the glitch was reliable), but with the patch it behaves more randomly and unpredicatable like 1.2.13 did.

I sure any other differences between patch and pre-patch is your imagination. There was only one line of code change - basically just a sleep when starting playback of .TS files. If you set the pre-play delay to zero, it'd be exactly the same as without the patch.

It also did something very strange to the play bar on some channels; before, the play bar always showed 0:00:00 on the left with the total length of the current show on the right (like 3:00:00 for a 3 hour movie), with the portion present in the buffer showing in green. With the patch sometimes the play bar has something like -596523:-14:-08 on the left.

Try it again. I'm sure it was just bad luck, and equally as possible pre-patch.

[johnsonx42]

I sure any other differences between patch and pre-patch is your imagination. There was only one line of code change - basically just a sleep when starting playback of .TS files. If you set the pre-play delay to zero, it'd be exactly the same as without the patch.

Try it again. I'm sure it was just bad luck, and equally as possible pre-patch.

Bizarre. It really behaved so differently. I'll give it another go soon (my GB-PVR test machine is my MAME arcade cab, which my kids are playing on right now). Maybe there was some bad weather up in L.A. between me and the transmission towers; on ATSC poor signal strength often manifests as exactly the same sort of glitch or skip.

[johnsonx42]

Sub,

You sir are wise. Having sent my little ones to the shower (literally), I fired up GB-PVR again. Sure enough, everything is working much better. I had to push the Pre-Delay up to 1000ms before the glitch was completely cured on all channels. It was pretty good at 500ms, but after a few channel changes it would show up on certain channels; even at 1000ms I got it once, but I called it good enough.

Thanks for the quick patch. Pretty nice to have the attention of the programmer.

Clearly I will need a signal amplifier for my antenna (a big roof-top type antenna in the attic). I knew I would eventually need it anyway, as I ultimately plan to feed 2 or 3 tuners in the GB-PVR machine, plus one or two other TV's in the house (at least until those TV's get GB-PVR clients of some sort).

A further question, if I may:

Is there a way to reduce or eliminate the need for a 1000ms buffer delay? I'm guessing it's not the playback decoder, as the problem was consistent across 3 decoders. Is this caused by my tuner somehow, or something else in my setup I could control? Or is this just the way it is?

Thanks again.

[sub]

Is there a way to reduce or eliminate the need for a 1000ms buffer delay? I'm guessing it's not the playback decoder, as the problem was consistent across 3 decoders. Is this caused by my tuner somehow, or something else in my setup I could control? Or is this just the way it is?

I suspect it'll come under the "just the way it is" category. The delay will vary from broadcast system to broadcast system, bitrates of the channels involved, how frequently iframes occuring in the stream etc. I dont need that delay myself, but you obviously do in that part of the world.

[johnsonx42]

Makes sense to me. Thanks again sub.

[johnsonx42]

Final comment: perhaps this NativeUtilities.dll patch/update should be posted in the 1.3.7 survival guide? If I needed it for ATSC in USA, and Pob needed it for HD in UK, then it's probably going to be a common need.

[Takenover83]

I am having the same problem. I can sometimes fire up Pvrx2, click live tv, and hear the audio for a second, and then it cuts out. I then hit the pause button, and wait for the controls to pop back up, and click pause again, to unpause, and everything plays fine. I have to do this every time I change the channel. I tried the patch, and tried setting the delay to 4000, but the problem persist. My source is QAM.