LiveTV Freezes Are Back on Clients

[smajor]

I've not had this problem for several versions. It appears to have returned, maybe with 2.5.9?

When watching LiveTV I'll have random freezes on the client. Sometimes 5 minutes apart, sometimes after viewing for 2 hours.

Stopping and restarting LiveTV usually does the trick to get things going again.

I have 2 HD-PVRs and have noted this happens no matter which is being used (hopefully that eliminates the capture source.)

Recordings streamed to clients work just fine, perfectly in fact. We've probably watch collectively 60-80 hours of recordings with 2.5.9 with the clients. All clear there.

It just froze now while typing this. On a lark, I've started it again and paused it for 1 minute and started viewing. I wonder if a little buffer will help.

EDIT: nope, froze again.

Logs attached.

[smajor]

So, last night I decided to watch the debates. Knowing LiveTV would likely freeze on the client I was using, I set it to record the debates, waited for 2 minutes for the recording to get going, and then started watching the in progress recording. I didn't have any problems with this. I don't suppose there is anything in the config to make watching LiveTV "more like" watching an in progress recording, is there?

[smajor]

Back with more logging. I enabled the stream logging on the client via the registry setting. That file, client and server log are included in the zip. Looks to me like the stream.log shows the stream is stopping, don't know why.

[smajor]

None of the patches helped, nor reverting the 2nd new option for the HD-PVR. I hate to rollback to 2.5.5, it's going to be painful, if anyone has any suggestions or if you have a minute to look at the logs, sub...

[sub]

I took a look at the logs but the cause of your problem isn't obvious to me. It doesn't seem to be near anything that changed in 2.5.9 though.

It seems to stem from the live tv buffer file on the server stopping growing. The client/server stuff waits a little bit for the file to grow before it eventually ends up sending the undersized packet of the bytes it was able to read.

You're not low on disk space on your live tv buffer drive?

[smajor]

No > 230GB free. Coincidence that it did start around the time I updated, I'm trying hard to think of any other change I made.

While I was testing today, I watched 2 hours on one client, while another client froze every 5-7 minutes. I switched HD-PVRs around (to eliminate one or the other as a hardware issue) and it doesn't matter which is in use. Clients, all 3 of them, randomly freeze with one or the other HD-PVRs.

Is it possible to increase that LiveTV buffer size to cache a little more for the client to work with to see if it recovers?

[sub]

There is no buffer setting which would help with scenario shown in that log. The file had stopped growing for about 10 seconds.

You could maybe reproduce the error, and before killing the client, check that the live tv buffer file is still growing.

[smajor]

I'll check that. Watching for about 30 minutes now without issue. Could you help me understand out that temp file works?

Right now, I have 4 files in there:

live-WPTZDT-2046.ts
live-WPTZDT-2046-2.ts
live-WPTZDT-2046-3.ts
live-WPTZDT-2046-4.ts

4 being the smallest, the others being ~400-480MB each.

I also had several from previous LiveTV viewings early that were not automatically deleted. I know that's been an ongoing issue and I probably have more. I have a nightly (2AM) task that deletes them out of there.

[sub]

Could you help me understand out that temp file works?

Basically it rolls over to the next file each x minutes. It keeps the last 4 files, and deletes the oldest each time it creates a new file.

[smajor]

It just froze. Before pressing stop on the client, temp live-WPTZDT-2046-6.ts did continue to grow in size.

Once I hit stop on the client, the temps were removed.