live tv transcode broken?

[ScaryBox]

Hey there UncleJohnsBand.

The latest build of NEWA (1.30) is great! I'm having a great time with it at home (within the home network) and no trouble with streaming outside the home network. I'm happily listening to music or watching recordings/movies at work or a friends house.

I just can't get transcoding of live tv to work. It looks like nRecord starts up but then ffmpeg crashes and I get a Windows message that says ffmpeg is not fully compatible with Windows 7 (this is just weird). Then the whole thing just stops and nREcord releases the tuner card. I've been through all the settings, tried updating ffmpeg with some other builds, reset everything to square one.

I need your expertise!
1) Is it possible the Shark Codec pack I installed could be causing a problem. (I'm suspicious of this, but removing it and resetting the codecs to default did not fix the problem)
2) Is it possible that something broke when you did the 1.30 update to repair the problems with streaming to vlc?

3) Is it possible that some of the transcoding settings (contained in the config.xml) are no longer valid?

4) I had a thought.....I wonder if the same settings used for streaming would work with the transcoding of live tv. Is there anyway to extract the string of settings/switches that ffmpeg uses when streaming so that I could insert them into the transcoding string in the config.xml??

Anything you could suggest would be great!

Thanks

Ken

[UncleJohnsBand]

Do you have the two settings in the config.xml file set to true?

<AllowRemoteTranscode>false</AllowRemoteTranscode>
<AllowRemoteStreaming>false</AllowRemoteStreaming>

[ScaryBox]

Yup, I do.

Ken

[UncleJohnsBand]

I am going to move this to the NPVR support thread since the live tv transcoding is part of the NPVR framework and not NEWA. NEWA simply starts the stream or transcode and sets the VLC plugin to play that stream. Since you mention ffmpeg failing it will be something that sub needs to look at since I am not familiar on how all that connects together.

[sub]

Transcoded live tv via ffmpeg is definitely flaky. I've made sure to point this out to people whenever it's come up to help set their expectations low. Unfortunately there is probably not much you can do about it - these problems happen in ffmpeg and are out of my control.

[ScaryBox]

Ok. Thanks UJB/SUB.

The flaky ffmpeg is not new to me. A couple of questions that might help me find the right path here...

1) Is the same ffmpeg used when npvr runs comskip and transcodes recordings??
2) Would you happen to know if the newest version of ffmpeg is significantly different in the type of settings/switches it uses.

I'll do my research and see if I can come up with an answer then.

Ken

[ScaryBox]

4) I had a thought.....I wonder if the same settings used for streaming would work with the transcoding of live tv. Is there anyway to extract the string of settings/switches that ffmpeg uses when streaming so that I could insert them into the transcoding string in the config.xml??


Oh ya, forgot. Any answer to this question UJB??

Ken

[sub]

It runs ffmpeg from "C:\Program Files\NPVR\Other". You can try updating it if you like.

You can experiment with different command like parameters by tweaking the <TranscodeArgs> setting in config.xml.

[Reddwarf]

I'v experimented a lot with on-the-fly transcoding and various versions of ffmpeg, what I have seen is that a commandline that works fine and gives good fps when run as a batch, does not work well when run in a realtime setting. I'v never found out why so eventually I gave it up, but I would be interested in sharing experiences.

[ScaryBox]

I believe I've managed to identify the problem ( I believe ) It seems the transcode arguments that are stored in the config.xml are not passed on to ffmpeg when the livetv link is clicked NEWA with transcoding turned on.

Not sure I can figure out why....

Ken