Improve quality of TS files produced wrt timeline (not quality of recording itself)

[jksmurf]

I've been having quite a few problems with the .ts files produced by my FTA digitial tuners, scheduled using NPVR, since the digital TV upgrade.
In the old analogue .mpg days, the files were clearly smaller and were less problematic.

Now I very often get a file, which loses the timeline when playing it back on my popcornhour.

What happens is this:

• I watch it and
  
• the green bar moves along over the grey one but
  
• at some point, quite often after a comskip cut,
  
• the WHOLE bar goes green and
  
• the time played becomes longer than the total show time and if I try to move forward with FF or Skip it ALWAYS jumps out of the file being played.
  

I can only assume that I need to find a way to improve the quality of TS files produced wrt timeline - not quality of recordings.

So I'm guessing either :

• the original signal is weak?
  
• my tuners are rubbish at processing
  
• my computer can't keep up when being fed the stream from the tuner
  

If anyone else has suffered a similar fate - what was the fix?
Gurus - MOST likely REASON?

wrt logs, sorry I played one last night, but the logs have gone and I deleted the file in frustration after I tried to use tsMuxerGUI to fix it, and mkvmerge, so I cannot demonstrate what I mean.

[mvallevand]

Without logs and samples there is nothing I can add. ts file could have garbage timelines especially if commercials are injected into a stream and not muxed with the video but nextpvr does have a timing.info file that helps but onlyfull recordings, not live tv or in-progress files.

Martin

[jksmurf]

Thanks - will try and find one. How do I enable timing.info ?

[mvallevand]

It's created automagically unless you edit or move the file outside nextpvr.

Martin

[jksmurf]

Thanks - will try and find one.

Here's logs for a slightly different but I believe related example.

I go into the program and go forward with time 5 mins etc, it works for 3 or 4, but then stops going forward any more and even jumps backwards.
I'll see if I can find one where the whole timeline goes green.

[Graham]

I don't use comskip ... but ... I have never gotten entirely reliable skips in ts files ... nor have I gotten consistent results. Some channels produce recordings that skip well ... some channels produce recordings of some shows that skip well and other shows that don't skip well. What happens if you take comskip out of the equation? Do you get consistent results? For example, does the 4 key then Skip always skip forward 4 minutes?

Edit: Sorry. Just re-read the post that describes what happens when you do skips exactly as I describe. Your symptoms appear to be much the same as mine.

[mvallevand]

Sub needs to look into it, it looks like NextPVR is issuing a comskip before the file has started playing.

2013-04-13 16:51:47.039 [DEBUG][3] In commerical, and about to skip to 3912.68. Duration is 9178.101. Position is3912.64

this "current" position is coming from the previous file

2013-04-13 16:50:57.450 [DEBUG][3] PlaybackPositionHelper.StorePlaybackPosition(300_20121215_21300000.ts, 3911, 9178)


Martin

[sub]

2013-04-13 16:54:39.276 [DEBUG][3] Raw PTS received:-45824400
2013-04-13 16:54:39.276 [DEBUG][3] Reported PTS now:-45864000 time: -1019.2

It looks like something is going wrong with the parsing the PTS values coming from mvpmcx2.

Try again with this patch, then post the logs again. These PTS values will still be negative and broken, but it'll also log the raw bytes so I can see why it's happening.

[mvallevand]

I don't think the negative PTS problem is in NextPVR, I think it is the file and how mvpmcx2 is trying to report from a bad timeline, it can't interpolate well going backwards. mvpmcx2 is seeking to were the Timing.Info says but it doesn't seem to know exactly where it is.

The early comskip issue should still be looked at, that will block things up even with a good timeline.

Martin

[jksmurf]

OK, here are the logs from two shows.

One = Painted Veil (the original above) - for some reason I couldn't get it to fail this time when I skipped forward by time increments, 3,4,59 etc . I went up and down the timeline just fine. However I don't think I tried to skips forward or backward with no time interval.

The next one (Jurassic Park) exhibited the same problem as original. I "think" I can tell when the timeline is not great when the cuts are very irregular as is the case in this show.
On this one I went up and down with time but then when I started just skipping it jumped backwards when I said skip forward etc.

Hope this helps.

k.