TV channels come up and play but then kick me

[thezfunk]

Hi,

I have an issue I have been trying to figure out but I am not familiar enough yet with the logs to diagnose.

When pulling up live TV from either the guide or just the 'Live TV' menu option TV will either play fine, play a 3-10 seconds and kick me back to the menu or play about 30 seconds and then kick me back to the menu. I have no idea why this is and I haven't been able to pick out a pattern.

I have a HDHomeRun attached to a server running Windows Server 2008 R2 with a Windows 7 client.

[sub]

Client mode is a bit crappy and can have these types of problems. Pretty much all you can do its try streaming mode to see if it works any better, or increase the live tv pre-play delay on the client.

[thezfunk]

Ok,

I will play around a bit. What are the main differences between file sharing and streaming? I notice that the temp recording and permanent recording shares get grayed out. Does that mean my buffer and temp recording will happen on my client machine as well as any TV recordings setup from the client machine?

[sub]

With file sharing mode, the client is reading the video data from a share. With streaming mode its using a network connect for passing this data to the client.

[whurlston]

Try streaming mode as sub suggested. You may also need to increase the LiveTV pre-play delay.

[thezfunk]

Ok, streaming mode doesn't kick me out like file sharing mode but the two highest bandwidth channels stutter. I have increased the buffer and that doesn't seem to help too much. HDHomeRun quick TV plays them fine. What is an outrageous pre buffer time? I am up to 1250ms.

[whurlston]

Ok, streaming mode doesn't kick me out like file sharing mode but the two highest bandwidth channels stutter. I have increased the buffer and that doesn't seem to help too much. HDHomeRun quick TV plays them fine. What is an outrageous pre buffer time? I am up to 1250ms.

I believe I had mine set at somewhere from 2500-3500 (no longer running client mode though). This is just the number of seconds to prebuffer (2500 = 2.5 seconds). The higher the number, the longer the file gets to buffer and the better the chance at playback, but then it takes longer to change the channels. Just find the number that gives you the best balance of the two.

[thezfunk]

Ok nothing is working and my combination of random changes isn't working. I need something more to go on.

All I gather from the responses here is that client mode just doesn't seem to work for some people, oh well? Doesn't anyone have it working? Doesn't anyone have it working with a HDHomerun? Should I be looking at Decoders? No matter what I set the prebuffer to all the 1080i channels skip and shutter with streaming mode. File sharing mode will just boot me out of the channel after a few seconds.

My hardware should be fine I would think. I have a quad core in my server and my client machine. WD blacks and WD raptors in various RAID configurations with the server running Server 2008 and the client running 7. They all reside happily on a gigabit network. I can transfer files from my RAID5 on my server to my RAID0 on my client at 120MB per second! That's a big B. That should be plenty of bandwidth.

I can watch my HDHomerun with QuickTV with no problems on both the server and client. I spent two months working on LinuxMCE and was 95% there. I came over here hoping to get 100% but now I need some suggestions!

I have a Zotac Ion board that I will be putting XP on and trying that out as a client. I wonder how that will work?

[sub]

The client/server stuff was implemented years ago, and was really aimed at the analog setups people were using at the time. Unfortunately most people have moved to digital setups these days, and the old client server code doesnt cope well with the higher bitrate demands etc. It does work for some people with digital, but is pretty fragile and things can easily go wrong.

Way back then I used a client PC myself. Later I moved to using a PopcornHour as a client instead, which does a much better job, so unfortunately PC clients havnt had too much attention since then.

I hope to revisit it mid-term future, but I've got other stuff I need to spend my time on before then.

Sorry, I know that doesnt help much, but I wanted to give you a clear view where client/server support is at.

[thezfunk]

Understood. That is the information I was looking for.

Then riddle me this...

I need to 'install' the HDHomerun on any computer that wants to see TV? To keep recordings all on the server I can point the temp and recording directories to shares on my server? That should keep anything from being locally recorded, yes? If that's the case, that's still a lot of extra back and forth when watching TV but it should work?

What about recording schedules? If I setup a schedule on a client it has to be left on to perform the recording? Every machine will have it's own database?