LiveTV over LAN - the neverending story part XIV.

[ShiningDragon]

Hi!

I could make some progress on playback of livetv within my lan. You've made a lot of good changes for this kind. Now let me please tell you, what i have found out. First the important things:

Server running Win7 x64 Pro. 2x HVR-2200 (analog mode only), 1x CableStar hd 2 (digital cable only). The used lan is gbit, cat6 cable. The cpu has a lot of power (i3-550), 4 gb ram and a own hdd (barracuda 7200.10) for the timeshift folder.

1st client: I'll start watching live tv. All is fine. Buffering grows and starts playback after the configured buffer. 1st avail. tuner will be used.
2nd client: I'll start watching live tv. A small stuttering happens while initializing the 2nd tuner of the 1st card. After this, all is fine. 30 minutes watching live tv on 2 clients are absolutely no problem.
3rd client: After the 3rd active watching client the problems begins. After initializing the 3rd tuner there's a heavy stuttering. After this tv will be played back. But only on 2 clients smooth! Any more then 2 clients will start a diashow of live tv. The stuttering client will NOT recover itself from stuttering. If i stop and restart this client, then another client starts to stutter.

Short: It's not possible to use more than 2 clients for live tv. The lan usage while streaming to 3 clients AND watching via UltraVNC is under 20 percent. There should be enough room left for transports. The cpu is idling, 3 gb ram are available and free for usage.
I even installed a ramdisk (1,5 gb) and used this one as timeshift buffer (perhaps the barracuda isn't performant enough): Absolutely the same.



Ok, that's one "small" problem. The bigger and more annoying bug is the logic for the tuners. I can't "zap" through the channels without getting "tuner you're used is no longer available". This happens (if i am using only 1 client) after the 2nd or 3rd zap.

Another technical bug is the low intelligence while livetv over network. NPVR should look before creating a new bufferfile. If i watch on 2, 3, 4 or more clients the same channel, then npvr should create and stream only this one. Instead npvr creates a lot of buffer files and makes a lot of useless traffic.



The rest seems to be working good. I reduced the codecs to Haali Media Splitter, ffdshow (latest built from 2012-12-26), microsoft dtv/dvd and monogram aac decoder. No asynchronous playback anymore (hurray!).

[whurlston]

Have you tried this patch: http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php...post398126

[ShiningDragon]

Yap, npvr 1.5.36 is up to date on all pc's. I hunt for every hotfix. ^^ I don't think, that the bandwith is that problem. Even if the streams would take 5 times of the current bandwith there shouldn't be any problem. And i can't believe that the overhead should be so big. Under normal conditions i can transfer within my lan (big files) with ~120 mb/s, a lot of very small files with ~50 mb/s. This should be more enough to transport a few streams.

I think the problem is to search somewhere else. The recordingservice logic could be one point. But this problem isn't to important. Sub can fix it if he has time for this (how many people are using npvr with 3 or more clients at home).

The bigger problem is the "tuner not available" thing. This happens to every clientmode user (perhaps even not only in clientmode; i can't say because i don't use my server direct).
And another thing is, that the recordingservice not every time release it's buffer files. After a few days using LiveTV my timeshift buffer is full of temporary files. A lot of gigabytes. That's not good.

[sub]

Bump the thread in few days and I'll respond. I'm on my iPhone away from home right now.