Some Live TV programs don't play in Kodi

[toddos]

Others have reported this before, but I'm started a new thread because when I've posted to the other threads (on the Kodi forum, anyway), it got no attention.

There are some programs (not necessarily channels, see explanation) that will not play live in Kodi. They play live via the NextPVR interface and the web interface, I can paste the URL into VLC and it plays, and they record just fine, but they will not play live. I've mostly noticed this on my local ABC affiliate for its 6pm local news, where the 5pm national news plays fine and the 7pm Wheel of Fortune plays fine, but the 6pm local news won't play. I've also noticed it on HGTV, which doesn't much matter to me but does matter to my in-laws. Most importantly, however, and the real showstopper, is that it happened today on the local Fox affiliate trying to watch the football game. Not having live football is a big problem.

I'm not well-versed in reading Kodi logs, but I think what I'm seeing is that Kodi isn't getting any video or audio stream. My first thought was maybe this is a copy protection issue, but if that were the case then I wouldn't expect anything to play or record, rather than just Kodi being broken.

NextPVR is on a Windows 10 Pro machine, using a Ceton InfiniTV 6 PCIe tuner and King County Comcast digital lineup via Schedules Direct. The client in this case was on a different Windows 10 Pro PC running Kodi 17.4, but it happens on all of my Kodi clients (Windows 10, Raspberry Pi 3, Nvidia Shield).

Any help on this before next weekend's games would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

[toddos]

Any chance someone can look at this? I can provide more logs if the current logs aren't helpful. This is seriously killing the acceptance factor of my NextPVR + Kodi setup.

Thanks.

[sub]

It certain channels that never work in Kodi, or just certain shows?

Does it do the same thing with recordings from those channels? It's usually preferable to have it happen with a recording, because then you can supply a sample recording so others can see the problem on their machine. It also helps us know we're comparing apples with apples, when we're looking at if the same recording will play in other players vs playing in kodi.

[toddos]

It's shows, not channels, though I do have one channel that almost never works. Recordings work fine, only live TV playback fails. The same shows almost always work in the main NextPVR client and in the web interface while Kodi is failing.

I've tried various combinations of settings in Kodi, as well. With and without timeshifting enabled in the PVR plugin makes no different (the log attached previously is with timeshifting enabled). With and without a framerate fallback (off or 59, not 50) makes no difference.

My suspicion is that it's something with how the stream is presented to Kodi that Kodi doesn't like, since the same video saved in a recording works and the same live show works in other players.

[sub]

Generally anything playback related is the sort of things that only the Kodi team are going to be able to do anything about. The NextPVR addon doesn't do any playback stuff itself.

That said, try enabling the debug logging in Kodi, then reproduce this playback issue, then post the kodi.log, and we'll see if the kodi log messages provide any useful clues.

[toddos]

Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear before. The attached logs include a repro kodi.log with debug logging enabled. I zipped it up with the npvr logs into a single container for convenience.

[sub]

I'd missed the logs on the original post. I've just taken a quick look now.

It looks like there was another streaming session actively happening during the live tv attempt shown in Kodi. Can you have another go at reproducing the problem, without extra things going on, so that we can get a clearer look at the what is happening at the time? It'd also be worth restarting the recording service immediately prior to starting Kodi, so that the logs start from near the problem.

[toddos]

I will see what I can do. The problem is getting a repro. I was able to grab a trace earlier this afternoon that should only have one stream going (there's some extra noise from a background process I wrote that periodically pings for recordings, but should't be streaming anything). But I didn't restart the TV service for this trace. At the moment, I don't have a reproing channel, but the next time I do I'll grab yet another trace that's hopefully cleaner.

In this log, look for the KBTC or KCPQ channels. Both of those were refusing to play at that time.

[VCR58]

I have had something similar when playing some programs. While the channel is playing (or trying to play) select the "Settings" icon on the lower right, then select "Video settings". At the top of the list there is a setting for "Deinterlace method" which should be changed to "Off"
[ATTACHMENT NOT FOUND]
This fixed some video issues for me when playing live TV using Kodi.

[toddos]

Changing deinterlacing didn't help. But I was able to get another repro, this time after restarting the recording service, so hopefully the logs are cleaner.