Pausing live video-fails to play 4.0.5 (171208)

[eastavin]

So I am watching CBS live tv. I push the pause bar and walk away. I return and push the pause bar again to play the paused video. Timer shows its been on pause for 48:57. Video starts to play.. I get about 3-4 seconds of video and a burst of audio then everything freezes with a black screen. Try pounding the escape key, the return key all to no avail. Then I decide to focus on 2 hits on escape followed by 2 hits on return followed by 2 hits on escape.. eventually it returns to the main menu from which I am able to reengage the Live Tv but my 49 minute paused video is gone. Watching live tv again. Zipped files attached. look at the end for hiccup.

[mvallevand]

There are known issues if you pause longer then the playback buffer which you already commented on https://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.ph...post518421

Martin

[HarryH3]

Pausing Live TV for an extended period can definitely be problematic. If I know that I'm going to be stepping away for a while, I press the record button on my remote. This way, NPVR records the remainder the show that I was watching without fail and I can watch from the Recordings screen at my leisure.

[sub]

The attached patch will jump forward to where video is available when you resume if you'd paused beyond the size of the buffer. It'll also show a message on the screen to let you know this happened.

[eastavin]

Thanks sub I will try it and see how it works. Before trying it here is what I thought pause video should be doing:

If one pauses for 70 minutes with a 60 minute buffer... one would expect that when you return and push resume that you get 60 minutes of video before it runs out. The other thing one would expect happening in the background is that as you playback the paused video... the buffer is emptying so it could then begin refilling with the current live video that you are not seeing because you are watching the paused video. Of course there would be a gap in the buffered video stream equal to the amount of time that you were away that was in excess of the buffer size. Of course its easy to type that maybe not so easy to write the code for that

Maybe someone can explain what one should expect from the current design of the "Pause video" feature?

Many thanks for all the hard work on Nextpvr. Its a great system.

[sub]

If one pauses for 70 minutes with a 60 minute buffer... one would expect that when you return and push resume that you get 60 minutes of video before it runs out. The other thing one would expect happening in the background is that as you playback the paused video... the buffer is emptying so it could then begin refilling with the current live video that you are not seeing because you are watching the paused video. Of course there would be a gap in the buffered video stream equal to the amount of time that you were away that was in excess of the buffer size. Of course its easy to type that maybe not so easy to write the code for that

Nah, that's just crazy. I haven't seen anything else work that way.

NextPVR works more like the set top boxes, where it's always buffering the last x minutes of video, and you can pause/skip/rewind etc within that buffer.

Some set top boxes do what NextPVR is now doing, and if paused too long, it'll resume playback in the video it has. With some other set top boxes if you pause to long, like it's got a 20 minute buffer, after 20 minutes it'll auto unpause itself and resume playback.

[eastavin]

So I installed the file and put it on pause for about 40 minutes. when I came back and unpaused it I got a message that said 'skipping to buffer' and video played without any incidents. after about 4 minutes I then hit stop and then selected Live TV and it worked as well without any hiccups. As I hit stop in a commercial and then on returning I got the tv show instead of a commercial - I figure the pause feature worked this time flawlessly. i will give it a longer workout the next few days.

So in this case with a 40 minute pause would I have been seeing the most recent 20 minutes to have been broadcast? or was it the 20 minutes from when I hit pause?

[sub]

So in this case with a 40 minute pause would I have been seeing the most recent 20 minutes to have been broadcast? or was it the 20 minutes from when I hit pause?

Think of it as two separate things happening:

1) The recording service is recording live tv to a temporary file. It always keeps the last 20 minutes in it's temporary file. (it has no idea if you've hit 'pause' - that is just a playback thing)

2) The front end is watching the video in that temporary file. If you pause, playback stops, but the recording service keeps doing #1. When you hit 'play' if the bit you paused in is no longer in the temp file, it just jumps forward to the oldest content that is in the temp file.

[eastavin]

This version you posted appears to be pausing and restarting reliably so far. One thing I noticed that was a bit of a pain in the neck was how it gets stuck on a channel with a weak signal and you cant escape while it tries to lock on to something. During this time the screen is black and no controls work... at least no controls I am aware of. Is there some sort of ctrl seqence that can be used to abort the tuners attempt to lock to a channel with a signal too weak to display?

[sub]

If you've got weak unreliable channels, I'd try improving the signal or removing them.

Ctrl-S is the normal key for stop.

The video render will only allow me to display stuff on the screen while frames are being presented, so if there is no video frames, unfortunately I have no way to force it to display OSD graphics like controls etc.