Skips in recordings

[NND]

Hi. I have been having a problem lately when recording shows especially from the UK channels BBC1 and ITV1, where the recording will skip for seconds or minutes, multiple times within a recording. It often happens when recording the news, and this morning it happened again, when recording Songs of Praise. The recording should have been 40 minutes long, but in fact it is only 19 minutes, with many skips within. Any ideas why this happens? I have broken the log file into two parts, because otherwise it exceeds the maximum size for forum uploads.

[NND]

For what it's worth, the first skip in this particular show comes at 3:19 into the recording. I have uploaded it here:

https://we.tl/t-25Zb0sDkW4

The recording title is 'Songs of Praise_20190811_05150550', which is a reference to my local time here in California. And, I'm sorry, I said above that I was expecting the recording to be 40 minutes long - I should have said 35 minutes. However, there were still 16 minutes lost to multiple skips during the recording. Is there a buffer size setting I should be increasing?

[sub]

It looks like this is IPTV delivered via http. I'd say either your internet connection wasn't keeping up at the time, or the IPTV provider was having some issues capturing the channel at whatever location they were using (like bad whether interfering with reception)

[NND]

Thanks, Sub. My own Internet connection has 300 Mbps download speed, but NextPVR is installed on a PC that uses a VPN service. Through the VPN connection, I get 20 Mbps down, 14 Mbps up (verified). There was no other recording taking place at the time of the one I sent, and no other traffic on the connection, either up or down, so I don't see that it could be an issue of the connection not "keeping up at the time". Is it possible for IPTV packets to get jumbled or go missing in a VPN tunnel, in a way that they might not otherwise? Is it possible to counter this with buffering?

The curious thing is that I've been using the VPN service for many months, but did not encounter this 'skipping' issue until a few weeks ago, and it has been getting worse, but mostly on the UK channels. I can record the US networks just fine, without a hiccup, as indeed I could the UK ones up until about mid-July.

[sub]

Could easily be a problem at the IPTV source. They may be having some reliability issues with their capture site (quite often these dodgy IPTV providers are just using a PC at someone's house to do the capture).

Or, it could be issues with connectivity speeds somewhere in between your network, your vpn, and the IPTV providers network. ie, just because I've get 1Gbps download speed, doesn't mean I'm going to get 1Gpbs for every site I try....so that 20Mbps down over the VPN may be great for accessing some sites (like servers in the US), but shitty for others (like servers in UK)

[NND]

OK, well not resolved then, but assumed to be a problem with the provider, and not anything that can be fixed with the NetxPVR software. I'll try monitoring some of the problematic channels live, and take it up with the provider if I see the same behaviour on the live streams. Thanks for your time.

[sub]

I'll try monitoring some of the problematic channels live,

If you see it happening on live tv, try it in VLC or other player at the same time, to see how the channel looks there.