knewc transcoding issues

[crackulator]

Tried with the UI client (still 2.7.0, new one hasn't come through yet), GUI/EPG looks fine, but it runs video for about 3 minutes on average before exiting back to the EPG. Sometimes the video hangs for a while (say 20 seconds), then runs fast-forward to catch up; the eventual end may be just a worst-case one of these.

This is a different client than the one in the previous report, but also Ubuntu client, same v4 server. This one is talking to the server across the internet.

[mvallevand]

Sorry since you are trying the transcoding option over the internet it is basically how well your server transcoding and the upload and download bandwidth you have. You might find the Python UI a little lighter. I do see a bug in the transcoding from UI client, but that is not in my test uses cases.

v5 probably offers a better streaming platform, I will have to give it a try sometime.

Martin

[crackulator]

Everything should be pretty overkill. Stream I'm trying to run is 256kbps, all network paths are >50Mbps, server is good up to about 5 streams before running out of CPU.

I'll try it on my local network tonight.

[crackulator]

On local network, it does about the same... maybe somewhat less, but hard to measure. Log attached.

I notice when monitoring the network traffic that it is very bursty, there's a burst of data about every 10 seconds, and most of the time it's quiet in between. Is this normal?

Also one of my problems is that when it crashes, it often leaves an ffmpeg open and busy on the server, which never closes. So it gradually eats up all my server CPU.

[mvallevand]

Ok I looked deeper at the code and to tell you the truth I am surprised it worked at all, I had the API call wrong. I probably shouldn't be that surprised my v4 server is not up to transcoding so this code was really only proof of concept work-in-progress.

I have made some modifications to the code and the transcoding option seems relatively stable with my v5 server. It doesn't look like the API changed for v4 but v4 is untested.

The bursty nature is quite normal, the transcode leases and UI client responses are on timers and m3u8 playback is segmented.

knewc 2.7.2 includes this change. Let me know how it goes, this will help me determine if similar functionality is of value in pvr.nextpvr

Martin

[crackulator]

2.7.2 doesn't seem to be any better, perhaps worse. Ubuntu client, v4 server, local network.

[crackulator]

Duplicated test on Chromebook (Kodi from Play Store), same result, lots of freezing and fast-forwarding, doesn't stay up more than a couple minutes.

BTW the native mode seems to be working now (cheers), but the Channel Groups selection doesn't work (even after connecting to the server to get the channel groups). The selection is settings seems to be scrolling through random-looking single characters. A few weeks ago I had that problem and I found it in the config files and changed it there, and then it worked, so it seems to be just the settings UI.

[mvallevand]

I'd need to see the server side logs that match kodi debug logs. The indication is the issue is now how Kodi is playing your m3u8 file. You might also want to see if v5 improves things.

The fix for the channel group is to change the line below in XNEWA_Connect.py

groups = '|'.join(str(self.channelGroups))
to
groups = '|'.join(self.channelGroups)

I don't think sub supports server side filtering of the channel lists for channel groups so knewc will be dropping support for the group filter that NEWA had in v5

Martin

[crackulator]

Yeah it's probably pointless to further diagnose v4. I'm working on getting a test v5 server up.

[crackulator]

Remote transcoding seems to be working great with knewc 2.7.2 and v5 server. Streaming almost 2 hours with not a single glitch. Bandwidth measures as expected (I'm running a 1 Mbps/720p stream). UI is Kodi native on Estuary, Ubuntu client, Ubuntu server.

Awesome, case closed! Thanks for your help.