IPTV Channel Looping/Playback Issues

[kalebroc]

I'm having the following issue:

Regardless of the client I use, be it kodi of the NextPVR client itself the following happens - I switch to an IPTV channel, it starts playing then loops back to the start of when it started playing, this happens randomly with the loop happening at anything from 10sec to over a couple of minutes. I have tested the same M3U file in both VLC player and Kodi and this does not happen at all. At this point I can only think that its something to do with NextPVR. I have attached the logs and the system it is running on is as follows:

Intel Core i3 4130
6GB RAM
240GB SSD System Drive (C
1TB SSHD Data Drive For Recordings (D
Intel HD 4400 On-Board Graphics
Intel Gigabit NIC
Clean Install Of Windows 10 Pro x64 With All Updates , Latest Drivers & LAV Filters, NextPVR v4.2.4

Any help would be really apprciated.

[mvallevand]

The logs don't say much is it better if you turn off EPG Mode? If not, start watching a show for about a minute and copy the live*.ts file to a more permanent location and check to see if the saved file loops.

Martin

[sub]

Are you using more streams that you're allowed from you IPTV provider, or could other people be sharing the same urls? When this happens, you get similar symptoms to this. ie, after a while the IPTV provider drops the connection, and when the application has to reconnect, it often gets given some period of buffered data. (which we'd already received on the previous connection)

[kalebroc]

Hi guys,
Thanks for looking at the logs for me, i was hoping that you might have spotted something in there, so I copied one of the temp files as you suggested and it played perfectly for well over 20min with no loops or stutters or anything, so back to square one. At the moment I'm starting the server all over again and for good measure I'm going to replace the RAM and SSD as those were slightly older from another PC I had lying around just to be on the safe side, once I have this done with a clean install of Windows 10 I'll check into running a test with and without an EPG as you suggested, also I have checked with my supplier and he has confirmed that I have 2 connections on my particular sub and that everything on his side seems to be ok.

Thanks again for your help

[kalebroc]

Hi guys,

Just a quick update on the above situation - after hours of messing around with both hardware and software, rebuild of PC with both Windows 7 & Windows 10 I have come to the conclusion that it must be something on the supplier's end just not liking the NextPVR software, I'm at a bit of a loss. Anyway, it's not the end of the world, I'll live with it just to be able to use this fantastic piece of software. Thanks again for the suggestions and so on, hopefully with the next version of NextPVR, this issues might resolve itself.

Cheers

[NND]

Hi. For what it's worth, I see the same initial looping symptoms, but sporadically. It doesn't happen every time I switch to a channel. When it does occur, if I switch away from the channel and then switch back again, it usually plays OK. My biggest problem with IPTV recordings is getting skips within them for minutes at a time, or sometimes seeing a ~1 hour recording appearing as being 24+ hours in length. At some point during playback, the time pointer will skip to a few minutes before the, say 24:10:00, end (which might actually correspond to about half an hour into the recording), and then end prematurely. Very frustrating.

[sub]

NND, are you using .m3u8 or .ts streams as the source?

[NND]

I believe they are .ts streams. My IPTV URL ends with "&type=m3u_plus&output=ts". All recordings of individual shows end with .ts

[sub]

My biggest problem with IPTV recordings is getting skips within them for minutes at a time, or sometimes seeing a ~1 hour recording appearing as being 24+ hours in length. 

Do you see that when playing back in NextPVR, or is this other players?

I'd think NextPVR's player would show you the correct duration, or at least very close to it.

This is probably caused by the IPTV provider restarting the encoding of stream, causing some missing period, and odd timestamps (with bigger values at the start of the file, and smaller ones at the end, instead of counting up in the way you'd expect)

[NND]

I usually watch recorded programs in Kodi, but I just verified that the skips are the same in both Kodi and when played directly in NextPVR. I hadn't noticed before, but a program I recorded yesterday shows as being 21:30:54 long in Kodi, but the correct 1:04:58 in NextPVR.

There's something weird going on, though, with the file sizes of recorded programs. Yesterday I recorded that same 1 hour program with 5 minutes of padding twice, three hours apart, on the same channel. (I do that in case one of the recordings is not good.) The first recording, which does have some skips in it, shows as the correct length in both Kodi and NextPVR, and is 361 MB. The second recording, which shows as being 21:30:54 in Kodi, is 2.6 GB (over 7 times the size, but not 21 times the size).