Live TV timeshift misbehaving on Shield

[PeterWeb]

My thanks to Sub and to Martin for impressively good and consistent work.

Server: NextPVR 4.2.5 running on a Windows 2008 server with about 30 mainly-New Zealand FTA IPTV channels via fibre. no satellite card. I've been running this kind of config for over a year with and without a sat card (no longer need one). No issues at all with watching live or recorded content directly on this system.

Client: Nvidia Shield 2019, latest firmware (v8.1.0)
          Kodi 18.5/Leia (Estuary skin)
          NextPVR client 3.3.18
          Has been in use for a few months now, with the issues below

EPG, Recording and watching recorded TV via Kodi/NextPVR client on the Shield is basically fine.

But watching Live TV:

* Real-time:- behaviour is normal, no issues noted in my tests - but of course I want some kind of timeshift, so:

* Timeshift: if I pause, the timeshift counter displays ok after a few seconds. If I then play, it works fine. But if I then do one skip-right, that causes it to bail out of Kodi back to the Shield's home screen. This behaviour happened twice in a row on my tests, even after tweaking some of the settings mentioned below. That's very bad behaviour so I gave up on ordinary Timeshift.

* Extended Timeshift: Basically works, I've been using with reasonable reliability for months. EXCEPT that frequently (on TVNZ 1 at least) it loops back in the stream, sometimes repeatedly to the same earlyish point. This is extremely consistent - it happens maybe two times out of three, a minute or three after starting to watch the channel live.

Live playback in this mode gets even more screwed up - that is, looping is more likely to happen or recur - if I use pause and subsequently do one or more right-skips to bypass ads etc. The playback position seems to get rather lost and the client often hangs for a long time before recovering, if at all. At least a couple of times in the past week, I had to give up and power cycle the Shield once it was in that state. But the more basic looping misbehaviour can commonly happen - at least once - if all I do is play and watch, with no further intervention.

On my most recent test, pausing for a couple of minutes, then pressing right-skip four or five times (waiting a couple of seconds between them) caused it to keep changing the current time to 5:27 then instantly back to 5:17 - and eventually it bombed out of Kodi the way regular Timeshift had done. I haven't seen that last behaviour before for extended timeshift mode, but the strange/"lost" placekeeping is typical.

I've tried altering Chunksize, Recording chunk size and Buffer but changing those has had no effect on either of the above Timeshift/Extended timeshift issues.

My current workaround is to record the stream and watch it from the Record list - this approach seems to be always ok, even if I'm watching the recorded stream in close-to-real time.

I've tried using XNEWA soon after I encountered these problems but IIRC I found it less satisfactory (slower?) than the standard NextPVR client.


Hopefully the attached logs cover the ground properly - happy to reset and try again if need be.  (Hmmm, Add Attachment doesn't seem to completing the upload properly, even though "Your allocated attachment usage quota is Unlimited.". So the logs are also here for a day or so).

[sub]

Your best option for Kodi live tv with timeshift is to switch to NextPVR v5. It's hard significantly more effort put into making it more reliable.

[PeterWeb]

Your best option for Kodi live tv with timeshift is to switch to NextPVR v5. It's hard significantly more effort put into making it more reliable.

I understand. If the core problem is likely to be at the NextPVR end rather than the Kodi client, that makes plenty of sense.

[sub]

It was really a combination of both ends causing problems.

When the current (3.3.18?) addon works against a v5 backend, things are done in a much nicer way, with a lot less that can go wrong.

With a v5 backend, both the 'Timeshift' and 'Extended Timeshift' modes instead use the new v5 Timershift mode.

[PeterWeb]

It was really a combination of both ends causing problems.

When the current (3.3.18?) addon works against a v5 backend, things are done in a much nicer way, with a lot less that can go wrong.

With a v5 backend, both the 'Timeshift' and 'Extended Timeshift' modes instead use the new v5 Timershift mode.

Understood - I noticed some of the commentary in the relevant thread about that behaviour change with the different backend.

I'm just investigating whether v4-v5 is currently an upgrade "over the top" or a separate install-and-reconfigure, then I'll go ahead. I expect all will be very well after that's done.

Thanks!

[sub]

If I were you, I'd go into Services, and stop the NextPVR Recording Service, and set it to disabled. Reboot. Then install NextPVR v5. (this will install it in different directories by default, and your v4 install will still be there while you have a test run)

Since you're using an IPTV source, you're probably better off to set it up from scratch. You can then import your recordings-backup.xml though to get your recordings into v5.

[PeterWeb]

If I were you, I'd go into Services, and stop the NextPVR Recording Service, and set it to disabled. Reboot. Then install NextPVR v5. (this will install it in different directories by default, and your v4 install will still be there while you have a test run)

Since you're using an IPTV source, you're probably better off to set it up from scratch. You can then import your recordings-backup.xml though to get your recordings into v5.

Aye, I guess I can just export then import the channels to avoid having to reconfigure the EPG order manually. Little else should take time. Thanks for the suggestion.

[sub]

Admittedly I’ve never used kodi on a shield, so don’t know if there are platform-specific issues on that front.

[PeterWeb]

Admittedly I’ve never used kodi on a shield, so don’t know if there are platform-specific issues on that front.

[quote pid='535136' dateline='1582159088']
Indeed, always tricky. Update - some things are ok, some still bad:

* V4 was stopped and V5 installed ok (I should have done a "recordings backup" in v4 first, but in the end the docs telling me where the relevant xml files were stored by v4 was sufficient so they're all back ok).

* No luck whatever getting my desired channel structure into v5 - there doesn't seem to be an "Import channels" function that matches the "Export channels" feature of v4. That feature creates channels-Other.xml, which has everything I'd like the channel setup to be. So that's a mess for now, but I'll sort it out eventually.

* I had to restart the Shield after the v4-v5 backend change to get the client to talk to NextPVR. And also force 0000 as the pin in v5 (I have no idea what the default was, but nothing happened until I explicitly entered it to be the 0000 that had been set in the client). Then things communicated ok.

* Timeshift on the Shield shows this problem, which is remarkably similar to the v4 one:

a) Play Live TV (again TVNZ 1 in my case)
b) Wait for it to starting playing, then pause
c) Wait 30-40 seconds, then do a right-shift

Bombed out of Kodi completely.

I didn't see any looping issues in the brief checks I ran before running that pause test. So some things might indeed be better, but bombing-out isn't.

I assume I'm ok still working with the same Kodi NextPVR 3.3.18 client?

What logs would be best to help track this further?
[/quote]

[sub]

* V4 was stopped and V5 installed ok (I should have done a "recordings backup" in v4 first, but in the end the docs telling me where the relevant xml files were stored by v4 was sufficient so they're all back ok).

Your recordings as-at your last EPG update can be found at C:\Users\Public\NPVR\recording-backup.xml

* No luck whatever getting my desired channel structure into v5 - there doesn't seem to be an "Import channels" function that matches the "Export channels" feature of v4. That feature creates channels-Other.xml, which has everything I'd like the channel setup to be. So that's a mess for now, but I'll sort it out eventually.

Above I said that since you're using an IPTV source, you're probably better off to set it up from scratch. There is some slight differences to the way IPTV channels are stored in v5, so you're better off just setting those channels up again.

* Timeshift on the Shield shows this problem, which is remarkably similar to the v4 one:

a) Play Live TV (again TVNZ 1 in my case)
b) Wait for it to starting playing, then pause
c) Wait 30-40 seconds, then do a right-shift

Bombed out of Kodi completely.

I didn't see any looping issues in the brief checks I ran before running that pause test. So some things might indeed be better, but bombing-out isn't.
...
What logs would be best to help track this further?

Martin is the person to look at anything happening on the Kodi side of things. He'd probably want to see both the NextPVR logs, and the kodi.log (with debug logging enabled). Unfortunately he's away on holiday at the moment, so only able to check in occasionally. To get the ball rolling, enable debug logging in kodi, restart the NextPVR (to reset the logs), reproduce that error above, then post those logs, and I'm sure he'll be able to check and give some advice when it's next in.