Windows install working great, clients not so much

[nclou]

So first of all, I want to thank everyone for an awesome piece of software, and especially for the support on these forums that got me through a couple challenges with setup.

I now have NextPVR setup and working great on a Windows 10 pc.  I have a combination of HDHR (1st gen) for OTA and an IPTV service.  Antenna placement is tough in my place, but I eventually managed to climb up into the highest reaches of my attic and place my antenna so I'm receiving 85+ reception on all channels.  I have near perfect receptions on the host pc and on the web client.

However, when I play it through a client in another part of the house (on the same network), the picture comes in pixelated and choppy, as if reception was still bad.  The clients I've tried are:

Kodi on Pi, wifi connected
NextPVR app on Apple 4k (hardwired through powerline network)
MrMC app on Apple 4k (hardwired through powerline network)

I'd blame it on the powerline network, except the Kodi is on wifi and had the same issue.  And I can sit right next to the Pi, open up the web player on my phone, and it plays perfectly on wifi, so it shouldn't be strictly a wifi strength thing.  The weird thing is that while the pixelation/drops looks like exactly what you get with poor OTA reception, it doesn't really match my signal strengths...a channel that gets 99 reception plays worse than one at 85.  And the IPTV streams play perfectly on all the clients.

I did find a suggestion on the forums to disable real time anti-virus on the host PC, so I did turn off Window Defender.  That made no difference at all on the ATV, but it may have improved the Kodi playing.  It was late last night so I could only watch for a bit, but it seemed like maybe it was improved.  Will try more tonight.

But is there any settings or setup on the server PC that would improve the play on the OTA channels on the client?  Is it just a matter of the network?  But if it's the network, would the IPTV streams be expected to play perfectly while the HDHR streams choke?  Would upgrading to a modern HDHR device make a difference?

Just looking for any thoughts or suggestion, thanks again.

[mvallevand]

If it is purely a bandwidth issue I would expect IPTV to play much better then OTA because of the significant compression of h264 over the high bandwith mpeg2video (h264 could easily be 1/3 the bandwidth or more)

The first thing I'd do is test Kodi wired and if it works you have a wifi issue. You can probablyn find some sub carrier SD channel OTA in those 85 channels that play at lower bandwidth.

Martin

[sub]

Also, try doing a recording, then try playing it locally on NextPVR machine, to see if it has any corruption, or if it plays fine. Then try playing the recording remotely on your clients, to see if it has corruption.

[BrettB]

Also, you didn't include any logs from either the server or the Kodi client. So we can only speculate exactly what you are doing. How are you trying to play things on Kodi? Via the PVR add-on? Via Knewc? Are you streaming the recordings via HTTP or via SMB/NFS?

[nclou]

Thanks for the suggestions everyone.

Some more time to experiment last night, and I think I found the issue. Kodi has rock solid reception, UNTIL I try to record. Once I try to record, it pixelates and becomes unwatchable, and the recording becomes unwatchable. When I stop recording, it eventually returns to stable watching live TV. Any recordings I make of live tv are also unwatchable.

The NextPVR and MrMC app aren't stable even when not recording...but I wonder if they are basically recording as a buffer, in a way that Kodi isn't maybe? Because they have issues as if they were recording. If I go into one of the Apple TV apps, and it is blocky and pixelated, and then switch to the Kodi on pi, the Kodi is then messed up until I restart the Apple TV.

So basically, my issue is with recording live tv (IPTV records no problem). It doesn't "fail", but it's basically unwatchable. Does that sound like an I have an issue with my server PC just not being up to the task of recording live TV? It's a relatively old machine, but I'm a little surprised, because I used to be able to record live TV this PC with windows media center and this same HDHR. But maybe it's not powerful enough?

[sub]

If you can do a recording and post the logs, we'll take a look.

[Graham]

Thanks for the suggestions everyone. 

Here's some more ... https://github.com/sub3/NextPVR/wiki/get-help ...

[nclou]

If you can do a recording and post the logs, we'll take a look.

Here are the logs...did a recording, too stuttering to watch, even on the installed PC.

[sub]

Are NextPVR and your HDHR tuner both connected to a wired network?

Ultimately it's sounding like somewhere on your network you've got constraints, and it's just not able to keep up with the amount of data is needing to ship around.

I know you've got clients on wifi and powerline networking.

[mvallevand]

You didn't include the required kodi debug logs but here is what I see

- you are using an older version of Kodi,
- you are using an RPi which already is bandwidth limited. You never mentioned this or indicated whether you have mpeg2 hw decoding licensed and installed that is a huge impact on the RPi.
- you are using Raspian not one of the optimized Kodi builds like Libreelec.

Martin