Video Corruption during playback on Android

[boringgit]

Any help on the below appreciated – I've been looking but I lack the terminology to Google effectively

I usually watch my NPVR recordings on Windows. Most of the time Kodi, sometimes Plex – rarely any issues. Occasional heavy server load or very bad weather when recording being entirely understandable exceptions.

When travelling, or exiled by wife and MIL I do find myself watching on Android – again, Kodi or Plex. Most recordings will play fine and then video will become corrupt. Audio is fine, but the corrupt video will not fix itself. The only (and perfectly easy) way to fix it is to stop playback, then start again a few seconds after the corruption. 

The same recording may or may not (mostly will) do the same thing a few times. The annoyance here  is that it will often not restart at the right place and you have to skip here there and everywhere…

This doesn’t happen In Windows so I don’t think it’s an NPVR issue, rather a blip in the recording is killing the android codec? (I don’t know – hence this post).

A few notes – this may well be an HD only issue (I don’t watch many SD recordings)
I can’t do any kind of auto transcoding because wile I only watch HD I share the box with somebody who only watches SD
I’d really like to look into the Android bit and see if I can work around it there.
 
Any help appreciated as usual!

[mvallevand]

Best to follow the support process and provide NextPVR and Kodi debug logs so we don't have to ask more questions.

Martin

[boringgit]

Really appreciate the quick reply!

Im actually away right now so it will be a few days, but same thing happens in
plex when I am watching offline on a plane - hence I had the time to write

Cheers,
Rob

[mvallevand]

Ok if your issue is strictly while you are away, I suspect bandwidth. That Jackson Pollock look would be exactly what I'd expect if streaming stalls. Perhaps try uidroid on Android, sub is adding a feature that save the resume point every minute for UI clients that are designed to handle bad connections.

Martin

[boringgit]

Ok if your issue is strictly while you are away, I suspect bandwidth.  That Jackson Pollock look would be exactly what I'd expect if streaming stalls.  Perhaps try uidroid on Android, sub is adding a feature that save the resume point every minute for UI clients that are designed to handle bad connections.

Martin

Hi Martin,

You gave me a firm shove in the direction of a workaround (I have a feeling a fix is beyond my abilities!). I spent a few hours today looking through the Plex Android logs which to give it credit are surprisingly verbose and the retention is brilliant. 

It saw me pausing, stopping, repositioning and starting again. No hint of an error.

Skipping a load of pratting around it appears to be a hardware decoding issue. Plex doesnt appear to offer the option to disable it, but using VLC as an external player they have a number of options, everything short of full HW decoding works fine.

Shame because this will probably be more CPU, hence battery intensive, but "stuff" happens

(I was on a budget airline with no wifi btw)

Happy to post NPVR logs when I am back if of any interest, but I think this is an Android driver issue. I currently use 2 Huawei and 1 Xiaomi devices, Perhaps not an issue on Qualcom but I haven't got one to test.

Thanks again,
Rob.