IPTV streaming uses 100% CPU

[callumjk]

Using NextPVR in a docker container on an Ubuntu Server. Watching a single IPTV stream using the web client uses all of my 4 CPU cores (i5-6500T). In comparison, watching the same stream through the Kodi add on uses 2-3% CPU. Recording is also fine and barely has an effect on the CPU, but watching those recordings with the web client uses all of the CPU again and isn't really watchable because of it's constant buffering.
Is my hardware not powerful enough to transcode the stream/recordings?

[mvallevand]

Unfortunately your provider is not sending the stream in a web compatible format

2024-04-18 13:53:59.138 [DEBUG][27] [FFMPEG]: Stream #0:1[0x101](en`): Audio: ac3 ([129][0][0][0] / 0x0081), 48000 Hz, 5.1(side), fltp, 384 kb/s

so it has to be transcoded. Since NextPVR transcodes both video and audio when it detects it is not web compatible to answer your question "yes" your machine as configured is not powerful enough.

You might be able to configure VAAPI in Docker. A simpler solution would be to run NextPVR on bare metal if you truly need web playback. i5-6500 should be able to use VAAPI.

Finally another option (assuming only audio is bad) is to change the transcode string and pass the video and assume it is good. This will mean any hevc or mpeg2video channels will fail in the browser, but they likely will fail anyway so it is not a big lose. You can try this on you config.xml in /config

Code:

sed -i 's/<TranscodeHLS>default<\/TranscodeHLS>/<TranscodeHLS>-y [ANALYZE_DURATION] [SEEK] -i [SOURCE] -map_metadata -1 -threads [THREADS] -ignore_unknown -map 0:v:0? [PREFERRED_LANGUAGE] -map 0:a:[AUDIO_STREAM] -map -0:s -vcodec copy -acodec aac -ac 2 -c:s copy -hls_time [SEGMENT_DURATION] -start_number 0 -hls_list_size [SEGMENT_COUNT] -y [TARGET]<\/TranscodeHLS>/' config.xml

Martin

[sub]

Using NextPVR in a docker container on an Ubuntu Server. Watching a single IPTV stream using the web client uses all of my 4 CPU cores (i5-6500T). In comparison, watching the same stream through the Kodi add on uses 2-3% CPU. Recording is also fine and barely has an effect on the CPU, but watching those recordings with the web client uses all of the CPU again and isn't really watchable because of it's constant buffering.
Is my hardware not powerful enough to transcode the stream/recordings?

The least resource intensive way to watch a stream is via a player that can play the stream in it's native format. ie, like a uiclient (like LG app, Samsung Tizen app, yauiclient, nlite etc), kodi, iOS app etc. These types of players can play the audio/video stream without having to re-encode it.

Web browsers are great for some things, but unfortunately not very flexible for video playback formats, so if the source stream is not H264+AAC then it needs to be transcoded. Usually IPTV streams are already H264+AAC, and can be streamed without reencoding...but unfortunately some IPTV streams are not in the correct format, so require this extra effort.

If your machine is not up to doing that smoothly, you could try those things Martin suggested above, like enabling hardware encoding (by mapping /dev/dri into your docker container, and setting nextpvr to use the VAAPI encoder). Hopefully that'd get the CPU usage down for you.