I'm hoping this is just some settings I goobered up.
WMC plays Live TV almost flawlessly -- there is the occasional hiccup, but it generally works well in terms of HD image quality, staying tuned and playing smoothly.
XMBC on the other hand -- standard-def channels are ok, but many HD channels will intermittently freeze and certain channels (especially local ones) will constantly buffer and occasionally lose the stream, at which point XBMC falls back to either the EPG or the home page. When it does play, the video quality is marginal at best with horizontal striations and motion blur.
I have Win7 and associated pgm files on C:\ and Recorded TV on a separate 1TB drive.
I really like XBMC, its GUI and seamless integration of music, movies and iPhone playback, so I'd really like to be able to keep using it for live TV.
Any suggestions?
(2014-08-05, 15:04)dshorrosh Wrote: [ -> ]Any suggestions?
We need to see a ServerWMC log, as per the forum sticky. Please stop and start ServerWMC (to create a fresh log), produce the problem behaviour and then upload the log to pastebin, and the link to it here
Scarecrow - thanks for the quick response (and sorry for the noob move of not posting the log) -- I'll capture a log and send it later today.
Also for the motion problems, make sure you have deinterlacing turned on in xbmc - but default it is off.
That's an XBMC log we need a ServerWMC log as well. Check the forum sticky if you don't know where to find it etc
Also I noticed you are running XBMC pvr.wmc addon version 2.93 but we have a newer version available. It would be recommended to be on the latest
DOH! My bad (again).
http://pastebin.com/BrFUY0uW
And FWIW this was one of the times where everything was relatively well-behaved.
I will download the newer version after I have a chance to look at your response.
Thanks!
OK from the ServerWMC log I can see you initially view an SD channel which looks fine then when you view a HD 1080i channel it happens reasonably quickly (3.68 seconds on the backend) but within about 20-30 seconds alot of errors are being logged for slow writes. This could either be we arent getting data from the tuner (via a WTV file recording we initiated in the background) or difficulty writing to the hard drive.
Given that you say everything is fine in WMC for live viewing (is this still correct?) I would suggest we should try out recording in WMC and see how that goes. Using WMC natively, set a show to record, wait for a few minutes then stop the recording. View the WTV file in WMC and in XBMC (via the normal Video Files section, not LiveTV recordings section). Does it play back OK?
Do you have any other storage intensive processes running on this machine that could impact it eg running MCEBuddy or comskip, video editing/conversion, nzb downloading/unrar-ing jobs etc? Any recordings running in the background when these live viewing problems are happening?
If you have a different TV tuner device it'd be interesting to give that a go as well
Scarecrow420 -
Thanks for responding. Yep WMC is dang-near rock solid for live TV viewing, the symptoms are worse for HD channels than SD, and nope nothing else going on (that I'm aware of) that would be causing disk i/o. The disk being written to is a separate 1TB drive with ~200GB allocated to the 'Recorded TV' folder and the rest to dvd/bd images which are not being read or written while watching TV.
I will test out recording one channel while watching another in WMC to see what happens and reply back with results.
Should I go ahead and download the current ServerWMC?
Latest versions are always good to be on
And don't forget to test if a recording made in WMC plays back ok in multiple players
I recorded one channel while watching another channel in WMC without any issues -- and the recorded program looked good. Probably not what you wanted to hear.
And I found no new versions for ServerWMC when I fired it up last night.
I'm just not much help right now.
its the client addon that you had out of date. pvr.wmc - download the latest zip file and install from zip within XBMC System->Addons menu
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=179960
In terms of the recording, the WTV file played OK in WMC and in XBMC?
When we are viewing "Live TV" in XBMC what we are actually doing is recording the channel then remixing the WTV file to TS container and XBMC is playing that. THe errors on your log seemed to indicate that the WTV file was not being written to fast enough
Another thing you can do - turn off the option on Debug tab to delete temporary files, this means for any live streams you watch, both the WTV file and remixed TS file will be left in the TempSWMC directory in your recoreded TV location. When you have the problem, we can look at the relevant WTV and TS file to see whether the "issues" are present in both (indicating the tuner wasn't pushing data into the WTV file in time) or only the TS file (indicating the remux job was having some kind of problem writing the TS file). So yeah turn off that option, reproduce the problem, then check out the specific WTV and TS files that correlated to that live viewing request. You can also upload them to google drive so we can grab them and analyse them as well
Have you looked at the processor load when live-tv is going?
Scarecrow - I'll update the pvr.wmc addon this evening and advise back.
Krusty - Debug onscreen display shows average CPU load typically between 10%-30% during Live-TV.
And to confirm, WMC is nearly spotless while XBMC can become borderline unwatchable.
FWIW a Cox technician is coming out this evening to investigate cases of some channels coming in 'wrong' (e.g., SciFy showing on a channel that should be on Science Channel), and 'missing' channels that show up on Motorola boxes -- maybe I have a signal strengh or channel assignment issue that is causing the tuners to spaz.
Did you try to play directly the temporary wtv and ts files in xbmc (see the last part of scarecrow's last post)?