(2013-01-28, 19:01)RealDealNeil Wrote: To follow up on my issues streaming live TV w/ a MediaPortal back-end, switching the streaming method from TSReader to ffmpeg resolved the buffering issues. TSReader works well on my living room HTPC, but on the RPi, it must be difficult to stream raw buffer files over SMB.
If you're streaming from TSREADER, I'm not sure I understand why SMB would be involved? I often use a ROKU HD1000 (which is a Linux box), and I can either play recorded files via SMB shares, or I can stream via HTTP from TSREADER. It's been a long time since I checked this out, but if I remember right, the SMB shares maxed out somewhere around 29 Mbps, whereas I could stream at rates up above 40 Mbps from TSREADER. So it's always been my impression that even though when you look at the transfers with a packet sniffer, they look pretty much the same, that the live HTTP streaming was faster than playing a recording from an SMB share. Just an observation.
However, just today, I tried setting up my OpenElec-XBMC for local OTA channels via my HDHomeRun. I got it working thanks to some help on another thread, however it was doing pretty much what you described earlier, ie relative to the part about every 10 seconds it pausing for buffering, although in my case it would eventually freeze. I was surprised, since the bitrate of the OTA video was lower than stuff I've played from SMB shares coming over the same Gb lan. I tried it on 3 different channels 2 were 1080i, and one was 720p, but they all behaved the same, and actually, the one that worked best was the one with the highest bitrate.
Something strange that I couldn't quite see long enough to read, was that when it quickly popped up some buffering thing, I could read something that said "720", even though the source and my TV setup was all 1080i. I was wondering if somehow there were 720p<-->1080i conversions going on that's slowing things down
But then I guess I can't explain why it wouldn't be the same for recordings from SMB?
The other thing that I haven't verified, was that I tried playing from SMB onto 2 different TVs. The SMB playback went smoothly on both, however the smaller of the two TVs seemed to work better, ie I was seeing some digital artiacts on the bigger TV that I don't remember seeing there when playing via Windows. Size obviously isn't an issue, but the smaller TV I think is native 720p, while the bigger TV is native 1080p. Makes me wonder if regardless of the settings, the RPi might be 720p and converts to 1080, and it might be that there are several back and forth conversions going on. One other possibility is that I had adjusted the output to my big TV to compensate for significant overscan on the TV. Perhaps that is slowing things down there too.
Anyway, just throwing out a few things that came to mind, since what you're doing is something I also wanted to try, and the problems you're having seem similar to what I saw via HDHR. So I hope you post if you find out more.
Also, since I haven't done it, I'd appreciate a PM regarding how you set up the streaming from TSREADER in XBMC.
Thanks.
