Playback randomly hangs (buffering...)
#1
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Hi,
i am using XBMC in combination with tvheadend for years now as my primary TV backend. Currently it is based on a Intel i3 530 Ubuntu 14.04 box hanging on my flat screen, xbmc is v13.2 stable, latest tvheadend from stable repo, oscam with astra hd+ card.

Its always a very smart system, but its never running really perfect. The most annoying problem is, that video playback randomly begins stuttering and then stops for buffering. After that the playback continues normally. This happens every 5-30 minutes. It does not matter if iam watching recordings from local disk or live-stream. As iam watching only HD contents, i cant say if sd would do better - i dont think so.

The most strange thing is, that i do have these problems for more than 2 years now, and it does not matter what hardware i use. I have a Intel i5 (2. or 3. generation) HTPC, even my raspberry pi (openelec) has the same behaviour. Only equal parts are my tvheadend-Server with the TV-Card (Digital Devices Cine S2) and my TV (Phillips 40PFL7605H) connected with HDMI.

Ive tried to activate and increase buffering for local media in advancedsettings.xml without any success.

Any ideas?
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#2
I guess anyone is going to say debug log (wiki) but also look at top and/or iotop to see what is happening when the glitches occur. If it is local disk then this should never really happen unless the system is starved of data through other processes accessing the disk. There could be a cron process or other regularly running job that is doing something IO intensive.

The best way to monitor top/iotop is to sit with your laptop or tablet on your lap, and ssh into the machine.
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