Poor performance on Recorded TV in from HEVC

[JeremyG 20]

A little background, both NYC and Philadelphia had ABC on VHF only and I was unable to receive.   A couple months ago Philly went live with ATSC 3, and while most are DRM, luckily ABC is not.  Channel  106.1 WPVI-HD

I think emby might be handling something poorly while recording this channel , because when I watch recorded video on my Roku ultra the performance is very slow.   It literally takes like 5-10 seconds to start the stream, and then sometimes pauses for buffering during playback for another 5-10 seconds (usually only once or twice during a half hour show).

The reason this seems strange to me, is that I have no problems with any other content streaming to this Roku Ultra, as almost every format is natively supported with no transcoding, if anything sometimes audio needs to be transcoded if it's only in TrueHD.

Could the 8 text streams be messing with it somehow?

Below is log file of transcoding session, and MediaInfo readout of the recorded .TS file.

Server/Hardware:
HDHomeRun Flex 4K
Windows 11
Core i3 10th Gen
16 GB RAM
Nvidia 1050 GPU
Transcoding disk is a Samsung 850 Pro  (SATA, but still shouldn't have any speed issues, I'm the only user of this server)

JeopardyStream-RokuUltra.txt

Edited November 19, 2023 by JeremyG

[ebr 14913]

Hi.  As a test, can you convert the file to a MKV without changing anything else and see if that makes a difference?

I'm thinking it may just be the Roku or connection having trouble with HEVC in a TS container.

[JeremyG 20]

Yea I will try that later tonight or tomorrow...

But even if that's the case... my concern is why is the transcoding behaving badly?.   If I took a full on 2160p movie, and forced transcoding, it would start to play in only a second or two, and never pause/lock-up through the whole movie. 

[Luke 37068]

Your example is actually not transcoding the video. It's copying the original video stream as-is. It could just be that the Roku is having trouble with the hevc stream.

Retrying it as an mkv would provide some useful data though.

[JeremyG 20]

For some reason none of my software would properly copy the audio stream of those .ts files into an MKV container.   Kinda weird I've done it many times (usually to strip out unneeded audio streams) so i know how to do it....but Xmedia Recode just plain wouldn't let me copy the audio.

But I did copy the video portion into an MKV and it played instantly on Roku.

So, I guess Roku could be choking on the .TS...or maybe there is actually something wrong with the audio?

[JeremyG 20]

Video worked fine...


Audio  ...the "add" arrow-button is just greyed out...its like it doesnt see any audio or something.

[JeremyG 20]

I don't know how to really try this with FFPMEG on the command line, but I did just run FFProbe on the .ts file.   After some "Error Parsing NAL #4" i got this  at the end:

Unsupported codec?
 

Input #0, mpegts, from 'D:\Jeopardy! S39E24.ts':
  Duration: 00:29:45.42, start: 18314.994900, bitrate: 4361 kb/s
  Program 3
  Stream #0:0[0x31]: Video: hevc (Main 10) ([36][0][0][0] / 0x0024), yuv420p10le(tv, bt709), 1920x1080 [SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], Closed Captions, 59.94 fps, 59.94 tbr, 90k tbn
  Stream #0:1[0x32](eng): Data: bin_data (AC-4 / 0x342D4341)
  Stream #0:2[0x39](eng): Data: bin_data (STPP / 0x50505453)
  Stream #0:3[0x33](spa): Data: bin_data (AC-4 / 0x342D4341)
Unsupported codec with id 98314 for input stream 1
Unsupported codec with id 98314 for input stream 2
Unsupported codec with id 98314 for input stream 3

 

[Luke 37068]

The upcoming 4.8 release will have improved support for ac4 audio.