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Live TV Stutters every few seconds


Hflashman

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Hflashman

Hi @@krustyreturns,

 

I hope your day is going well and that you have a couple of minutes to check into something for me please.

 

I have a problem recently where Live TV stutters every few seconds (plays for up to 4-5 seconds, then pauses).  I don't know what's up with it as it had been fine before.  The problem happens on my home network and when viewing remotely.  I can play recorded content just fine, hence wondering if its something else.  I even uninstalled everything (Emby, the pluggin to ServerWMC and ServerWMC itself), rebooted and reinstalled everything but get the same thing.  No PC or other changes were made at the local end (its a top of the line i7 CPU, 16 gigs of RAM, Samsung SSD).

 

I've attached the log from yesterday.   Towards the end of the day maybe you can see multiple attempts to watch which are interrupted like this. I have log files from other days if those are clearer.

 

I've been using the http setting as advised in the sticky and have had no firewall or other changes.

 

Thank you most kindly for your help here.

 

 

ServerWMC_20151202.log

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krustyreturns

Everything in the log looks fine.  Do you get the stutter even when your client is running on the same machine as serverwmc?  Is the wmc recorded tv folder on the ssd?  Is that also the drive windows is stored on?  Have you check what the cpu usage is when the live stream is running?  Have you tried temporally disabling anti-virus?

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Hflashman

Great questions @@krustyreturns. Thank you for checking the log for me.

 

Haven't tried playing the client on this server. Will do that. Will also try to disable Windows Defender and test. Will get back to you on these. Sometimes everything is fine.

 

Yes the recorded TV folder is on the ssd and yes that is the windows ssd. CPU was around 8% while ffmpeg was running.

 

I often get playback error messages on Android mobile. This is a separate issue. Any idea what that might be?

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  • 1 month later...

bump - did you get anything resolved with your issue @@Hflashman or @@krustyreturns ? both me and my parents have setups similar to this. i don't watch live tv a lot but don't really have issues. the last few days my parents have been having stuttering/pausing issues with live TV. everything else including recorded tv is working fine though. they even watched a show live that was recording at the same time and it stuttered but when they played back the recorded file after it finished there was no stuttering playing that. i'm lost on what the issue could be as everything looks fine and we had just upgraded their computer to handle transcoding and CPU usage was less than 20% with one stream going and it was stuttering.

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krustyreturns

I don't know what ever happened with him.  I need a serverwmc log when they are running live tv, a description of their server/client and network, and possibly an emby log.

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I don't know what ever happened with him.  I need a serverwmc log when they are running live tv, a description of their server/client and network, and possibly an emby log.

 

k, it might take me a few days as i'll have to get all that remotely but i'll post here once i do, thanks!!!

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@@krustyreturns here is a link to the logs i pulled from last night when it was doing it to them. their setup is they have 2 dual tuner HDHomeRun tuners, for a total of 4 tuners (not sure on the exact model but they are the ones right before all the newer DLNA capable ones came out) connected to an antenna for OTA broadcasts. the HDHomeRuns are connected to a gigabit switch that is then connected to a gigabit router, the router is where their desktop is connected that is running Emby server. they are using nexus players which are connected to the same gigabit switch and router using a usb to network adapter, all cabling is CAT6. we just upgraded the desktop to an AMD FX-8350 8 core CPU with 8 gig of RAM. as far as software for live tv its windows 7 with servermwc and emby.

 

last night there was 2 shows recording in the background and my dad was trying to watch live tv on the nexus player. every few seconds it would pause/stutter and then continue. they tested playing "shark tank" while it was still recording (i am unsure if they watched it from the guide or watched the partially recorded show) and it was stuttering/pausing as well. after shark tank finished recording they then started the finished recorded tv file and it played without any issues. this appears to eliminate any signal/network issue because if it was due to that the pauses/stutters should have been recorded as well.

 

all tv watching/testing was happening between 8PM and 10PM. i took a look at their computer at the time and CPU usage was round 25% while the 2 shows were recording and the live tv stream was transcoding. I also had it setup so that recorded TV goes to the D:\ drive (which is 2 physical HDD combined into a dynamic disk) i also had the temp transcode folder pointed to the D:\ drive too. i attempted to move the temp transcode folder to the C:\ drive to try and eliminate any HDD I/O performance issues and the stuttering/pausing continued after that change as well.

 

let me know if you have any questions, need any more details, or need anything tested.

 

thanks!!!!

 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B379XYZRGuIyQnItd003emZETUE/view?usp=sharing

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krustyreturns

I assume your attempt to move drives around was in a different log because I don't see that here (you probably know you have to restart swmc when you make changes to the remux location).

 

I can see in the logs where the data pipeline repeatable bogs down:

 

2016/01/08 20:23:55.098 WriteChunk> long interval between writes (ms): 2351

 

They either indicate swmc is waiting a log time for data from the tuners or it is having trouble writing the ts file to disk.  It appears to happen when the first two tuners were not available so there is a lot more activity to disk.  

 

There is something else weird going on when you opened a active recording where it looks like the same file was opened four times, I'm not sure what that is about.  I'll have a look at what could cause that.

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thanks for the reply back! i was changing the emby transcode temporary files location (under playback and then transcode on the emby server settings), does that still affect serverwmc that it would need to be restarted? i didn't do anything to restart serverwmc after making that change as i didn't think it would affect that. i just had them stop live tv and then made and saved the change and then had them start live tv again, the temporary files did move to the new location so i assumed it took it.

 

so based on what you saw and your response it sounds like it was the HDD that was the bottleneck?

 

i don't know about the same recording getting opened multiple times. they may have tried something on their own before they got me involved.

 

sometime when i get some time here i'll try and recreate the scenario with them, doing 2 recordings and trying live tv and then get you the logs again. i would attempt it on my system but i only have 2 tuners total so i don't think i can recreate it.

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krustyreturns

I misunderstood your post, I switch back and forth between different swmc client forums and forget which group I am talking to.  

 

The problem I am seeing in the swmc log has to do with where swmc writes temporary files, by default this is in the recorded tv folder of wmc in the sub directory 'tempswmc'.  This is the same disk being written to when wmc is recorded programs.  So when they all get going its a lot of disk activity.  

 

A fairly simple thing to try is to tell swmc to create its temporary remux files (ts files) on a different disk and see if that improves performance (this is what I mistakenly thought you were talking about in your post).  You can do this by editing swmc's config file and setting this field (its normally empty):

<RemuxCustomFolderUNC>\\UNCpath\to\a\diff\disk\folder</RemuxCustomFolderUNC>

 

Currently swmc requires this path to be a unc (shared) path.  This shouldn't be required for emby since it uses http for live streaming - but for now the restriction is there, so make sure its a unc path you enter.

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Awesome! Thanks for the quick replies and help! I'll impliment that setting change hopefully tonight and have them try it out.

 

Side question, would having all that activity going to a SSD instead of a mechanical HDD make a difference? I assume yes since SSD are so much faster but didn't know if something with the type or amount of data would negate that.

 

I've been trying to push my parents to get one maybe this will push them over the edge :)

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ok so we did some testing tonight after i made the change. i had 2 recorded shows going on 2 different channels and then had them start 2 live streams on the 2 nexus players also on different channels, so all 4 tuners were being used.

 

at about 8:20PM is where they started watching the 2 different channels of live tv with the previously started recorded tv shows. i would say this time it did much better, the streams lasted for about 10 minutes before one of them paused for a second. before it was doing it every minute or so.

 

i'm assuming even with splitting everything up this is still due to HDD performance. i had emby's temp transcode folder pointed to the C:\ drive, the recorded TV folder was on the D:\ drive, and the custom remux path that i added was set to the E:\ drive, which is technically an external drive though it is USB 3.0 and hooked up to a USB 3.0 port.

 

if you could just confirm thats what you see or if there is some other issue going on and i'll try and figure out a way to switch things around and/or upgrade HDD to improve the performance. 

 

thanks again!

logs.zip

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krustyreturns

I see this in the serverwmc log, but this is the only one:

2016/01/09 20:22:29.420 WriteChunk> long interval between writes (ms): 12448

 

I'm not guaranteeing that it is disk performance though, but seems like a reasonable place to start.

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