Just starting doing Live TV and having some trouble

[Tur0k 143]

Hey guys, I finally decided to implement my HDHOMERUN Prime with a cable card. I have opted to run the DVR service directly in Emby. I picked up a 7 day trial of schedules direct. I was able to activate my card and sync it to my HDHOMERUN Prime.

 

In my network I have 1 HTPC server and 1 LAN client and 1 wifi RPI3 client. We have 2 tablets (1 iPad mini, 1 amazon fire 7) and 2 smart phones that connect to Emby.

 

My main HTPC is the server and is in my home theatre room. Hardware wise it is a little old. CPU is based on an AMD phenom II 1090T. It is a 6 core proc with a base clock of 3.2 GHz. I have the server running 8 GB of ram. The OS and software are hosted on an SSD drive pool. The data drive is hosted on a separate 7200 RPM drive pool.

 

The HTPC server acts as the front end for my home theatre room (Kodi/Emby/web-browser access to Netflix/YouTube) and hosts Emby, my media file shares, and a few other services.

 

Emby server has transcoding enabled with hardware acceleration (openmax omx) enabled. I use a custom version of ffmpeg X86. Everything has been working very well. video playback as near perfect.

 

I have a second mini pc (HTPC-2) in the living room. It is running on an Intel core 2 duo T6600. Its base clock is 2.2Ghz. It has 4 GB or RAM and onboard video. Again video playback from my media shares is acceptable. System performance has been adequate.

 

I also have an RPI 3 (HTPC-3) that had Kodi xbian on it that I am converting to Emby. It has to buffer pretty regularly, but I suspect that some of that is related to missing Moët codecs, and a wifi connection.

 

HTPC-1 and HTPC-2 are connected to the LAN with gigabit connections. HTPC-3 is connected via wifi (I am planning on running a LAN network drop to see if I can improve playback performance.

 

All playback worked fine for media that is already on the media shares on any of my devices. Currently, I am able to watch live tv from HTPC-1 without trouble.

 

Live tv playback on HTPC-2 is less than optimal. Primarily it is jittery. CPU seems to run all the way up to 90%.

 

On both systems as soon as I get into the live tv playback and enter the guide navigation between seems awfully delayed compared to navigation in the rest of Emby Theatre.

 

I would like to correct playback on HTPC-2 and see if it is possible to improve guide navigation. Once those are addressed I will assess the performance of the RPI3 (run a network drop to my bedroom. Do any of you have any tips and tricks on how to make video playback and menu navigation less jittery?

 

Honestly, I am also worried that my older HTPC server hardware just needs to be refreshed so I can support hardware transcoding more effectively. If rebuilding my HTPC server around an Intel 7th gen CPU with better support for improved accelerated transcoding (support for HEVC) could fix my problem it wouldn't be out of the question. If that is the case I could move the existing AMD CPU, RAM, and motherboard to my living room HTPC. What are you guys' thoughts?

 

 

 

 

 

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[Luke 37129]

Can we please look at an example along with the information requested in how to report a media playback issue. thanks !

[Guest asrequested]

It sounds like there may be some transcoding going on. As Luke is asking for, post your server logs and transcode/remux logs, if any. 

[puithove 208]

I will chime in to say that if you are using the pi's built-in wifi.... just don't.  It's awful. It will never hold up for video playback. If you can run ethernet to it, great, that'll make it good.  If not, get an external usb wifi dongle - do some searching, there are some that work well with the pi.

Edited August 6, 2017 by puithove

[Tur0k 143]

Ok, I will work to get log data. I found my Emby server service was offline this morning when I woke up. I turned it back on. On a hunch I turned on enable throttling and reduced the transcoding thread count to 5 (server dashboard-transcoding). Our experience with server operation has been much more stable today. The jitter on my secondary HTPC is still there and the guide is still a bit slow.

 

I am planning on testing NVENC acceleration with the EVGA geforce 1070 FTW out of my gaming rig. If that does the trick I will pick another one up.

 

 

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Edited August 7, 2017 by Tur0k

[Luke 37129]

Yes before we can really offer any guidance can we please look at an example along with the information requested in how to report a media playback issue. thanks !