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3.0.80 - Choppy playback for live TV only


Jdiesel

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Jdiesel

I don't watch much Live TV on my Roku device but noticed this this night. When watching a live tv channel it is almost as if every second frame is being dropped. Video playback is not smooth at all. Channel is being direct streamed and both audio and video streams are being copied. My Live TV source is from a m3u playlist and all channels are the same format:

Stream #0:0: Video: h264 (Main) ([27][0][0][0] / 0x001B), yuv420p, 1280x720, q=2-31, 59.94 tbr, 90k tbn, 90k tbc
Stream #0:1: Audio: aac (LC) ([15][0][0][0] / 0x000F), 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp

It is almost as if the video is be treated as interlaced even though I believe it is progressive. Playback on my Nvidia Shield is smooth.

 

I didn't capture an in app log from this playback session.

Edited by Jdiesel
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Well just to clear one thing up, it's not being treated as progressive. I can see in the media info it was not detected as interlaced.

 

If you drop the roku app quality setting low enough to force it to transcode, how does that differ?

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Jdiesel

You are correct. I bumped the quality down to 4Mbps to force a transcode and playback was smooth.

Edited by Jdiesel
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You say you don't watch live TV much so you can't really say if this is different behavior.  Is that correct?

 

Is it different with different channels?

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Jdiesel

It is the same with all channels. When I say different behavior I mean it wasn't this way 1-2 months ago. I can't say exactly when it changed but it wasn't always like this.

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If emby is copy both the video and audio stream then this would imply that the container wasn't supported. But really, the container is supported and can be direct played, but the application is now refusing to direct play from url. This is one of those changes, where direct play would encourage the stores to label the application as one which facilitates piracy. Pretty sure the roku app wasn't following standard protocol, and wasn't doing  this 1-2 months ago. Since the app stores are cleaning up their store fronts, a change such as this was inevitable.

 

The problem is your stream is 59.94 frames per second. This combined with ffmpeg having to fetch chunks over the internet from your m3u and compile them into a custom segemented m3u8 playlist for your roku all on-the-fly adds overhead. This means you now can't so easily play your legitimate streams as easily as you could of in the by-gone eras of yesterday. You could use theater, which doesn't need an "appstore" to distribute it, or any of the other apps which circulate on their own to acheive direct play..

 

*hint* blue neon still allows direct play of these types of streams, since the application itself can force a play method. Does doing this fix your issue?

Edited by speechles
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Jdiesel

As I understand the Android TV app has the same process in place requiring 3rd party sources to be remuxed on the server even if the app support direct playing the stream. I see no choppy playback issues on my Shield TV which leads me to believe that it is handling deinterlacing on the client properly. When I lower the bitrate on the official Roku app to force transcoding I believe the deinterlacing is happening on the server side which eliminates the issue I see with choppy playback.

 

I will try BlueNeon and see how it handles it since I have more control over playback.

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