Direct Play Issue with Live TV using HD Homerun (Emby Issue Only)

[ebr 14913]

Without knowing which log goes with which session this is tough to tell but this stream is clearly an issue:

6:02:02.642 [mpegts @ 000001d5deeeff40] probed stream 0 failed
16:02:02.643 [mpegts @ 000001d5deeeff40] Could not find codec parameters for stream 0 (Unknown: none): unknown codec
Consider increasing the value for the 'analyzeduration' and 'probesize' options
16:02:02.643 Input #0, mpegts, from 'http://127.0.0.1:8096/LiveTv/LiveStreamFiles/8c7a947e9f094308b10750c0d64fdc67/stream.ts':
16:02:02.643   Duration: N/A, start: 43097.094422, bitrate: N/A
16:02:02.643   Program 17472 
16:02:02.643   No Program
16:02:02.643     Stream #0:0[0x66]: Unknown: none, Start-Time 43097.094s
16:02:02.643 Stream map 'v:0' matches no streams.

 

[mirdragon 15]

@rbjtech, @cayars

In this share is two video files taken tonight, one is Emby and one is Channels DVR

Both on the same Shield TV 2015 Pro

Videos showing difference

@cayarsas you are based in the US, do you have a team of developers or testers in the UK, seeing our broadcasts are totally different to what you get in the US?

[shdwkeeper 15]

On 9/11/2021 at 6:06 AM, ebr said:

Can you please play one of these until it starts direct streaming and then send a log from the app directly from the playback OSD?

Thanks.

Send it from the emby app on the Shield TV?  Not sure how to do this.

[Carlo 4330]

4 minutes ago, shdwkeeper said:

Send it from the emby app on the Shield TV?  Not sure how to do this.

Instructions for doing this are in the link above.

[shdwkeeper 15]

On 9/11/2021 at 6:06 AM, ebr said:

Can you please play one of these until it starts direct streaming and then send a log from the app directly from the playback OSD?

Thanks.

Ok 2 logs sent, right now, I was watching LiveTV off the HD Homerun device.  ABC channel and CBS channel.  Starts off saying Trans, than everything freezes and than says Remux and I still get the Transcode Speed and reason saying Direct Play error in Stats for Nerds.  Channels DVR never does this and plays both these channels flawlessly. 

Edited September 12, 2021 by shdwkeeper

[ebr 14913]

19 hours ago, shdwkeeper said:

Ok 2 logs sent, right now, I was watching LiveTV off the HD Homerun device.  ABC channel and CBS channel.  Starts off saying Trans, than everything freezes and than says Remux and I still get the Transcode Speed and reason saying Direct Play error in Stats for Nerds.  Channels DVR never does this and plays both these channels flawlessly. 

Okay, I think the reason being displayed is erroneous.  There is no error.  It is remuxing because you have turned off the option to direct play it.  I can look at improving that but, can you turn on the option to direct play and then send a new log from the app after starting one of these channels?

[shdwkeeper 15]

On 9/13/2021 at 7:20 AM, ebr said:

Okay, I think the reason being displayed is erroneous.  There is no error.  It is remuxing because you have turned off the option to direct play it.  I can look at improving that but, can you turn on the option to direct play and then send a new log from the app after starting one of these channels?

Logs were just sent.  Direct Play seemed to work.  Problem with Direct Play is you can't pause or rewind Live TV and a lot of the times the audio is out of sync.  Channels DVR doesn't have this issue.

[ebr 14913]

Okay, so the whole issue here was just a misinterpretation of the stats info?  I have improved how that will display in the next release.

[shdwkeeper 15]

10 minutes ago, ebr said:

Okay, so the whole issue here was just a misinterpretation of the stats info?  I have improved how that will display in the next release.

I'm still getting Audio out of sync and pauses while I had direct play running.  But its not transcoding if that's what your asking.

[mirdragon 15]

@ebrWhat about the issues for UK users where direct play doesn't work over 97% of the time. It's very hit and miss if and when it will work. We shouldn't have to set it to copy video stream just to do a workaround which then causes audio sync issues.

And as asked previously do you not have any UK developers working on this or is everything done on US devices and hope they work with UK broadcasts?

[ebr 14913]

8 hours ago, mirdragon said:

And as asked previously do you not have any UK developers working on this or is everything done on US devices and hope they work with UK broadcasts?

We do not currently have anyone working in the UK.  That makes this very difficult to diagnose I'm afraid.

[Luke 37065]

8 hours ago, mirdragon said:

@ebrWhat about the issues for UK users where direct play doesn't work over 97% of the time. It's very hit and miss if and when it will work. We shouldn't have to set it to copy video stream just to do a workaround which then causes audio sync issues.

And as asked previously do you not have any UK developers working on this or is everything done on US devices and hope they work with UK broadcasts?

Does the problem occur with recordings of the same broadcast?

[ebr 14913]

1 minute ago, Luke said:

Does the problem occur with recordings of the same broadcast?

Yeah, if it does, then you can get us a sample recording...

[mirdragon 15]

 

4 hours ago, Luke said:

Does the problem occur with recordings of the same broadcast?

 

4 hours ago, ebr said:

Yeah, if it does, then you can get us a sample recording...

yes it does and I've already provided (also provided to @cayars) you with the recordings, the recordings are fine but Emby can't play them. See page 2 of this thread

 

 

 

[ebr 14913]

Okay, I remember that now from back this spring.  You say "Emby can't play them" but that isn't really true, right?  It can play them but requires remuxing or transcoding...?

[mirdragon 15]

1 minute ago, ebr said:

Okay, I remember that now from back this spring.  You say "Emby can't play them" but that isn't really true, right?  It can play them but requires remuxing or transcoding...?

It can't do direct play that is the issue and shouldn't have to a) keep changing settings to get it to play b) have it constantly remuxing to fix a bug in the software or c) have it playing with audio sync issues when it does remux.

I've even provided within the past week two video's showing Emby vs Channels DVR, where Emby fails at doing direct play and can get a spinning circle for minutes while the same channels play fine on Channels DVR on the same unit.

For me, Emby is only suitable for playing back my other media and not suitable for UK LiveTV

[Carlo 4330]

In the US to get full use of Live TV on the ATV and be able to pause, RW, FF with hardware based tuners, we normally don't direct play the stream either.

I myself don't have to keep changing settings on any of my client as I set the app and leave it.

If a channel direct streams it's just repackaging it and sending it to the client as HLS vs a transport stream which has no timing codes (dumb stream).
It doesn't matter if it direct plays in this case as it could be more limiting. Nothing is gained by a direct play vs direct stream using HLS for Live TV.

HLS is the defacto standard used by everyone to stream media.

Now if you are getting direct stream and/or transcode with sync errors that's an issue we can look at but there is nothing wrong with delivering the stream via HLS.

 

[rbjtech 4265]

I concur with what is being said here - it's a frustrating experience to watch any form of live HD channels in the UK using emby - you have a significant chance that it will simply not work - or wait for a significant amount of time for it to 'start' .. why ?

As has been said - the frustrating thing is using the same HDHR tuner - you can direct play any HD stream instantly using the likes of VLC - you can even wget the http from the tuner - again zero issues - so I really don't understand why emby has so many problems - direct play, direct stream, even transcoding is hit and miss.

I can provide you with the 5 channel h264/aac raw .ts files from the 5 OTA HD Channels if you like (via a wget) - maybe, they will reveal something ?

Edited September 16, 2021 by rbjtech

[mirdragon 15]

8 hours ago, cayars said:

In the US to get full use of Live TV on the ATV and be able to pause, RW, FF with hardware based tuners, we normally don't direct play the stream either.

I myself don't have to keep changing settings on any of my client as I set the app and leave it.

If a channel direct streams it's just repackaging it and sending it to the client as HLS vs a transport stream which has no timing codes (dumb stream).
It doesn't matter if it direct plays in this case as it could be more limiting. Nothing is gained by a direct play vs direct stream using HLS for Live TV.

HLS is the defacto standard used by everyone to stream media.

Now if you are getting direct stream and/or transcode with sync errors that's an issue we can look at but there is nothing wrong with delivering the stream via HLS.

 

Even if you set to do video stream copy, here in the UK you still have problems with audio sync and just because you do that in the US doesn't mean everyone wants to do it. Your app cannot function properly with LiveTV in the UK on the Nvidia Shield TV. Also if you say the defacto is to direct stream so remuxing or even have it transcoding then why have the option to direct play it just doesn't make sense.

Even if you do have it on direct play and it doesn't work, why can't your app automatically fall back to remuxing instead of constantly showing the spinning circle as though buffering or hung. You can direct play on some streams but not all, so this suggests there is a bug within your software on how it is dealing with the input stream.

5 hours ago, rbjtech said:

I concur with what is being said here - it's a frustrating experience to watch any form of live HD channels in the UK using emby - you have a significant chance that it will simply not work - or wait for a significant amount of time for it to 'start' .. why ?

As has been said - the frustrating thing is using the same HDHR tuner - you can direct play any HD stream instantly using the likes of VLC - you can even wget the http from the tuner - again zero issues - so I really don't understand why emby has so many problems - direct play, direct stream, even transcoding is hit and miss.

I can provide you with the 5 channel h264/aac raw .ts files from the 5 OTA HD Channels if you like (via a wget) - maybe, they will reveal something ?

They have had recordings and logs showing the issue and no further forward since they were supplied. Even if you look at the last two videos posted you can seen the difference between the apps.

[mirdragon 15]

there is also this post Direct Play not working with ts files on shield which has been ongoing for months, but no update since june

[rbjtech 4265]

If we have somebody willing to investigate, then maybe we can tackle this from another direction.

I don't believe there is any technical reason, why I could not share my hdhr onto the internet as a 'UK' tuner - that way, they effectively have a 'live stream' to test from ?

It would be over http only, so I would need to lock it to a source IP address or range to give it 'some' form of security - but this is doable - as it just uses TCP 5004 for the stream.  It wouldn't 'discover' but they could just use my WAN address or fqdn.

@cayars - would this be something worth trying - is this the problem here, you can't re-create the issues ?

Edited September 17, 2021 by rbjtech

[rbjtech 4265]

So I shared my HDhomerun and it opens the channel remotely but HDHomerun are being sneaky and using TTL=3 on their outgoing streams - thus you cannot just send the stream across the internet as TTL means it will die before it gets anywhere ..

I 'may' be able to modify the IP header to increase the TTL - then the stream will work .. hmm .. not as easy as I had hoped.  Something like 'Trudy' acting as a transparent proxy to modify the TTL will probably do the trick ..  I'll have a play when I find some time ..

Edited September 17, 2021 by rbjtech

[mirdragon 15]

i had some issues playing some channels this morning, so i set the recording going - when tried to playback it had problems and emby crashed, but when retried it played the file but remuxed it.

I've now set it recording on BBC1, Channel 4 and Channel 5 HD channels, so will test them as well as initially had some issues playing then went into remux

[mirdragon 15]

So a bit of further testing - it failed playing live but on some recordings i tried playing it automatically started remuxing even with all the options set to direct play only but then had audio sync issues.

also tried a couple after redoing them into different containers and had mixed results again.

[ebr 14913]

9 hours ago, mirdragon said:

why have the option to direct play it just doesn't make sense.

Because, if you don't care about pausing or rewinding, it is possible to tune the channels much quicker this way.  In my setup they come up in about a second with direct play.

9 hours ago, mirdragon said:

They have had recordings and logs showing the issue and no further forward since they were supplied

The issue exists somewhere in Exoplayer and we have not been able to locate  it yet.