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


mirdragon

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mirdragon

@ebr which i'm not bothered about and if emby can play the direct play it still slightly slower than plex, channels and hdhr apps. if you set to remux it takes longer to start and if you have on direct play and emby can't do it, you are still waiting up to 5 minutes later and what I have noticed is that when it's hung like this it sometimes either restarts the app or you just have keep pressing back to get back to the guide. Family don't want to be waiting minutes when swapping channels when they want to watch something.

just performed another test with countdown which has just been on - i set emby, plex and hdhr all recording the same channel, hdhr saved the file in mpg format, while emby and plex saved in ts format. Emby could not play the hdhr file unless it remuxed it.

i'm now recording the same channel through emby, plex, hdhr and channels dvr to see the results as emby could not play the channel again as direct play

 

 

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@rbjtech maybe a better approach might be trying to use a private VPN like openVPN or similar.
I've done this in the past to run 3 remote HDHomeruns to get additional sports coverage besides my local market. I don't know if recent firmware has changed the way this would work as I don't do it over VPN anymore.

I'd be happy to work with you on this to get it working and could do some limited testing as well. This could be helpful to the devs in troubleshooting & testing the UK streams I would think.

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rbjtech

Hi Carlo - a VPN is still going to be more than 3 hops - so that is not going to work.

HDHR have purposely restricted the TTL to 3 - effectively meaning 3 hops max.  On my own LAN I only just make that as I currently stream from a different VLAN lol (ie 2 hops).

However, doing a very quick bit of research, you can use a transparent proxy in the path of the stream - and it will modify the header/TTL to say 128 - thus your problem is solved and you can route it wherever you like ..

I think we need the real streams to really solve this - as recorded raw streams from hdhr or wget etc - work just fine (as does anything recorded in Emby..) - it's just Live TV that has the unreliability issue.

When I get some time - I'll try and look into the proxy solution - but being honest here, I rarely use Live TV anyway, so it won't be at the top of my 'to do' list ... 

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mirdragon

I just tested the stuff that was recorded earlier by all 4 apps and initially on the playback of the emby recording through emby it crashed, but then went tried file again it played but remuxed. The only recording it never remuxed and was able to do direct play was the Plex recording, overall i think the issue is down to how each program is broadcast and the audio formats

 

 

Edited by mirdragon
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rbjtech
3 minutes ago, mirdragon said:

I just tested the stuff that was recorded earlier by all 4 apps and initially on the playback of the emby recording through emby it crashed, but then went tried file again it played but remuxed. The only recording it never remuxed and was able to do direct play was the Plex recording

 

 

Are you just looking at the OTA HD Channels - BBC1,2,ITV,C4&C5 - 1080i/p h264/aac_latm ?  or are you also looking at the mpeg2 SD channels ?

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mirdragon
4 minutes ago, rbjtech said:

Are you just looking at the OTA HD Channels - BBC1,2,ITV,C4&C5 - 1080i/p h264/aac_latm ?  or are you also looking at the mpeg2 SD channels ?

Just the OTA HD Channels - that's all i've recorded

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1 hour ago, rbjtech said:

However, doing a very quick bit of research, you can use a transparent proxy in the path of the stream - and it will modify the header/TTL to say 128 - thus your problem is solved and you can route it wherever you like ..

That or a reverse proxy like nginx or caddy2 running on the local network pointed to port 5004 on the HDHomeRun might work as well.

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rbjtech
1 hour ago, cayars said:

That or a reverse proxy like nginx or caddy2 running on the local network pointed to port 5004 on the HDHomeRun might work as well.

Possibly - remember this is UDP - so not sure the RP is going to be able to do this to a connectionless protocol - but worth a look for sure.

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mirdragon

Some testing done this morning on the following channels and programmes

 101 BBC1 HD - Saturday Kitchen Live

102 BB2 HD - Serengeti

103 ITV HD - James Martin's Saturday Morning

104 4HD - The Simpsons

105 5HD - Friends

I also done a test with the equivalent SD broadcast

Test TV Channels
Channel Apple TV Shield TV  Channel Apple TV Shield TV 
1 Works Fails 101 Fails Fails
2 Works Works 102 Fails Fails
3 Works Works 103 Works Fails
4 Works Works 104 Works Works
5 Works Works 105 Works Works

Even though the channels wouldn't play on the devices, Emby reported all as direct-play and again on the Apple TV is sort of locks and sometimes need to press Home to get out of it, i did also experience the same crash I got on Shield TV where the app just crashed but not sure if that was me trying to back out when it didn't work or the app itself.

I tested the same channels on the HDHR app on both devices and that worked 

I also noticed that if Emby crashes the tuner is not always released and thus requires force unlocking and closing of the stream (or full reboot of the HDHR box)

NB: I have disabled video stream and any other option that would force it to remux or transcode within Emby as my goal is to get it working using direct play

Edited by mirdragon
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16 hours ago, rbjtech said:

Possibly - remember this is UDP - so not sure the RP is going to be able to do this to a connectionless protocol - but worth a look for sure.

This would be used for the http protocol, not UDP.  I did a google search and see others have this setup so it should work.

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1 hour ago, mirdragon said:

Some testing done this morning on the following channels and programmes

What is the resolution, interlace status and codecs used for each channel?

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mirdragon
4 hours ago, cayars said:

What is the resolution, interlace status and codecs used for each channel?

Can't remember, done lots since then and never made a record of what they were broadcast in

 

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You would need to play those 6 channels back and record those results to have anything meaningful for us to look at.

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mirdragon
3 hours ago, cayars said:

You would need to play those 6 channels back and record those results to have anything meaningful for us to look at.

Uploaded the recordings to the shared location further up

Apple TV 4k 64GB and Shield TV 2019 Pro

Both can only play channel 103 and 104, the other hd channels fail

All SD channels (1 - 5) work on Apple TV and on Shield TV only BBC 1 fails

I've recorded a short bit on the HD channels, but have noticed the ones that failed to even play haven't even recorded properly as only done about 20kb, while the two hd channels that worked play fine

101 - Match of the Day

102 - Detroit

103 22 Jump Street

104 Deadpool

105 When TV Goes Horribly Wrong

Also noticed when it crashed on 102 - it locked the tuner

 

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mirdragon

Just uploaded test recordings

Again only 103 played on Shield TV

There are 2 recordings for each channel

1st is from when the channel is on screen showing the spinning circle and the one that worked

2nd recording is from the guide only

Not tested Apple TV yet

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pwhodges

I've been away from Emby discussions for a few weeks (other things in my life!), but being in the UK I can confirm all the issues being discussed here. 

I have also previously brought up the issue not being mentioned in the current discussion which is that our subtitles in the UK are also different from the US ones, and are often not accessible live through Emby, in some cases hanging the streaming through Emby completely (all reported and logged months back).

Recordings are OK, and I have a few times simply played back a minute behind while recording, which usually sorts things out.  But that's a pain, not least because recording can't be set to run continuously over program boundaries - for instance, our local news follows our national news as a separate program, so we can't just watch through the whole news using this method.

At present I don't use Emby for live broadcasts, as I (my wife, actually) require subtitles, and I classify it as unusable in practice.

Paul

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rbjtech

Thanks Paul - Glad it's not just us then ;)

@cayars

On the testing side - I think this is a big task and it takes a lot of time to delve into the technical stuff for each channel.

Maybe it's better if we just focus on one channel and fully understand what is going on before moving onto the next ?

In the UK, we only have 5 OTA HD 'Main' Channels - so it's not like we have 100's - but I still feel understanding what is going on with one of them in detail would be a good start.

Thoughts ? 

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Yes, the 5 main OTA channels would be a good place to start.

Now we just need access to a UK based tuner to do some testing.

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rbjtech
9 minutes ago, ebr said:

UK guys - please test with the beta of the TV app that just went up (2.0.44).

Thanks.

Will do Eric - Thanks.

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rbjtech

*** WOW ***

5 out of the 5 HD Channels Direct Play !

Wehey !!

This is on a FireTV - I haven't tested the Shield yet.

All channels start within a second or two, and Direct Play (H264 - 1080i/p) - with AAC_LATM being software decoded.

Good job ebr !

Thankyou very much for solving this !

Edited by rbjtech
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rbjtech

Also just checked recording each channel - all good.  They all Direct Stream when playing back as expected due to the TS container. 👍

I'll test with the Shield and other clients (web) shortly.

edit - Blimey - DVB Subs also work ! 

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pwhodges

After reminding myself where to find the FireStick download, I was initially disappointed - 10-20 secs to tune, complete hang when requesting subtitles.

However, I saw that it was Direct Streaming, and after poking around to find the setting for direct play I got the results rbj has reported.  I see that for some reason SFN claims that it is transcoding the audio from stereo AAC to 7.1 AAC - I have no idea why (my TV is stereo); it still played.  In fact, if it is direct playing, surely it can't be transcoding the audio anyway, so the reporting's a bit screwy there I think.

However, this is of little use to me as it stands, because my TV does all this just fine on its own.  My main interest in live TV through Emby is when travelling, so I might not be able to enable Direct Play if the connection isn't good enough.  Presumably the web app requires transcoding, and in that case calling for subtitles still just hangs the stream - so a fix of the server's handling of this is still necessary.  Of course, I am still hoping that the long-rumoured live TV rewrite will transform the situation. but it's getting to be a long wait.

Paul

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