Live TV issues

[Doonga 17]

Not sure if this belongs here or in the Live TV section, it does seem specific to Android TV so I'll leave it here.

 

When I tune into a channel, the audio is usually slightly out of sync. After it's been streaming for a few seconds, it will stutter a bit then then audio will be way out of sync, on the order of 2 seconds or so. At this point the video will be extremely choppy and look like it's fluttering forward and backwards. The audio plays smoothly but is completely out of sync with the video. If I then adjust the audio offset to 2000, the audio will cut out for a moment and when it comes back it's perfectly in sync with the video and the video plays normally.

 

I'm using a HDHomerun Extend, Emby on an nVidia Shield and the 90 version of Emby. I'm on the current dev build of the server but this also happened on stable.

 

I can reproduce this at will. I should also note when using Google Live Channels none of these issues appear. Nor do I have the problem with Emby on my phone.

 

Attached is a log while the issue happened, should be around 10:28AM.

server-63598694400.zip

Edited May 13, 2016 by Doonga

[ebr 16169]

Is it all channels or only certain ones?  Is it transcoding or direct streaming? 

[Doonga 17]

I'm pretty sure it's all channels, I only tried about 5 out of the 12 I can receive though so I'm not 100% sure. It shows Direct/V.

[ebr 16169]

Only 12 channels, so this is OTA?

 

I've never seen this problem  so I don't really know what to try other than maybe fiddling with whatever settings may be available at the tuner level.  You could send me a log from the app just to see if there is anything I can spot but this is some sort of issue with VLC and the particular stream.

[Doonga 17]

Yea it's OTA. When I'm back home I'll send them in. Thanks!

[cncb 25]

Is this MPEG2 content because I have similar issues when playing .ts MPEG2 recordings with ExoPlayer (the Google player that Emby uses)?  

[Doonga 17]

Not too sure to be honest, it's whatever the HDHomerun Extend encodes to. I just got it and am learning how everything works. The source is OTA broadcasts.

[spencerisadog 4]

I often have the same audio delay in LiveTV via an HDHomeRun Extend.  However, it's not quite that magnitude of delay.  Ours is typically around 1300 ms.  I raised this question some time ago as well.

[Doonga 17]

Didn't get a chance to send up logs yet, however I think this is partly due to it being OTA and having my antenna not in the best location. Seems like the signal is stronger today, I noticed cleaner video in Google Live Channels too. Or perhaps it's the new VLC. I still do see audio sync issues though. I end up having to tweak that every time I start watching a channel.

Edited May 19, 2016 by Doonga

[Doonga 17]

Played with this some more this morning. I don't think the h.264 transcoder on the HDHomerun Extend is very good at least for OTA broadcasts. When I turned off hardware transcoding in Emby all of the problems went away. This isn't a huge deal since my Emby server is overbuilt. A single channel streaming eats about 8% CPU, not too bad.

 

It does make me wonder why the HDHomerun View app doesn't have any problems. I'm guessing that it just uses the native stream coming in without a transcode to h.264. 

[Luke 42077]

Played with this some more this morning. I don't think the h.264 transcoder on the HDHomerun Extend is very good at least for OTA broadcasts. When I turned off hardware transcoding in Emby all of the problems went away. This isn't a huge deal since my Emby server is overbuilt. A single channel streaming eats about 8% CPU, not too bad.

 

It does make me wonder why the HDHomerun View app doesn't have any problems. I'm guessing that it just uses the native stream coming in without a transcode to h.264. 

 

because it's built specifically for the streams that their tuner puts out.

[ebr 16169]

Interesting.  Thanks for the report.

[Doonga 17]

because it's built specifically for the streams that their tuner puts out.

 

Definitely makes sense. I'll probably pick up a connect and sell the extend since I'm not using the one thing it does over the connect.