I'm using two Hauppauge HVR-930C tuners on a DVB-C network (Unitymedia Germany). As Windows is constantly letting me down, I looked into alternatives and was amazed to find TvHeadend, which is generally an awesome application.
The only actual issue I'm facing are some optical glitches in live TV or recordings, accompanied by log outputs like this:
2016-10-15 12:51:39.026 TS: DVB-C Network/138MHz/RTL HD: H264
#523 Continuity counter error (total 1)
2016-10-15 12:52:36.634 TS: DVB-C Network/138MHz/RTL HD: H264
#523 Continuity counter error (total 2)
2016-10-15 12:52:36.634 TS: DVB-C Network/138MHz/RTL HD: TELETEXT
#528 Continuity counter error (total 1)
2016-10-15 12:52:51.370 TS: DVB-C Network/138MHz/RTL HD: H264
#523 Continuity counter error (total 8)
2016-10-15 12:54:26.752 TS: DVB-C Network/138MHz/RTL HD: H264
#523 Continuity counter error (total 10)
...
2016-10-15 13:19:37.867 TS: DVB-C Network/138MHz/RTL HD: AC3
#524 Continuity counter error (total 1)
2016-10-15 13:20:38.320 TS: DVB-C Network/138MHz/RTL HD: H264
#523 Continuity counter error (total 44)
2016-10-15 13:20:38.329 TS: DVB-C Network/138MHz/RTL HD: AC3
#524 Continuity counter error (total 2)
This also happens for MPEG2 and the "total" numbers go as high as 200.
I've found many threads about this issue here and in other forums. Thus I tried using only one of the tuners, directly plugged into the Raspberry Pi instead of using a hub; I installed the MPEG codec license; I compiled the latest TvHeadend version (4.1-2275~gea1f43f); I searched for the "Full mux reception" option, but apparently that's long gone and hopefully turned off by default?
None of that has helped, so I wonder what else I could try. I'm pretty certain that it's not a signal strength problem, as the same tuner USB sticks were plugged into the same TV socket at the same place in my house, and they worked perfectly fine. However, they were plugged into a different computer (running Windows 7; same driver version though) and not into the Raspberry Pi.
When I record a program and watch it or even transfer the recorded file manually, the glitches are always in the same places, so it is definitely not a streaming problem from the Raspberry Pi to the PC that I view it on.
When I stream/record two channels at once, the problem gets significantly worse. Could the Raspberry's single USB 2.0 host be the bottleneck that causes these problems?
And for my understanding: when I tune into a MPEG/H264 channel and want to watch it live on another computer on the network (no timeshift, no recording), what does the Raspberry have to do? Does it essentially just read the encoded data from the tuner and pass it through to its Ethernet port? Or does it have to decode/transcode in any way?
I'm happy about any tips on how to fix or improve this!
Cheers,
Philipp