Hi,
I just wanted to ask the community for some help. In the last few months, I've noticed that HD TV recordings have been pausing to buffer very frequently.
This is usually to the extent that the program becomes unwatchable. Sometimes when it happens the program even stops completely.
I've spent quite a bit of time investigating the root cause, but have no solution so far.
My setup is an Ubuntu ver.18.04.2 box running fully current TVHeadend Server (4.2.6-84).
The box contains a mobo with integrated AMD APU, HDMI out, USB 3 etc. The system drive is a 128 GB Samsung SSD, TV recordings and movies are stored on a 3 TB Seagate HD.
I have a LAN connected Nvidia Shield running Kodi 18.1 and the current TVHeadend client as provided with that Kodi version.
I also have a Beelink GT1 Ultimate box running CoreElec, again running the current Kodi 18.1 version. I was using the Beelink box as my main Kodi box but switched it out for the Shield to try and resolve the issue. They are obviously different platforms (LibreElec v Android), so I was surprised that this didn't help.
Things I've verified not to be the cause of the issue:
LAN speeds.
CPU Overheads.
Disk access speeds.
I've tested, tuned and verified the above individually and am sure that they are not the issue.
I have 1000 Mbps n/w speeds end to end, server cpu averages about 40% when in use, CPU on the Shield rarely goes over 10% per core etc.
But in summary, I can put a 4K movie on the Seagate drive and will play flawlessly on either Kodi box via my LAN. Which is confirmation.
Also Live TV HD channels play flawlessly, as do SD live and recorded TV, as well as 4K/HD/SD movies and all internet streaming content.
When I use system monitor on my Linux box, to view resource use at the time the issue happens, the CPU activity never exceeds 50% (On either of 2 cores). Data transmission rises just after the playback pausing event corresponding to the buffering on my client box pulling data as expected, but it's not enough to reach any kind of upper threshold.
On the Kodi box, I can view stream info (Ctrl + Shift + O) for buffer information during playback. When a HD TV recording is playing, it goes along skipping between 100%/99%. When the event happens, with no warning and apparently at random, I can see the buffer suddenly drop; E.g.: 100%...99%...76%...54%...12%...7%. Then playback will pause and a buffer progress ring will display until the buffer refills to 100%. Sometimes, as I mentioned, playback will stop completely.
Things I've tried:
I've updated TVHeadend server to the latest nightly build just yesterday (ver 4.3)
Same for Kodi clients (Now on 18.2 RC1).
I've tried a whole range of "Chunk Size" settings in TVH client settings.
Increased priority of "pass" stream to "Important" in TVH server.
Reduced other overheads at the time of playback (No active recordings, Netflix streaming, Live TV playback, Movie streaming etc.).
Nothing above has any effect. I am at a loss to identify any other TVH setting that might help.
My suspicion is that this issue has crept in with updates, probably around the time of upgrading to Kodi 18.1. But I can't be sure.
Has anyone else experienced this issue? Any help or suggestions would be appreciated. I will have minimal further time available to spend, so please understand that I might not be able to post logs in a hurry (I'm a log noob), but any and all insight would be most welcome.
Thank you!