Diagnosing streaming and recording issue

Ian Jones

Please can someone advise how best to identify why certain streams freeze and whether the issue is to do with the stream, the performance of the service or a bug in TVH.

The issues are only prevalent when timeshift is enabled, but the issue does not occur for 90% of my streams of the same bandwidth.

Please can someone help with the diagnosis

ukn_unknown

This is a long shut ... but maybe when you enable timeshift (I never used timeshift) TVH is trying to understand the stream content. If you have errors and use passthrough TVH will send the data (and player will have to handle those errors).
I had the same problem when I enabled vaapi transcoding ... TVH was passing info to vaapi driver and driver was not able to handle the failure and stopping.
An interesting experiment would be to enable vaapi transcoding (with CQ = 27) without enabling timeshift --> if you still see the errors in same proportion (of 90%), probably above is the root cause. Anyway I don't think we have a fix to the problem ... is only that you will understand where is coming from.

DaveH

ukn_unknown made what sounds a sensible point. It might be helpful if Ian gave some details of what the streams are (i.e. their source, and transport type etc). Also does TVH put anything in the logs when there are problems? (I don't know anything about enabling debug logging or whatever)

Ian Jones

Hi All - sorry it has taken me a while to reply. I cannot reliably test it, but when I put on the VPN the stream runs more reliably and I can timeshift and record. I think the stream has issues that are not being reported when it is passed through. I have similar issues when I try to record. As the TVH is in docker, I dont have access to to all of the encoding libraries

ukn_unknown

I assume you have a VPN between client and server. You can also use HTTP transport (I think that packets are retransmitted in HTTP mode). HTSP has the advantage that prioritize packets based on 'importance' (in streams) ... so in theory HTSP should be superior. Interesting results.

Ian Jones

vpn is on the router but effectively yes - VPN tunnel where all traffic resides