Having troube pausing live TV on all platforms running XBMC

Anders Wenneberg

Now I'm going "all in" with my ATV2, iPAD, an eeeBOX and PC running as frontend and a TVheadend with 3 tuners (DVB-T) running as backend.
Everything works like a charm, configured the source like htsp://_user:_pass@server_ip:9982 and this gives me access to all live channels from the backend.
Only thing now is that the pause function does not work properly.
When I pause the picture freezes like it should, resuming works initially but after a like 20-30 seconds the picture goes in slow motion and very jerkily. sound is ok though.
The same behavior on ATV2, eeeBox running W7, eeeBox running liveCD, on my state of the art laptop running W7 and some old boxes running Ubuntu. Tried the 10.1 Dharma and some older 9 release but with same problem. The iPAD does not have the option to paus.
Am I missing something?

So far I have noticed that a working stream is around 6-10 Mpbs and after pausing it and when the problem occurs it is only like half of the bandwith.

“Wife acceptance test” coming up in a few days and you know how hard it is to get a second chance.

Please advice

/AGW

H Gut

I think the live TV buffering happens in XBMC and not in TvHeadend. I use on my Ubuntu 10.10 lars opdenkamp's ppa (https://launchpad.net/~lars-opdenkamp). A few weeks ago there was a option to pause live TV, but now the feature is missing. "The timeshift is not proberly implementet yet" is the statement of lars, but it seems to be on the agenda.

I think the best option will be the buffering (LiveBuffer) in TvHeadend like descripted in this thread:
https://www.lonelycoder.com/redmine/boards/5/topics/91

Anders Wenneberg

I do think the buffering is done in tvheadend. If I monitor the networkload an unpaused stream runs about 6-10Mbps. In "paus mode" the load is 0 Mbps and when I resume a paused stream the load is 3-5 Mbps and the picture is in slow motion and very bad.

/AGW

H Gut

Maybe there is a difference between using the htsp-source and the tvheadend xbmc-pvr plugin.
The “Wife acceptance test” fails in my setup, because the missing/hanging timeshift. So I had to stay on mythtv still this is fixed.

Anders Wenneberg

Just to give you all :) a picture of network load during some pausing...
After a pause eaven the mouse pointer in XBMC is jumping and moving very slow

H Gut

Are you using teh PVR-Plugin (from opdenkamp?) or the htsp source?

Anders Wenneberg

I'm using the htsp source. Don't thing the opdenkamp rel. supports pause @ the moment.

/AGW