I know you guys have responded to some of my other posts. My only issue that I have right now is watching Active Recording.
I am wondering technically, what is the difference between the Live Recording and the Active Recording
Live TV works perfectly without any stuttering/pixilation. However when I try to watch an Active Recording (especially HD) I get bad stuttering.
Thinking it was the remuxing of the Active Recording, I did the symlink workaround that I have seen described elsewhere. Also I disabled the remux Active Recording Setting. I ran into the file size issue of course, but before I did I still had the bad stuttering.
Are there any advanced settings for Active Recordings that I can try. In the config file I have tried bumping the buffers of Active Recordings to 5 seconds however I still have the issue.
I am wondering how I can isolate the issue further.
My setup is a regular SATA System Drive (250GB) and a Data Drive (4TB). I store the recordings to the Data Drive. Currently my Symlink for the TempSWMC directory is pointing to System Drive. ServerWMC and Kodi are on the same box, so network isn't an issue.
Any thoughts guys
(2015-09-20, 04:49)skarragallagher Wrote: [ -> ]I am wondering technically, what is the difference between the Live Recording and the Active Recording
There is no real difference, unless you run live-tv in dlna mode OR you turn off the remux of active recordings. Are you running in dlna mode for live-tv?
You say you tried turning off the remux of active-recordings but still had the problem. After turning off active recording remux, if I recall right, you need to restart kodi for the change to go into effect (or wait long enough for kodi to refresh its recordings list on it own) did you do that? With remux off, playing back an active wtv file is just the same was playing a regular wtv file, except the playback will end early - which I think you noted. So the the next question would be, can you playback regular wtv files without problems?
Which version of kodi are you running?
I can't remember if I restarted Kodi after making the remux change however since it ended early I thought it took effect.
Pretty strange Hugh? I would think they both would act the same way with remux turned on.
The version of Kodi is 15.1.
Regular wtv files (non remuxed) play perfectly with no stutter.
I have noticed that the channels that have issues are usually HD and AC3 5.1. SD always works without stutter. Live TV seems to always work.
One thing that I have noticed as well is that if I change the audio mode on Active recording while it is playing, either check stereo upmix or passthrough, it send to be better for a while
It different matter if I enable it disable these settings, toggling them is what helps.
I just threw another 4gb of ram at the machine so I will see if it helps.
Processor is a core 2 quad 3ghz with 8gb of ram. Machine is an optiplex 960.
So, I think I may have found the issue here. A couple of things that I did that helped.
1. Memory was consistently above 80%. Putting the additional 4g helped.
2. CPU contention. I noticed that the CPU usage was above 80% at times. Reviewing the running processes revealed a stale PlayOn.exe using a lot of CPU. Modifying some PlayOn settings (disabling long pause/resume) killed the running process.
3. Installation of proper AMD display drivers. I was using the built in windows driver and installing the package from AMD enabled some hardware transcoding acceleration features which I think is helping reduce overall CPU cycles.
In all I think I may be pushing the limits of this machine however with the above changes it looks like I have solved the issue with playing Active Recordings
Good news then, nice job. Also there have been issues with windows playback in kodi 15, that according to this thread:
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=237232
have been fixed in the 15.2 nightly. Its only reported that it effect ff and rw, but might be worth it to take a look.
Thanks for that, I will check out that thread. Over the weekend I monitored things and it apears that for the most part my tweaks have solved the problem. There are still a few glitches every now and again but PlayOn seems to be the culprit especially return my aging equipment.
Thanks again
I just wanted to post a quick update in case anyone comes across this thread.
I think the root cause of most of my issues was a failing (or under powered) graphics card. Although the ATI Radeon HD 3400 worked fine most of the time with WMC without many glitches apparently Kodi was too much for it.
I recently replaced with an NVidia GeForce GT740 and things are much happier now. In fact I noticed strange issues caused by some of the settings I was tweaking with in the video options like the Video Render, Refresh rate and sync settings. Setting those all back to default has improved things significantly after swapping the graphics card