[fitzy89]

Hi all

I'm having some issues with live TV where it will become distorted and garbled after a random amount of time watching it. This seems to happen with all backends, but some are affected worse or more frequently than others.

My tuner is a Pinnacle 7010ix (currently using only the DVB-S inputs) running on an ESXi 5 server via PCIe Passthru, a configuration which I believe many of you here are familiar with. OS on the server is Windows XP purely for low resource usage, CPU usage remains under 10% at all times and of the 512mb allocated ram, only half of it is ever used so there's plenty free. Network is via gigabit ethernet to all clients. Motherboard is Intel DQ45EK with latest BIOS and Core2Duo CPU (will upgrade to quad soon) and 4GB RAM

I have purchased DVBViewer hoping it would be suitable for me, but due to lack of support in their forums and no way (that I can find) to contact the developers, I've given up on it and I am now using NextPVR, Both have the same issues with the picture and audio becoming distorted after 30secs-5mins of watching, but NextPVR is far less frequent and allows to watch for longer before it occurs than with DVBViewer.

The best way to describe the problem is a poor signal, but the dish is correctly aligned and I can replicate the issue on several dishes at different houses so it's something with the server that is causing it. The picture goes pixelated and jerky, the audio starts screeching and eventually the client locks up requiring a reboot when this happens unless I click Stop as soon as it begins to happen.

My only thought is that the tuner is connected via a 10cm PCIe riser ribbon cable due to the case layout (Noah 3988 case) and I wonder if this is affecting the connection between tuner and motherboard. I haven't got any other risers to test with and haven't had chance to take everything out of the case to try it plugged directly into the board yet.

It's difficult to troubleshoot because it's so intermittent there's no errors or logs anywhere to pinpoint the issue, software says it's got a good signal so I'm stumped with what to try next. Can anyone suggest anything?

[sub3]

I have purchased DVBViewer hoping it would be suitable for me, but due to lack of support in their forums and no way (that I can find) to contact the developers, I've given up on it and I am now using NextPVR, Both have the same issues with the picture and audio becoming distorted after 30secs-5mins of watching, but NextPVR is far less frequent and allows to watch for longer before it occurs than with DVBViewer.

The best way to describe the problem is a poor signal, but the dish is correctly aligned and I can replicate the issue on several dishes at different houses so it's something with the server that is causing it.

Ignoring Kodi for now, what happens in NextPVR itself?

If it's happening in multiple backends though, it's sounding like you've got something to fix in your environment before it'll work. ie, whether it's flaky hardware or drivers, or your riser.

My only thought is that the tuner is connected via a 10cm PCIe riser ribbon cable due to the case layout (Noah 3988 case) and I wonder if this is affecting the connection between tuner and motherboard. I haven't got any other risers to test with and haven't had chance to take everything out of the case to try it plugged directly into the board yet.

Could be. You'll have to take the device and try it in some other machine without the riser to see if it works any better.

[nickr]

Is your card (or something else in there) getting overheated?

How is Disk I/O? You are saving and retrieving relatively large amounts of data.

Does this happen with recordings, or just Live TV?

[fitzy89]

I haven't tried recordings yet, this is only with live TV, with or without timeshifting enabled it still happens.

Disk I/O should be low enough, it's running on a Kingston SSDNow V100 which is fully tested with a disk diagnostic and working fine, at the moment the TV server is the only virtual machine running in ESXi so nothing else could be bogging down performance.

How much disk space is required for it to work? I've never really thought about that, I've only allocated 8GB and with XP and drivers/updates installed leaves around 2.5gb free, is it worth increasing that? Always assumed if it was streamed live it wouldn't need much working space, the timeshift buffer (when enabled) is on a network share, is it worth keeping that on the local drive for performance reasons or can gigabit ethernet cope with it? Speaking of performance, when viewing HD channels the issues do start happening almost immediately so I guess it could possible be disk space even though I've never witnessed it being full or seen any logs to indicate it

I'll be picking up a better quality riser today as well, the current one was the cheapest one I could find on ebay so I'm lucky it works at all, although this current riser worked fine in my old standalone MediaPortal setup a few years ago (in a Hush solid aluminium case)

Although I can't easily monitor temperatures from ESXi it feels fairly cool, despite the small case it's got 2 fans providing ample airflow through the case and doesn't feel overly warm so I wouldn't be concerned there at this stage.

Edit: DVBViewer used to skip in the software itself as well, I haven't tried with NextPVR yet as I only installed it last night

[nickr]

I don't know how those backends work, but in mythtv livetv is a recording like any other, so if you are watching live the stream is being saved to disk, read back for the viewer programme and also there is a lot of reading and writing to disk for the database.

[fitzy89]

I've been doing a bit more testing now, I didn't manage to get the riser cable in the end but in the next few days I will do.

I can't play TV on the server itself due to an "unhandled exception" error that repeatedly pops up, I think it's probably the fact it's running in a virtual machine that causes that but I'm trying on the web interface to NPVR now which streams over a web browser using the VLC player plugin.

Long story short, the problem still happens but isn't so severe, the pixelation isn't as bad but does still happen and the audio just skips rather than screeching, it also continues to play without locking up or crashing the player.
Video here, skip to the 1 minute mark for a good demo of it happening: https://www.dropbox.com/s/lj1pd0k8qzmtcz...2.avi?dl=0

Disk usage goes down to 500mb free space then I guess it trims the live buffer to keep 500mb free at all times, even after an hour of playing it's still at 500mb free space. Ram goes down to 90mb free, I'll allocate some more to it just in case but I don't think that would be the issue.

Will report back once I've got a new riser cable