OTA live TV shows keep stopping - won't continue onto next show on same channel.
#1
Backstory:
With the recent discontinuation of support by Microsoft for Windows Media Center and the fact that my Windows install (Vista) is on its last legs; 2017's coming up fast), I've migrated to Linux Mint and Kodi. I've managed to get OTA antenna TV working and I have all the DTV channels I normally receive on Windows Media Center... every single one of them, which is GREAT!

My setup: Hauppauge HVR-1600, Linux Mint 17.2 Cinnamon, Kodi 15.1+MythTV PVR client (backend) v2.4.2.

Problem: But right now, I'm having 2 annoying issues with my setup:
  • After finishing watching a TV show, all live TV actually stops.... and I have to restart Kodi to resume watching the next show on the same channel. Like if I watch the 6 O'Clock News (which ends at 7 O'Clock), and the next show is something else, like "Power Rangers" for example, Kodi stops at exactly 7 O'Clock. Or if a different show is only 30 minutes long, Kodi stops all live TV playback after exactly 30 minutes.... completely refusing to play the next scheduled show, and any commercials in between the shows.

  • Changing DTV channels is comparatively slow, taking anywhere between 5 to 7 seconds between each channel; compared to less than 5 seconds in Windows Media Center (under Windows).

As far as watching live, OTA (over the air) TV is concerned, Is there any way to force Kodi to seamlessly progress from one show to the next scheduled show on the same channel, without playback stopping? And is there any way to further speed-up or shorten the time Kodi takes to change DTV channels?

Also please note that I do NOT have cable TV, I am not yet well-versed in Kodi terminology, and I am the only person in my house watching TV on my desktop HTPC computer.... there is no other hardware involved, except for an external rabbit-ears TV antenna, connected to my Hauppauge HVR-1600 PCI card. That's about it. I'll greatly appreciate any help and advice.
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#2
Normally Kodi does progress seamlessly from one show to another.

Your channel change time of 5 to 7 seconds is a little slow, and maybe triggering a timeout in Mythtv PVR client which by default is set to 5 seconds.

In Kodi go to the Mythtv PVR client Advanced tab and change the "Tuning delay (sec)" to 10 to see if that helps.

What is your location (country) and who is your OTA provider. This information may help to diagnose what is happening.

If the above fails to resolve your issue, will need a full debug log (make sure Mythtv PVR client Advanced tab has "Include more debug information in the log file" selected).

Mike
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#3
(2015-08-21, 02:00)rkmugen Wrote: And is there any way to further speed-up or shorten the time Kodi takes to change DTV channels?

I have a Hauppauge USB type tuner, and it takes about 10 seconds for it to lock to an OTA TV station. It was causing me a bunch of grief in WMC with ServerWMC. I had to increase the timeouts to fix it. Maybe that's the problem with yours as the other poster suggested.

Now, to answer your question above, look into getting yourself an HDHomerun. They work really well and change channels quickly. I've got two now with MythTV backend and they work great. I've always used Hauppauge stuff in the past, but the HDHomerun changed my life. Wink

I was running WMC before, but I switched to MythTV to get my Win7 gaming machine back from my wife. Wink I built a little I3, loaded Mythbuntu on it and haven't regretted it so far. My only gripe is that WMC and Remote Potato did a better job of serving my stuff up over the net to my phone, but I'm working on that still. Part of the issues I'm having might be from taking a fairly big step down in CPU horsepower.

My setup is Mythbuntu on the backend with a 5TB storage drive, 2 RPi2 frontends running OpenELEC and an Amazon Fire TV Stick running Kodi. Of course my tuners are network based HDHomerun devices.
Experience: It's what you get when you were expecting something else.
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#4
@rkmugen

One other thought, what version of mythtv backend are you running ?

I know some of the Ubuntu based distros have older versions of mythtv 0.27 in their repositories and there have been many improvements since the original 0.27 release.

To upgrade to the latest version of mythtv 0.27/fixes for Ubuntu based distros (which Mint is)

Do this is from a terminal

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:mythbuntu/0.27
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo reboot

Mike
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#5
Just a thought. One thing you have to remember with myth is that live tv is a recording. Therefore at program transition one recording is closed off and another opened. This could lead to timeout problems. Your myth logs may reveal the reason.
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OTA live TV shows keep stopping - won't continue onto next show on same channel.0