Severe Tiling when watching Football games
#1
This is not a ServerWMC issue directly but would appreciate any comments.

On Thursday (US Thanksgiving) and on Sunday (yesterday) I was experiencing severe tiling when watching the football games (3 different channels). After the problems on Thursday, I called Charter and set up a service call. They were out on Saturday and replaced my splitter and the coax connections to my cable modem, 2 HDHomeRun Primes and 2 Tuning adaptors. He indicated that the signal strength was "too high" and he had to install a "snubber" to reduce the signal strength. Of course, I didn't see any obvious tiling after he made the changes.

Unfortunately I had the same problem yesterday. I have set up an other call with Charter for later today and have submitted a support ticket to SiliconDust to see if there might be a problem with the HDHomeRun Primes.

One possibility I haven't looked at yet is if I might have a network issue. Basically the video glitches produce tiling in the video every few seconds. THe tiling is most obvious in parts of the video with lots of motion. Surprisingly, atleast to me, is that the problem seem to be worse with the live football game, and less obvious during commercials.

I actually went back to WMC and confirmed that the problem was not related to ServerWMC.

Is it possible, that I have a network issue that is causing the tiling? The HDHomeRun Primes and the main Media Center PC are both wired to a gigabit switch with an Asus AC68U router. If this could be a network issue, how might I troubleshoot?

Ian
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#2
Man, sounds like a tough problem. I had an issue with the NIC driver negotiating at 10mb/s instead of gig and discovered it using the Networking tab on the task manager... Pretty basic but at least you can see your utilization and negotiated link speed. You could also try watching via the HDHomeRun VIEW application and see if that gives you different results. Hope you get it figured out. Let us know how it turns out.
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#3
Charter stopped by again last night. He indicated that the signal was "too strong" and that I wan't getting enough atenuation between the pole and the house. He indicates that they would be stopping by the house again with a cherry picker to look at the connections on the telephone pole.

Hopefully that will resolve the issue once and for all.
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#4
I would start here https://www.silicondust.com/support/troubletickets/ . They are pretty good about support.
You can also rule out kodi by trying to watch TV with the native hdhomerun app or vlc
Also worth a shot if you have android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zaren
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#5
I just hear back from SIliconDust. They indicate that the signal is 100% and their logs indicate there is no packet loss. I had ruled out Kodi and ServerWMC back switching back to WMC directly.

I will trying viewing the channel through the HDHomeRun App. SIlicondust indicated that would generate more diagnostic information.
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#6
SO working with SiliconDust and Charter, I beleive I have my signal quality issues behind me. Unfortuantely I am still having issues with tiling.

SiliconDust had me watch the channel in question (NFL Network) with VLC. No tiling. Watch in WMC tiling, Watch in Kodi with ServerWMC tiling (not surprizingly).

This isn't a slouch PC. it is an AMD quad core with 4Gb memory running Win7. CPU load is < 25% with Kodi and WMC running.

at this point, it seems to be the PC that is causing the problem. Not Network or HDHomeRuns or cable service.
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#7
Do you see this problem watching pre-recorded wtv files? You have been using this for a long time, so did something change on the system before this started happening? Anti-virus software? Do you have any other codecs installed for use with wmc?
Windows Media Center PVR addon (pvr.wmc) and server backend (ServerWMC)
http://bit.ly/serverwmc
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#8
Unfortunately no obvious changes that I can associate the problem with. This PC has been trucking along for a couple of years now with few issues. I have been dealing with tiling for a while now (many previous posts) but nothing like on Thanksgiving and this past Sunday.

Clearly this isn't an issue with ServerWMC so I really appreciate any thoughts and comments as I try to sort this out. Atleast now, I am confident that it isn't a signal strength/quality issue.

It is interesting to me that the problem doesn't show up when viewing the video feed with VLC. Only when viewing with WMC or via ServerWMC. This seems to indicate to me that it 1) isn't a network issue and 2) that VLC is just more efficient than WMC so that it isn't affected as much.

I am going to run more tests disabling the antivirus. I started doing that last night but didn't see an obvious improvement.

I don't have any codec packs installed on this PC.
I will check if watching prerecorded WTV files exhibit the problem.

Looking in task manager (actually Process Explorer), System and interrupts are showing 2-3% CPU load. Sometimes I have noticed that excessive interrupts can cause glitches but I don't know what normal really is.

I may stage a new PC just to see if that makes a difference. I hate doing that since it is so much work but this is probably the longest any of my PCs have been in continuous use for without significant modifications so it is probably about time.
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#9
Since it is happening in wmc, have you tried their forums like greenbutton?

Wmc using the hdhomerun windows drivers, I assume when you run vlc you are streaming using dlna direct from the tuner. You could try using dlna with swmc and see if the problem persists, my guess is the problem will go away (but rw and ff will go away too unfortunately). I think I would first try reinstalling the hdhomerun drivers. If that fails, then I would try moving the recorded tv folder wmc uses to a different physical drive. If that fails, then I would try reinstalling wmc.

Building a new pc is great, but yeah, a lot of work. Nice to have an excuse though.
Windows Media Center PVR addon (pvr.wmc) and server backend (ServerWMC)
http://bit.ly/serverwmc
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#10
Well I rebuilt my HTPC. It is amazing how many things get installed on an HTPC to make it work they way you want and how much time it takes to do it. This is a much more capable computer. CPU load is less than 4-5% when playing back live TV via WMC and ServerWMC.

Unfortunately I am still getting some tiling. It has to be a I/O bottle neck on the drive as SIliconDust indicates that there are no loast packets being reported there. I didn't change the Recorded TV drive (conventional drive). Perhaps it is heavily fragmented. I am also going to relocate the ServerWMC folder to my SSD so see if that makes a difference.
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#11
Just diving into relocating the remux folder. That moved the .ts file creation to my SSD. Now looking at the RecordedTV folder where the TempSWMC folder is locate. I guess that is where the WTV file is created and remuxed from to the .ts files on my SSD?

There are a couple of other folders in there. What are they used for?
TempRec looks like a WMC folder
ImageCache is related to ServerWMC. should that folder (and subfolders) be relocated? I doubt it would impact performance.
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#12
Sorry the new machine didn't help.

You are right, the remux folder only moves the ts file, wtv file has to be created in the recorded tv folder (wmc limitation). Those other folders are only there to spread around images to remote clients, they can't effect anything.

Sure you don't have a spare drive around that you can set as a dedicated recorded tv folder?
Windows Media Center PVR addon (pvr.wmc) and server backend (ServerWMC)
http://bit.ly/serverwmc
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#13
It was time to update it anyway.
I deleted all of the files in the Recorded TV folder and tried defragging things to nsee if it made a difference.
Next up is substituting the RecordedTV hard drive. Funny you should think I might have a spare hard rive laying around <grin> WIll sort though my pile to see what I have.
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#14
Neverending story here.

Had more tiling the past two weekends. Only seem to notice it when watching LiveTV (Football). Thinking that it might be a drive throughput issue, I changed my Recorded TV folder to an SSD.

It wasn't as bad as at Thanksgiving but annoying non the less.

Had SiliconDust look at the diagnostic data around several instances where I identified what time it occurred at. They indicated
that "Signal reception was perfect, no packet loss or network issues."

I am not sure what to try next.

Ian
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#15
Sorry to hear that. Did you ever test whether the tiling happens in the stored wtv files?
Windows Media Center PVR addon (pvr.wmc) and server backend (ServerWMC)
http://bit.ly/serverwmc
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