Live tv stream stutters and freezes, but recordings play back ok (certain chann
#1
I opened a thread on silicondust's forum, but I'd like to pose my question again here since the sillicondust thread hasn't gotten much traction.

I have an hdhomerun prime and use Kodi as my primary client (on windows and os x). Recently, some channels have started having playback issues, and I'm really at a loss to figure out why. I know that I've upgraded firmware recently, but I'm not even certain if that was the trigger. Everything was working pretty well up until a few weeks ago (maybe more, we'd been away and haven't had the tv on much before that). My hdhomerun is currently running firmware 20161117.

Here's what the playback issue looks like: playback for certain channels starts smoothly and continues for a few seconds (~5) before becoming pixelated/distorted and then freezing for a second or two. It continues playing short bits of extremely distorted video and audio. When using one of my kodi clients, I can see a message every second or so saying that its buffering. Pausing the stream and resuming after waiting several seconds does not restore normal playback either. The problem only seems to affect some of my HD channels, but not all, and none of the sd channels appear to be affected.

To try and troubleshoot, I picked one of the problem channels and tried it on several different clients on different computers - Kodi on windows/os x, the hdhomerun app on windows/os x, an xbox one using the hdhomerun app, vlc on windows/os x, hdhomerun dms source on my samsung tv. The mac is unable to play the channel in Kodi (neither wmc nor hdhomerun pvr backends). The xbox and tv are also unable to play back the channel. The windows machine, however, is able to play the channel using WMC, but not Kodi. On the windows or os x, Kodi is able to play back the recording of the problem channel smoothly (recorded with WMC).

I'm out of ideas at this point! As I mentioned, I didn't have any issue playing this channel (or any of the sevaral other affected channels) in the past (using kodi). Any help you could give would be very much appreciated!
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#2
I have the exact same problem. This all started a couple weeks ago, I get audio dropping out constantly, stuttering and choppy playback across all my channels and even buffering which makes no sense, wtf is it buffering when it's all inside my network with no load on it? What is Silicon Dust sending back to their servers I wonder? I don't think this device is as advertised if it suddenly stopped working for no reason. It should have absolutely no need of any updates after the initial install, it should just work standalone.

Today I ran a test where I blocked internet access to the device and it pretty much brought it to it's knees. WTF does it require internet access for? The guide is all it would ever need to pull and it would only need to do that once a day, so what exactly is SD up to?
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#3
Post a debug log (wiki)
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#4
Quote:HD channels, but not all, and none of the sd channels appear to be affected

You might have the same issue as me. I had a an older HDHomerun Extend (HDTC-2US) and I had to purchase the next Extend model, (HDTC-2US-M) to get everything working again. Messing with the transcode profiles made no difference.

The HDTC-2US will only stream HD over A/C wifi, not N. HDTC-2US will only stream SD channels over N. HDTC-2US-M will stream HD over N. I have an Asus 1900P/RT-AC86U running in N mode.
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Live tv stream stutters and freezes, but recordings play back ok (certain chann0