[rcrh]

What is the codec of your live streams? Early Fire TV boxes and all Fire TV Sticks don't really have the processing power to handle full 1080 MPEG2 streams (especially with interlacing, as there isn't hardware support for deinterlacing) and proper audio.

Of course, there have also been numerous improvements to Tvheadend's handling of Live streams and the associated packets, so upgrading your TVH instance is an option to look into, too.

I believe they are 1080i mpeg2 (I don't think any of the OTA broadcasts are 1080p). I'm just surprised that MRMC handles them and that they play fine from a recording in Kodi (it's only live streams that are a mess).

Just as a trial I turned off deinterlacing and the live stream plays back just fine (deinterlacing is set to "auto" in MRMC). And I don't see any evidence of interlacing. Strange.

I'm going to look into updating my back end right after I move from openelec/kodi 16.x to librElec/kodi 17.x.

I'm going to run with deinterlacing off and see how things go.

Thanks.