[ferretlegs]

Was testing things out and discovered a new issue last night. As I said in my very first post, I've been using WMC for close to ten years now and over that time have accumulated alot of historical recordings. Many of these are dvr-ms format which was the format used in WMC before they changed to .wtv format in around 2008/2009. When trying to play back dvr-ms recordings in xbmc, the picture stops and skips and generally doesnt work and there is no audio. I think the problem is that it doesn't know what audio stream to use because on the OSD you can see the audio playback constantly shifting from mp2 (or whatever the normal is for dvrms) to mp3 and seems to try to cycle through a few all within a second or two. Just to see what happens I renamed one of them to a wtv extension and in that situation the audio plays fine but the screen is black. Not sure what is happening here?

[krustyreturns]

Weird, just tried again and it's all working. Set a series recording and set prefs OK then deleted from timer screen and got the prompt to delete just this episode or entire series recording. Are you using the release version or your dev version?? Possibly something changed?

When I originally tried the files included with the client the record prefs came up but there was no OK/Cancel buttons

I download the released version of amber right after I saw your post, then I pasted in the two xml files from the link you posted. I bet that was where I went wrong - I should have downloaded the whole skin from that repo, is that what you did?

[Dilligaf]

No, I added the files to the release version. I was asking about the WMC-PVR version. Just tried on a PI and it worked there as well however there is a problem where you can't navigate to the OK/Cancel selections with the remote arrow keys. I'm unsure whether it's a problem with the modded versions or if it happens with the originals as well. Will investigate further. Just tried in Confluence and can navigate to the OK selection but can't get to the cancel selection so there is a problem in the original files as well

[krustyreturns]

Was testing things out and discovered a new issue last night. As I said in my very first post, I've been using WMC for close to ten years now and over that time have accumulated alot of historical recordings. Many of these are dvr-ms format which was the format used in WMC before they changed to .wtv format in around 2008/2009. When trying to play back dvr-ms recordings in xbmc, the picture stops and skips and generally doesnt work and there is no audio. I think the problem is that it doesn't know what audio stream to use because on the OSD you can see the audio playback constantly shifting from mp2 (or whatever the normal is for dvrms) to mp3 and seems to try to cycle through a few all within a second or two. Just to see what happens I renamed one of them to a wtv extension and in that situation the audio plays fine but the screen is black. Not sure what is happening here?

This is not the fault of my software since when you play a wtv file, or a dvr-ms file, our software just points xbmc at the file and says 'play this' - no parsing or remuxing or any of that nasty stuff. I am surprised xbmc can't play these dvr-ms files correctly given how old dvr-ms is. For what its worth, in my early experimentation with xbmc it played the dvr-ms test files I had fine.

Just to make sure I am not high though, play one of these files directly with xbmc, like stick one in your 'videos' folder and play it from there, or right click on the dvr-ms file in windows and choose 'open with' xbmc.

[krustyreturns]

No, I added the files to the release version. I was asking about the WMC-PVR version. Just tried on a PI and it worked there as well however there is a problem where you can't navigate to the OK/Cancel selections with the remote arrow keys. I'm unsure whether it's a problem with the modded versions or if it happens with the originals as well. Will investigate further. Just tried in Confluence and can navigate to the OK selection but can't get to the cancel selection so there is a problem in the original files as well

I just tried it again too, it just hangs. I haven't changed anything with regards to this on the pvr version I am running and it works fine with confluence - there is probably something else screwy about my setup. Just as a sanity check: Frodo 12.2, pulled Amber down from inside of xbmc, and copied in the two xmls from the site you posted.

I'm not surprised that there are navigation issues in these xml files, I didn't really know what I was doing when I wrote them, I just needed to get something to debug with. Also since I am working from a pc I tend to use a mouse so it would be an easy mistake to make. If anyone is inclined to fix the navigation in these, I can fold it into the next release.

[Dilligaf]

Sounds the same as me as far as setup, tried it on a second PI with no issues, so I've had success with 2 PI and 1 Windows install. Hopefully someone can fix the navigation issues, I'm not a coder/skinner but seem to have a way of getting things done. If no one steps up in a couple days I'll see what I can do.

[hoopsdavis]

I sent the files over to jurialmunkey the creator of the Arctic skin, asking if he'll modify the files to work with his skin.

I'll notify everyone once he replies.

[krustyreturns]

I sent the files over to jurialmunkey the creator of the Arctic skin, asking if he'll modify the files to work with his skin.

I'll notify everyone once he replies.

Thanks for doing this. If he does it, you might want to mention the navigation problem Dilligaf found.

[zaide_chris]

With the last update the channel change has sped up, but now on channels with multiple language sound tracks I sporadically get the wrong language or more then one language playing at the same time.

Here a 7-zip of both a wtv and a ts file of a show with this issue:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bwwnao9F...sp=sharing

Thanks for being proactive and having the clips ready. This audio track stuff is in the heart of the new parser, and I had a worry that I didn't test enough with multiple audio tracks. Hopefully sorting it out won't be too difficult....

woah, that simultaneous spanish and english is kind of freaky.

Would you like more clips if it ends up happening again? And do you need both the wts and the ts, or is just the wts good?

[krustyreturns]

Would you like more clips if it ends up happening again? And do you need both the wts and the ts, or is just the wts good?

I have fixed the audio bug you found, your clip made it very easy to track down. And yes, if it happens again I just need the wtv. I have one more bug to fix that hoops found, before I do another release, hopefully tomorrow. Although if this 49er game continues to be delayed due to lightning, maybe sooner.

[ferretlegs]

Was testing things out and discovered a new issue last night. As I said in my very first post, I've been using WMC for close to ten years now and over that time have accumulated alot of historical recordings. Many of these are dvr-ms format which was the format used in WMC before they changed to .wtv format in around 2008/2009. When trying to play back dvr-ms recordings in xbmc, the picture stops and skips and generally doesnt work and there is no audio. I think the problem is that it doesn't know what audio stream to use because on the OSD you can see the audio playback constantly shifting from mp2 (or whatever the normal is for dvrms) to mp3 and seems to try to cycle through a few all within a second or two. Just to see what happens I renamed one of them to a wtv extension and in that situation the audio plays fine but the screen is black. Not sure what is happening here?

This is not the fault of my software since when you play a wtv file, or a dvr-ms file, our software just points xbmc at the file and says 'play this' - no parsing or remuxing or any of that nasty stuff. I am surprised xbmc can't play these dvr-ms files correctly given how old dvr-ms is. For what its worth, in my early experimentation with xbmc it played the dvr-ms test files I had fine.

Just to make sure I am not high though, play one of these files directly with xbmc, like stick one in your 'videos' folder and play it from there, or right click on the dvr-ms file in windows and choose 'open with' xbmc.

I have tested this by right clicking and opening with xbmc as requested and yes, its seems that dvr-ms playback no longer works properly in native xbmc. From what I could read, it looks like this format has been broken and fixed by different builds over the years, and being an old format now its probably not tested much in modern builds such as frodo. This is a shame because I have over 100 recordings predating the wtv format.

With regards to the channel 7 problem, I have been thinking about this a bit more and I wonder if one of my tuners is struggling with the seven network and by luck you may be spinning up that tuner when the server starts. I have had problems over the years with individual tuners struggling with some channels on rare occasions. Is there an easy setting I can change in the config file so that I can spin up a different tuner to see if that helps. It would explain things if the 'bad' tuner is preactivated by wmcserver which would then mean normal channel 7 would be working fine in WMC on another tuner. Not sure by any means but just trying to think of alternatives - unless your review of DrOz has turned anything up?

Also, can anyone else let me know if they have original dvr-ms recordings working in frodo?

[krustyreturns]

I have tested this by right clicking and opening with xbmc as requested and yes, its seems that dvr-ms playback no longer works properly in native xbmc. From what I could read, it looks like this format has been broken and fixed by different builds over the years, and being an old format now its probably not tested much in modern builds such as frodo. This is a shame because I have over 100 recordings predating the wtv format.

With regards to the channel 7 problem, I have been thinking about this a bit more and I wonder if one of my tuners is struggling with the seven network and by luck you may be spinning up that tuner when the server starts. I have had problems over the years with individual tuners struggling with some channels on rare occasions. Is there an easy setting I can change in the config file so that I can spin up a different tuner to see if that helps. It would explain things if the 'bad' tuner is preactivated by wmcserver which would then mean normal channel 7 would be working fine in WMC on another tuner. Not sure by any means but just trying to think of alternatives - unless your review of DrOz has turned anything up?

Also, can anyone else let me know if they have original dvr-ms recordings working in frodo?

I bet there is converter software you can run to convert your dvr-ms to wtv. In fact, I think I could write a filter graph that could do it pretty easily. Dvrmstoolbox should be able to do it too and its free.

As for channel 7, I think your tuner is probably fine. Scarecrow and I have been looking at it, he reports that sometimes he is able to do live-tv on the channel and sometimes it appears to be encrypted. So we think it is encrypting on a show by show basis, but its still early to say for sure. We consistently see in-stream encryption headers, but its not always encrypted. This basically means Dilligaf was probably right, its the same problem he is having with some of his channels (the man definitely has a good feel for this stuff). We don't yet have a solution for it, this will be much tougher to crack. But this is not playready drm, it should be possible to decrypt this, we just haven't found a clean way of doing it (I only know of messy ways right now).

[scarecrow420]

krusty you might have missed an email from me because the problems i was having with channel 7 today turned out to be an embarassing case of poor reception due to rain! XBMC and the ServerWMC plugin was just erroring out with the stream ending prematurely so I thought it was this problem, but finally I tried things natively in WMC and was greeted with a "low signal" warning.

Once I fixed up my aerial connection everything was fine. I havent had any issues playing anything on channel 7 on all the occasions Ive tried.

Given what I just experienced today (low signal warning in WMC but XBMC and plugin just erroring/crashing) I wouldnt be surprised if what ferretlegs said about 1 tuner being dodgy could have some merit. Can you disable that tuner ferret, or try a different one etc? Although there does seem to be those DVBScramble headers in the WTV files I dont think its actually scrambled or encrypted. If they were actually encrypting some content but not others I highly doubt they would encrypt Dr Oz!!! More so a prime time premiere movie or something like that

In WMC setup I believe you can pick which tuners you want WMC to use. I wonder if you disabled the suspect tuner in WMC that this would flow through to ServerWMC addon as well, I think probably it would. So ferret perhaps disabling 1 at a time and seeing if you get a better result on channel 7

In better news, some changes krusty has been working on have now given me a very CONSISTENT channel change time! Evenwith the latest released changes I would still get variation of as good as 1 second backend timing but as bad as 8 seconds or more and sometimes even timeouts. The log file would show wanrings of more than 10,000 headers inspected in the WTV file etc.

Anyway, the latest changes ive been testing (will be in the next build) i am now seeing under 2 seconds consistenty whereas without these changes things were a bit more "all over the shop"

here are results of a number of channel changes under the current release version, and the upcoming build. Something to look forward to folks

Current Release
2013/09/16 10:27:37.025 Parse> total descriptor parse time: 10.13 sec
2013/09/16 10:27:48.582 Parse> total descriptor parse time: 2.02 sec
2013/09/16 10:27:56.853 Parse> total descriptor parse time: 1.35 sec
2013/09/16 10:28:08.537 Parse> total descriptor parse time: 2.16 sec
2013/09/16 10:28:22.810 Parse> total descriptor parse time: 4.99 sec
2013/09/16 10:28:35.707 Parse> total descriptor parse time: 5.57 sec
2013/09/16 10:28:41.741 Parse> total descriptor parse time: 1.12 sec
2013/09/16 10:28:57.909 Parse> total descriptor parse time: 2.07 sec
2013/09/16 10:29:16.877 Parse> total descriptor parse time: 6.00 sec

(the first one was 15000+ headers and timed out)


Upcoming Build
2013/09/16 10:20:50.010 Parse> Total Descriptor parse time: 0.85 sec
2013/09/16 10:21:00.991 Parse> Total Descriptor parse time: 2.11 sec
2013/09/16 10:21:11.857 Parse> Total Descriptor parse time: 0.76 sec
2013/09/16 10:21:24.550 Parse> Total Descriptor parse time: 1.27 sec
2013/09/16 10:21:35.608 Parse> Total Descriptor parse time: 0.81 sec
2013/09/16 10:22:20.375 Parse> Total Descriptor parse time: 1.30 sec
2013/09/16 10:22:32.479 Parse> Total Descriptor parse time: 1.48 sec
2013/09/16 10:22:42.230 Parse> Total Descriptor parse time: 1.32 sec
2013/09/16 10:22:58.091 Parse> Total Descriptor parse time: 1.13 sec

[bry]

Wow! Those new speeds are impressive!

[scarecrow420]

Wow! Those new speeds are impressive!

Yeah, I could sometimes get speeds like that previously but the inconsistency would see things go as long as 8 seconds or even time out. The new changes seem to be very consistent

(note that this is the descriptor parse time so there is still a bit more time in the backend usually, but not much... then we still have to deal with XBMC frontend processing the stream). But any speed/consistency in any of these areas will contributre to a better user experience