XBMC TV server Plugin MP1.4
#31
@azafeiros:
Could you try disabling DXVA?
What happens if you record the same channel and play the recording?

According to your logs, the crash occurs after XBMC already started the playback of the TV stream. The ffmpeg library is producing some errors before XBMC actually crashed.
I can't see where the crash occurs,so I'm just guessing.

The interesting thing is that your logs look somewhat similar to the ones here: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=170222

@doveman: XBMC does not support different sorting between the full channel list and individual groups, so the order can be different in XBMC.
Besides this, I've modified the TVServerXBMC code for MediaPortal 1.4 to allow retrieving more than one group. This turns out to break the sorting too. I have dive into this change to see what the cause is.
Developer of the MediaPortal PVR addon and retired developer of the Argus-TV PVR-addon.
http://www.scintilla.utwente.nl/~marcelg/xbmc
Reply
#32
(2013-08-07, 17:59)margro Wrote: @doveman: XBMC does not support different sorting between the full channel list and individual groups, so the order can be different in XBMC.
Besides this, I've modified the TVServerXBMC code for MediaPortal 1.4 to allow retrieving more than one group. This turns out to break the sorting too. I have dive into this change to see what the cause is.

I think I understand but I set it to "only import group: Main", meaning there shouldn't be any full channel list in XBMC, so I assume it should be able to show the channels in the correct order? So it sounds like it's probably the changes you've made to allow retrieving multiple groups that are the problem in my case.
Reply
#33
@margro
Thanks for the quick answer.

I tried disabling dxva..no luck.

I also reproduced the problem in 2 additional machines (2 netbooks over wireless and my wired desktop all running win 7).

Playing recordings is fine, although i played them through the add video source route (could not play them directly from the plugin - I do not know if it should reproduce directly from the recordings tab of the plugin.)

Also i noticed that the problem always occurs at the beginning on the first channel selection. If it does not crash then it plays fine changing channels fine. the problem never occured in the middle of channel playing.

Alex
Reply
#34
@margro
Since the problem was exactly the same in many clients I conlcuded the problem was in the server side. I completely removed MP and all its components and performed a fresh clean installation with all settings in default.... and now everything seems to be working fine.
Reply
#35
I booted with my PC on, so the Mediaportal PVR addon was able to connect to the server and didn't throw up any errors.

Then my PC went to standby and I opened the All TV Channels screen and selected BBC One, which threw up an error as expected as the PC was not available. So I woke the PC intending to try again but since then (11:51) the GUI has been stuck, although the log shows that at 11:54 it did some stuff in the background. TOP shows xbmc.bin using 99% CPU.

http://pastebin.com/68Bb4ydP

It would be good if the PVR addon could:

1) Detect if the server is available or not
2) If not, send a WOL signal to wake it and wait a user-defined amount of time before continuing. This delay needs to be user-adjustable, as different tuner cards require different amounts of time to initialise on the PC.

Not sure if this is an addon, skin or core XBMC issue but I've got to start somewhere Wink

I've got my red button set to FullScreen but I find this doesn't work when the TimeLine EPG or Recordings screen is open, so if I'm watching TV and open the EPG or Recordings screen with my remote's shortcut buttons, I can't press Red to swtich back to watching the programmes but have to press Back, which takes me to the Home screen and then press Red from there.

I'm not sure if they're the right sections but in my remote.xml I do have:

Code:
<PVROSDChannels>
    <remote>
      <back>Close</back>
      <start>Close</start>
      <red>FullScreen</red>
    </remote>
  </PVROSDChannels>
  <PVROSDGuide>
    <remote>
      <back>Close</back>
      <start>Close</start>
      <guide>Close</guide>
      <red>FullScreen</red>
    </remote>
  </PVROSDGuide>
Reply
#36
I keep running into this issue, where I have TV playing and I go into the GUI (it's happened in various places, Settings, Addons, Home) and have TV in the background, or just a small window on Home and it's fine for a while and I can browse through the menus, etc but then suddenly the menus stop responding and the playback becomes extremely stuttery, both video and audio but obviously audio is somewhat more noticeable and annoying as it plays like 100ms at a time!

I have to hard reset to fix it, which I can do with Putty but that's a pain and most people will just switch it off and on again.

http://xbmclogs.com/show.php?id=43954

I thought I'd try disabling Visuals as Background and Media State Overlays (using xTV-SAF skin) to prevent it showing the TV picture when in the menus. This just seems to have made things worse though! I started TV and pressed my Guide button which opens the TImeline EPG and this time it failed to open and just left me with a extremely stuttery fullscreen TV and unresponsive GUI. Previously it always took maybe 5-10s to open the Guide and TV stuttered/audio cut-out for a moment just before it opened but this never happened before.

http://xbmclogs.com/show.php?id=43962

Actually, it seems that this particular channel (Yesterday) is triggering this problem with it breaking when trying to open the EPG. I obviously haven't tested every other channel but on Film 4 it doesn't seem to have this problem going into the EPG/GUI.

http://xbmclogs.com/show.php?id=43964
Reply
#37
I found an issue with the MP Server plugin, in that it doesn't seem to stop the Timeshifting if it doesn't get stopped cleanly, for example if the RPi crashes.

After a few crashes, I was looking at TV Server later and saw there were actually four streams running, two on Film4 and two on Yesterday. Perhaps you could look at whether there's a way for the plugin to tell if the Client is no longer active and stop the timeshifting?

Another issue is that the server plugin doesn't seem to reset the Windows standby timer, so that as soon as I stop watching TV on the RPi, the PC will go to standby (assuming I haven't touched the PC in the standby time, currently set to 15mins). It's obviously a bit annoying if I stop TV to go and do something on the PC and it goes to standby before I can get there and I have to wake it up again! Apparently there are two options for MP plugins for dealing with standby:

1.It does its own power handling by calling SetThreadExecutionState(...) to prevent standby
2.It uses the PowerScheduler interface for handling the standby and wakeup

Could you tell me if your plugin does either of these please?
Reply
#38
I can't find any way to make the channels display in the correct order, they seem determined to only list in channel number order.

I think I've tried every combination of settings under TV - Settings and in the plugin settings and I've tried arranging the channels in MediaPortal's TV Server config to the order I want them in the main Channels list, before copying them to a group called Main.

Hmm, it seems that the All Channels list is in a completely different order to Channels or Main, so maybe it's using that, even though I've set it to only use the Main group.

EDIT: Nope, it's not taking any notice of All Channels either and is still just displaying them in channel number order Sad
Reply
#39
Now I can't get it to work at all. As you can see from the log, it's saying it can't access the tsbuffer files but MP has started Timeshifting and I can see the files on R: and access them over the network and play them manually from Videos. http://xbmclogs.com/show.php?id=45200

As before, I have to stop the Timeshifting from TV Server config manually, as TVServerXBMC leaves it going even though XBMC isn't playing the stream.

EDIT: Rebooting the RPi didn't help but after rebooting the PC it's working again.

EDIT2: Is not working again this morning, after waking my PC from standby. Obviously it's impractical to use if I use to reboot my PC every time.
Reply
#40
@doveman2:
XBMC supports only 1 channel sort order and not the separate sorting field from MediaPortal that allows different orders between groups. The sorting order in XBMC is either based on the channel number (when enabled in the XBMC PVR settings) or the order of the All channels group. I have to check if the TVServerXBMC plugin uses the group order when importing only 1 particular group.

The TVServerXBMC plugin should automatically stop a TV stream when the client stops it or terminates the connection, so somehow, the TVServerXBMC plugin does not detect an abandoned connection on port 9596 and keeps the stream alive. The only way to solve that is to introduce a keep-alive message system as implemented by the Argus-TV server. It is not something which I plan to add.

With respect to your standby problem: the TVServerXBMC plugin does not implement any of these methods. It is just a minimal command gateway between the TVServer and the PVR addon.

Your last log clearly indicates that XBMC itself on your RPi cannot access the smb share (time out). All smb access is done through XBMC itself and outside the PVR addon.
Furthermore, I can't provide much support for the RPi because I don't own one and because I think it is barely powerful enough to handle TV using the XBMC PVR API.
I've seen too many messages already about unstable streaming.
Developer of the MediaPortal PVR addon and retired developer of the Argus-TV PVR-addon.
http://www.scintilla.utwente.nl/~marcelg/xbmc
Reply
#41
(2013-08-16, 16:36)margro Wrote: @doveman2:
XBMC supports only 1 channel sort order and not the separate sorting field from MediaPortal that allows different orders between groups. The sorting order in XBMC is either based on the channel number (when enabled in the XBMC PVR settings) or the order of the All channels group. I have to check if the TVServerXBMC plugin uses the group order when importing only 1 particular group.

That's the thing though, it's not using the All Channels group order, only channel number order, even though I've disabled the three options under Enabled in TV Settings.

Quote:The TVServerXBMC plugin should automatically stop a TV stream when the client stops it or terminates the connection, so somehow, the TVServerXBMC plugin does not detect an abandoned connection on port 9596 and keeps the stream alive. The only way to solve that is to introduce a keep-alive message system as implemented by the Argus-TV server. It is not something which I plan to add.

That's a shame as without that it's out of the question for me to use it, as I can't have timeshifting left going unnecessarily, constantly creating files and preventing my PC from sleeping

Quote:With respect to your standby problem: the TVServerXBMC plugin does not implement any of these methods. It is just a minimal command gateway between the TVServer and the PVR addon.

With respect, it should use one or the other to prevent the problem I described. Perhaps it might be possible to use PS++'s Network Monitoring as a workaround. I'm not sure if that resets the Windows Standby Timer though.

Quote:Your last log clearly indicates that XBMC itself on your RPi cannot access the smb share (time out). All smb access is done through XBMC itself and outside the PVR addon.
Furthermore, I can't provide much support for the RPi because I don't own one and because I think it is barely powerful enough to handle TV using the XBMC PVR API.
I've seen too many messages already about unstable streaming.

Fair enough. It actually works OK when it's working, albeit a bit slow to open the EPG and change channel but I can understand if you're not able to support it for the RPi.

The TVServerXBMC plugin causes some other intermittent issues at the moment, such as making TV Server Config take a long while to open and when it does, the Stop Service button is missing from the Manual tab and it doesn't show any status for the tuners, even though they're working, so you might want to look into those.
Reply
#42
By the way, your plugin puts the SMB username and password in the debug log, so you should look at scrubbing that as otherwise we have to remember to do that manualyl before sharing the logs.
Reply
#43
(2013-08-16, 18:14)doveman2 Wrote: [quote='margro' pid='1485748' dateline='1376663791']
Quote:The TVServerXBMC plugin should automatically stop a TV stream when the client stops it or terminates the connection, so somehow, the TVServerXBMC plugin does not detect an abandoned connection on port 9596 and keeps the stream alive. The only way to solve that is to introduce a keep-alive message system as implemented by the Argus-TV server. It is not something which I plan to add.

That's a shame as without that it's out of the question for me to use it, as I can't have timeshifting left going unnecessarily, constantly creating files and preventing my PC from sleeping

Not sure if I get this correctly, but is this still the case? I run on a windows server the MP TVE and a linux box with OpenElec as the only PVR client.
If I stop Live TV on the client side the stream will continue on the server?!? Is this really the case? And it will continue until when?
Reply

Logout Mark Read Team Forum Stats Members Help
XBMC TV server Plugin MP1.40