[noggin]

Disabled OMXPlayer and haven't had the issue with > 1 hour of LiveTV. The crashes occurred most often during commercials, so I'm guessing they were related to resolution and/or frame rate changes. I've also seen some decode/stream issues with Charter today, so perhaps OMXPlayer is more sensitive to errors in the mpeg2 stream.

Going to try things with OMXPlayer disabled a while longer and see how that works since it was recently disabled by default. I have noticed that using dvdplayer and bringing up and of the GUI overlays exhibits odd behavior from time to time where the overlay doesn't go away (hit the 'i' button for info and then again to make it go away). Not sure if anyone else can reproduce that.

Broadcast channels shouldn't switch resolution or frame rate. Cable, satellite and terrestrial channels run their encoders at fixed resolutions (480i, 480p - once used by Fox not sure anyone does now, 576i, 576p - if Aus still uses it, 720p and 1080i, with some like the BBC doing 1080i/p switching)

Fox in the US has a clever system called "The Splicer" which means the local stations pass on the network-encoded MPEG2 that they downlink, and then splice in locally encoded commercials, news, local shows etc. (and have a very clever selective decode/encode system for a couple of MPEG2 macro blocks to insert a station bug into the network feed in the MPEG2 domain). However this won't cause issues either.

It is possible that the commercials and shows are encoded differently by the encoders as they contain different mixes of interlaced, 2:2 progressive and 3:2 progressive content which could cause the encoder to change encoding modes in a way that OMXPlayer doesn't like, or it could be something nasty happening on commercial insertion I guess? Unlikely to be a change of resolution or frame rate in the encoder though, that would be very unusual. (Broadcast playout areas pretty much universally run at a fixed resolution and frame rate - 480/59.94i, 576/50i, 720/59.94p or 50p, 1080/59.94i or 50i are the dominant standards, with 23.976p and 25p content carried with 3:2 or 2:2)