2015-10-19, 20:03
Before I start I just want to say that I am unable to submit a debug log on this because it would contain information I don't want made publicly available, and there is no way to submit a debug log privately to just the developers. So I am just noting what I observed, in case anyone else sees this type of problem.
I was recording a show off of a satellite channel, and this particular channel for the most part is "in the clear" but occasionally they scramble specific programming for one reason or another. The show I was trying to record came on right after a scrambled program ended. Naturally TVHeadend cannot record the scrambled content but it does start recording when the scrambling is disabled, and it did record the entire program I wanted to see. But the weird part was, when I tried to play this recording via the TVHeadend PVR addon's "Recordings" section, it immediately crashed Kodi, and the effect was the same on at least three different systems running Kodi (two running Linux and one running OS X). Yet if I take the .ts file and play it through the Videos menu in Kodi it plays just fine, no crash and no problem at all, and the same thing if I play it in VLC - it plays just fine there. This is the first time I have ever seen such a thing happen, but it makes me wonder why a .ts file would play differently when played through the PVR addon as opposed to being played directly as a video file. I don't process the file in any way, it's the same .ts file, just in the one case it completely crashes Kodi and in the other it doesn't.
What I wish is that there was an option in the Kodi PVR addon to skip the first n kbytes (settable by the user) of any .ts file played from the backend. Since TVHeadend ALWAYS starts recording 30 seconds early (unless it has to wait for a tuner to become available), in most cases you could skip the first few kb or even mb and not lose more than a second or two of video, but you'd ignore a lot of the instability and errors that sometime occur in the first second or two of the recording. I realize that in TVHeadend itself there is a per-tuner setting called "Skip Initial Bytes" and I have tried setting that as high as 18800000 (1000 times the default input buffer size - I wish I knew what the maximum value is for that setting) but the problem is that still does not always prevent bad initial bytes in a recording, although it does prevent most of the problems with bad recording lengths (where Kodi seems to think a one hour recording is more like 12 hours long). If Kodi could just ignore the initial bytes of a .ts file, I think maybe that would help solve several issues. It might not be a solution for everyone, but I do think it would help avoid problems like the one I have mentioned here, where the first so many bytes of the .ts file seem to be a poison pill as far as Kodi is concerned.
Kodi version is Kodi 15.2 Isengard – Release Candidate 3.
I was recording a show off of a satellite channel, and this particular channel for the most part is "in the clear" but occasionally they scramble specific programming for one reason or another. The show I was trying to record came on right after a scrambled program ended. Naturally TVHeadend cannot record the scrambled content but it does start recording when the scrambling is disabled, and it did record the entire program I wanted to see. But the weird part was, when I tried to play this recording via the TVHeadend PVR addon's "Recordings" section, it immediately crashed Kodi, and the effect was the same on at least three different systems running Kodi (two running Linux and one running OS X). Yet if I take the .ts file and play it through the Videos menu in Kodi it plays just fine, no crash and no problem at all, and the same thing if I play it in VLC - it plays just fine there. This is the first time I have ever seen such a thing happen, but it makes me wonder why a .ts file would play differently when played through the PVR addon as opposed to being played directly as a video file. I don't process the file in any way, it's the same .ts file, just in the one case it completely crashes Kodi and in the other it doesn't.
What I wish is that there was an option in the Kodi PVR addon to skip the first n kbytes (settable by the user) of any .ts file played from the backend. Since TVHeadend ALWAYS starts recording 30 seconds early (unless it has to wait for a tuner to become available), in most cases you could skip the first few kb or even mb and not lose more than a second or two of video, but you'd ignore a lot of the instability and errors that sometime occur in the first second or two of the recording. I realize that in TVHeadend itself there is a per-tuner setting called "Skip Initial Bytes" and I have tried setting that as high as 18800000 (1000 times the default input buffer size - I wish I knew what the maximum value is for that setting) but the problem is that still does not always prevent bad initial bytes in a recording, although it does prevent most of the problems with bad recording lengths (where Kodi seems to think a one hour recording is more like 12 hours long). If Kodi could just ignore the initial bytes of a .ts file, I think maybe that would help solve several issues. It might not be a solution for everyone, but I do think it would help avoid problems like the one I have mentioned here, where the first so many bytes of the .ts file seem to be a poison pill as far as Kodi is concerned.
Kodi version is Kodi 15.2 Isengard – Release Candidate 3.
