[mrstef2000]

Hi, I am using the following setup:

Backend: MediaPortal 1.20 TV Server with MediaPortal_2_1_2_TVServerKodi_plugin_rev138 running on a powerful and fully updated Windows 10 PC
Frontend: Kodi 17.6 (via LibreElec 8.2.5) running on a Raspberry Pi 3

The TV stuff works great, apart from one thing. Every now and then when watching TV in Kodi, the picture freezes. I checked the logs of both Kodi and MediaPortal and at 23:10:11 something goes wrong on Kodi side (no error prints on Mediaportal side until 23:10:33 where it recieves a stop request):

Code:


23:10:11.017 T:1346368416 NOTICE: CVideoPlayerAudio::Process - stream stalled
23:10:11.887 T:1354757024 DEBUG: CPullupCorrection: pattern lost on diff 80000.000000, number of losses 1
23:10:11.887 T:1354757024 INFO: CVideoPlayerVideo - Stillframe detected, switching to forced 25.000000 fps
23:10:12.080 T:1462989728 NOTICE: AddOnLog: MediaPortal PVR Client: XBMC requested 32768 bytes, but the TSReader got only 1808 bytes in 2 seconds
23:10:14.284 T:1462989728 NOTICE: AddOnLog: MediaPortal PVR Client: XBMC requested 32768 bytes, but the TSReader got only 32336 bytes in 2 seconds
23:10:14.285 T:1462989728 DEBUG: Stream stalled, start buffering. Audio: 0 - Video: 0


So what happened here? Both the Raspberry and the TV server are hooked up via very stable cable LAN connections (no wifi), so I have a hard time believing this should have anything to do with the network connection between them.
I have set up the plugin to use "tsreader" as playback option (and not using RTSP). All other options gives even more unstability (not debugged though).
This issue reproduces itself maybe once in 3 hours of operation or something like that.
Watching TV from a Windows Mediaportal Client does not trigger this issue. It runs very stable.

Btw, is it OK to use MediaPortal_2_1_2_TVServerKodi_plugin_rev138 together with MediaPortal 1 (release 1.20 final)? I think the latest pre-release of 2.2 uses exactly the same TV server (1.20), right?

Full logs here (I have removed some unecessary stuff from them):
http://steffe.net/kodimp/kodi.log.txt
http://steffe.net/kodimp/tvservice.log.txt
http://steffe.net/kodimp/tswriter.log.txt
http://steffe.net/kodimp/streaming_server.log.txt

Best Regards
Stefan

[margro]

Thanks for the log files. Right now I don't know exactly how to fix this.
It seems that Kodi is playing a bit too fast such that it approaches the end of the timeshift buffer. Older Kodi versions would temporarely buffer but Kodi 17 just aborts.
You can add a small delay in the PVR addon settings ("Wait time after tuning a channel") of 2 seconds to increase the initial timeshift buffer size.
Another option to try is to pause the stream for e.g. 10 {s} and see if it still stops after a few hours.

[mrstef2000]

Thanks for the suggestion margro, but it turned out that there was nothing wrong with this plugin.

I ran the tvserver in a virtual environment (VmWare ESXI) in which I had used PCIe passthrough to "forward" a Firewire expansion card to the virtual host. Connected to this Firewire expansion card where my FireDTV TV cards. But there seems to be some kind of issue in the current release of ESXI (6.7) which makes the PCIe passthrough unstable. Suddenly the data just stops flowing from the TV cards via the forwarded Firewire card and the TVserver just halts.

I replicated my setup on a physical machine, and now everything runs stable as a rock!