[arad85]

Anyone know where the log file is if you set Mythbox to log or does it just dump into the xbmc.log file. I have logging on but no mythbox.log file in my top level directory.

[myrison]

I have a few different xbmc mythbox front ends, and a single backend server. My network runs @ Gig speed, although a few clients only have 100M cards. In addition, I have a front end that speaks over a DD-WRT WiFi bridge using Wifi N. This machine sitting out in WiFi land seems to be my problem child....

This is an acer revo (atom ion) that runs win7. Using WiFi, it can playback any HD recorded streams without any issues. When I try to watch live TV, it stutters like crazy and is un-watchable.

I have taken this same problem machine and dropped a ethernet cable for direct connection. When it is hard-wired..... everything works well. Remove the hard-wire connection and live TV stutters again through mythbox front end. This same machine has an embeded WiFi-N adapter, and it acts the same as using the DD-WRT bridged router.

My connection speeds for my bridged router report around 144M. I know this number is not realistic for true bandwidth.... but I also know this connection will support streaming HD signals from a variety of other sources without issue. It seems like just the live TV in mythbox really has problems over wifi.

I tried to find an answer to how to get wifi streaming to work better, but right now I think my only option is to try to fish cables through walls.

Anyone with a tip around this? Some of these symptoms seemed like what others are reporting.... but I think (in my case at least) live TV thru mythbox seems to be very sensitive to network connection type.

I unfortunately don't have any tips for you, but I can confirm that you are not alone here. I have exactly the same behavior on a Zotac ION Mag. I actually just went out tonight and bought one of the new 500Mbps (in theory) PowerLine Adapter Kits to see if they would have enough speed to overcome the stuttering in Live TV. Unfortunately, even though it is really fast for PowerLine (sustained ~90-100 Mbps file transfers) it was not enough for LiveTV. It does allow me to stream all of my HD content (Movies and TV) without issue, but Live TV just won't play when on anything but wired Ethernet.

I had the same thoughts you did wondering why LiveTV is so much more sensitive to network speeds / latency than everything else, but I really don't know what the answer is. If you figure anything out, please post back as I'm really trying to avoid a cable run to this TV as well (it's next to impossible location-wise, so for the meantime I'm just giving up LiveTV on this set).

[zzz1735]

I'm am trying to get MythBox 1.0.2 running in XBMC 10.0 on Windows 7 to run. I have another computer that is currently the Frontend and Backend for MythTV. While try to figure out if MythBox will support my needs, I ran into a problem where the video won't play after selecting the show and then hitting Play or Play+Skip. My MythBox pulls all the thumbnails and data from the MythBackend MySQL server. All that seems to work great.

However, when I want to play a show, I get a frozen video frame first. I have to hit the Pause and then Play buttons before the video will play. The video then plays for 8 seconds before the video freezes. The time counter continues to increase but the video does not follow. Hitting Pause and Play will start the video again for another 8 seconds before it freezes. Eventually, the video just won't play.

I moved my videos directly onto the Windows 7 machine to make sure it was not a network issue. The problem still occurs.

I have tried using Aggressive Cache. I have tried all the configurations for Interlace handing. I have tried all the settings for Video scaling method. I have tried different video files. The problem is consistent.

If I play the video file directly from the hard drive in Windows Media Player, the video plays fine.

My video files are in the raw format that I've used for Myth for the past 4 years. In other words, I don't transcode the files to another format. I do have MythTV scan for commercials.

Although I don't think MythTV is part of the issue here, I am currently running .21.

Any ideas about why this is happening or what I can do about my problem?

Rob

[MikeFellows]

I seem to have got a little further since my last post...

just to confirm:

mythtv running on ubuntu as backend and frontend (working no problems)

xbmc running on win 7 x86

remote connections are also working to the backend, I can ping the backend via hostname (mythv) in this instance (also db connection works using hostname)

when trying to enter the recording directory, it will not accept \\mythtv\recordings or //mythtv/recordings or smb://mythtv/recordings. it does not work replacing hostname with ip address either

if I map a drive letter in mycomputer to drive r: it will accept r:\ for the recordings.

if i then run mythbox I get an error almost immediatiely

oninit:
'nonetype' object has no attribute 'ipaddress'

im not sure why its not possible to just enter the hostname and port.

If I can supply you any more info please let me know as I would really like to get this working.

Thanks

[myrison]

I seem to have got a little further since my last post...

just to confirm:

mythtv running on ubuntu as backend and frontend (working no problems)

xbmc running on win 7 x86

remote connections are also working to the backend, I can ping the backend via hostname (mythv) in this instance (also db connection works using hostname)

when trying to enter the recording directory, it will not accept \\mythtv\recordings or //mythtv/recordings or smb://mythtv/recordings. it does not work replacing hostname with ip address either

if I map a drive letter in mycomputer to drive r: it will accept r:\ for the recordings.

if i then run mythbox I get an error almost immediatiely

oninit:
'nonetype' object has no attribute 'ipaddress'

im not sure why its not possible to just enter the hostname and port.

If I can supply you any more info please let me know as I would really like to get this working.

Thanks

Do you have the hostname of the backend machine and ip address entered in the hosts file of the Windows machine? I had to do that on mine before it would get up and running.

Also, to confirm, I also mapped my recordings directory to a drive letter in Windows which seems to be the easiest way to go with MythBox.

[myrison]

As an update to my previous post, I've spent several hours now testing with various network configurations (NFS3,NFS4, SMB, etc) to try and fix the stuttering with LiveTV and can't seem to overcome it. As I mentioned in my last post, I was first testing over wireless, which worked "ok" but not well, so I upgraded to one of the new fast 500 Mbps (theoretical) powerline adapters. I did several tests and measurements and confirmed that I can get ~90 Mbps read speeds from the backend (which is running on a superfast RAID array capable of read / write speeds upwards of 500 Mbps).

Despite the fact that I can consistently read at ~90 Mbps from my backend server over Powerline ethernet, LiveTV stutters like crazy when connected via PowerLine. This does not happen when playing uncompressed Bluray rips like Avatar, which regularly climbs above 30 Mbps, which _seems_ to be more bandwidth than the LiveTV broadcasts require, but someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

Other observations:

• The test system is a Zotac MAG ION running Dharma XBMC-Live and connected to an old Sony Trinitron CRT.
  
• I have a Windows laptop sitting right next to it on *G* wireless that can play back the LiveTV broadcasts much more smoothly. (vq (video queue) stays at around 50-70%)
  
• Edit from a later test: I plugged the Windows laptop into the same powerline connection and it plays live tv smoothly over the powerline as well.
  
• Higher bitrate movie files play smoothly, lower bitrate livetv stutters.

If I plug the computer into a wired Gigabit connection, LiveTV plays fine, so it first appeared to be a network/bandwidth issue, but if that is the case, is the problem really bandwidth here, or is it something else? And why does what appears to be a LOWER bandwidth LiveTV stream stutter when a higher bandwidth video does not? Does myth use a different protocal for live streaming vs. playing recordings ?

• The recordings of the livetv programs that stutter play back 100% smoothly, the same files watched live are unwatchable
  
• The XBMC 'o' display shows that the video queue quickly dropping to zero, which indicates a lack of bandwidth (I think).
  
• CPU usage is low (~20%)
  
• The XBMC 'o' screen shows two different readings for the video bitrate, which I'm not used to seeing. See below:
  

Note the two different indications of video bitrate. One next to "DAR 16:9" (16,960 kb /s) and another at the very end of the 2nd line of the display, Mb/s: 7.88. What do these two different ratings mean?


As information, network monitoring (jnettop) shows throughput of ~9 Mbps while watching this video, which is WAY lower than Avatar, which hits ~40 Mbps in jnettop and plays smoothly.

Can anyone explain these results or help me troubleshoot further? Why does Myth behave differently with LiveTV than it does when playing the exact same files back once recorded?

Edit: now that I've tested with the laptop plugged into the Powerline connection, I'm thinking maybe this is an issue of scaling down to the low resolution of the CRT TV? I'll test tomorrow with a new TV as well....

Thanks in advance for any advice or thoughts.

[myrison]

Anyone know where the log file is if you set Mythbox to log or does it just dump into the xbmc.log file. I have logging on but no mythbox.log file in my top level directory.

Pretty sure it's just in the xbmc.log file.

[arad85]

If I plug the computer into a wired Gigabit connection, LiveTV plays fine, so it first appeared to be a network/bandwidth issue, but if that is the case, is the problem really bandwidth here, or is it something else?

Sounds like a latency issue rather than bandwidth. Live TV is a JIT technology so unless the software prebuffers the TV stream, you will be subject to network latency. With a file on disk, you can guarantee to read ahead of where you are. As to playing OK on PC vs Zotac, they do have two different network stacks, so who knows what they are doing? One thing you could look at are the ping times across different transport mediums. That may help you out.

Thanks for the pointer on mythbox.log too

[myrison]

arad - you're right, the powerline adapters are a bit more high latency (~3 ms pings as opposed to < 1s) so maybe that is an issue.

As an update to my earlier posts, I reimaged a couple of times to rule out problems with my front end setup.

First test: Base xbmc-live dharma image.
Results: No change to livetv results. Instantly choppy on almost every channel.

Second test: Full MythBuntu install
Result: Absolutely flawless playback.

It makes it appear as if the streaming protocol inside XBMC doesn't deal with latency as well (or it could be something else that I'm not thinking of). The TV I was testing this on is primarily used for watching live TV, so I'm going to dump XBMC on that box (or dual boot into it when needed) and just use the full MythBuntu install by default. It would definitely have been easier to use the plugin, but I've spent enough hours on that at this point and am happily moving to a smoothly streaming MythBuntu.

[colbert]

Wierd issue here with Mythbox crashing.

I use XBMC on my desktop box and leave it running windowed when not using. This happened 3 times: I last use XBMC at night and always leave it at home window. Next day when I come back whether in morning or evening and go straight into Mythbox, it freezes right at the main menu (showing most recent recording thumbnails but it hasn't retrieved them yet, it freezes right at "working" and the circular loading icon on each recording window).

I will turn on logging tonight and see if it happens tomorrow as it was random and so I didn't have loggin on.

[MikeFellows]

Do you have the hostname of the backend machine and ip address entered in the hosts file of the Windows machine? I had to do that on mine before it would get up and running.

Also, to confirm, I also mapped my recordings directory to a drive letter in Windows which seems to be the easiest way to go with MythBox.

Ive checked everything now.

added mythv to the hosts file (I cant see how this makes any difference as the back was accessible using hostname).

I uninstalled Mythbox, went into userdata and removed the settings left over and also ffmpeg. so theoretically a clean install will now be done.

still have the same problem of
oninit:
'nonetype' object has no attribute 'ipaddress'

some things I dont know if are right or wrong.....

1. the settings.xml file used by mythtv does not have any reference to the backed expect for mysql information.

2. when I click test settings nothing happens, i just get a grey screen nothing else.

3. I have never had a previous version of mythbox installed and im using the version from the addon's screen (should i be using a newer version?)

4. backend is running mythbuntu 10.10 (which uses 0.24)

I really dont know what else to try/do.

[davecurtains]

So, just trying to understand the 0.24 livetv support;

From reading the notes on the mythbox issues pages, it looks like this is a bug in XBMC. So, if you move up to a pre-compiled XBMC svn with latest mythbox will that let me have 0.24 liveTV ?

Or, do I need to wait until 10.1 - which I thought was due imminently?

Thanks!

[Dobyken]

So, just trying to understand the 0.24 livetv support;

From reading the notes on the mythbox issues pages, it looks like this is a bug in XBMC. So, if you move up to a pre-compiled XBMC svn with latest mythbox will that let me have 0.24 liveTV ?

Or, do I need to wait until 10.1 - which I thought was due imminently?

Thanks!

I don't think the SVN's, otherwise known as "Nightly Builds" are in place yet but from what I've read Mythbox is ready for .24 but the XBMC core has not been updated for the Myth .24 protocol. You may, however, be able to download the source from git and compile it yourself.

[myrison]

4. backend is running mythbuntu 10.10 (which uses 0.24)

I really dont know what else to try/do.

I'm pretty sure that's your issue. I am not an expert on this, but I think I've read a few times that if you are going to use this plugin, you have to be on v0.23 until XBMC 10.1 is released.

[MikeFellows]

I'm pretty sure that's your issue. I am not an expert on this, but I think I've read a few times that if you are going to use this plugin, you have to be on v0.23 until XBMC 10.1 is released.

hmmm..

I knew live TV didnt work with 0.24 but I thought recordings where working.

might try updating my 10.0 to latest svn

Thanks

edit: looks like im waiting, there are no nightly builds at the moment.