IP TV is freezing

Help and Support Vero V
1

Hi there,

I have another problem using IP TV with the Vero V.

My ISP is providing me with a commercial / public IP TV Stream, nothing illegal here.

I have configured the https://api.init7.net/tvchannels.m3u in the simple ip tv client.

The stream is starting and I can watch but after some minutes the picture just freezes.It just stops.

Then when I want to return back to Kodi it takes unusual long until I see the UI again ~5s black Screen.

If I watch the same stream on my pc with VLC it works absolutely fine, so I don’t think that it is a network issue (IGMP/UDP). The Vero V is connected via LAN to my main Router ( so is my PC )

Here are the logs:

https://paste.osmc.tv/ahagitinax

2

Hi,

Thanks for the log — it actually tells us quite a clearly what’s happening, and the good news is it isn’t a decoding problem on the Vero.

Your channel is coming in as a multicast UDP stream (udp://@233.50.230.6:5000/), H.264 720p50 with AC3 audio. The log shows it opened cleanly and played for over four minutes with
no decoder errors and no dropped frames at all — the hardware decoder was perfectly happy with it. Then this happens:

  22:02:00  CDVDClock::SetSpeedAdjust - adjusted:-0.050000     (buffer running dry)
  22:02:01  CVideoPlayerAudio::Process - stream stalled         (data stopped arriving)
  22:02:02  CVideoPlayerVideo - Stillframe detected             (frozen frame)

That’s the signature of the stream simply running out of data — the packets stopped arriving, the buffer emptied, and the picture froze on the last frame. It’s not a corrupt or unsupported stream, and it’s not the Vero struggling to decode it.

The reason the “but it works in VLC on my PC” test doesn’t tell us much here is that this is multicast:

  • Multicast UDP has no retransmission — the moment the feed drops packets, the picture freezes. There’s nothing to recover from a gap.
  • Multicast delivery is per-switch-port and depends on IGMP snooping. Your PC and your Vero are different ports with independent group state, so one working doesn’t mean the other
    will stay fed several minutes later. A very common cause is an IGMP querier/snooping timeout that prunes the group after a few minutes, or a switch/AP (or any WiFi/powerline in the path) that handles multicast poorly.
  • VLC also buffers ~1 second by default and is more forgiving of jitter, whereas you’re currently on default buffering (no advancedsettings.xml present).

A few things to try:

  1. Add some network buffering. Create ~/.kodi/userdata/advancedsettings.xml:

  <advancedsettings>
    <network>
      <buffermode>1</buffermode>
      <readbufferfactor>4.0</readbufferfactor>
      <cachemembuffersize>20971520</cachemembuffersize>
    </network>
  </advancedsettings>

Reboot afterwards. This gives Kodi more headroom to ride out brief gaps.

  1. Compare like-for-like. Try the same multicast URL in VLC plugged into the exact same network point the Vero uses (same cable/port), and leave it running for several minutes. If iit stalls there too, we’ve confirmed it’s the multicast delivery and not OSMC.

  2. Check the path for multicast handling. If you have a managed switch, look at its IGMP snooping/querier settings, and try to take any WiFi or powerline adapters out of the equation between the Vero and the router. If your provider also offers the channels over HTTP/unicast, switching to that transport usually makes these freezes go away entirely.

Let us know how you get on with the buffering change and the like-for-like test.

Cheers

Sam

3

Those were removed from advancedsettings.xml in Kodi v21 and moved to GUI settings at Settings>Services>Caching>

1 Like
4

Indeed they were :laughing:
The same approach should be beneficial nonetheless

Sam

5

Hi all,

Thanks for the replies. I played around with some router settings and I have diabled IGMP snooping and rebooted it. Somehow it is working now. I could watch 2 worldcup games without any problems. So I think there is no issue on the Vero V.

Thanks for having a look into it.

6

Glad it’s sorted, and thanks for reporting back — that’s a really useful data point.

For anyone who finds this later: the giveaway was that it played perfectly for a few minutes and then froze. Your channel is a multicast stream (udp://@233.50.230.6:…), and that “fine for a few minutes, then freezes” pattern is the classic symptom of IGMP snooping without a working querier on the network.

In short: IGMP snooping makes your router/switch only send a multicast stream to devices that have “joined” it. To keep that membership alive, something on the network (an IGMP “querier”) has to periodically ask “who still wants this?”. If nothing does, the switch ages out the Vero’s membership after a couple of minutes and simply stops sending it the stream — so the picture freezes even though nothing is wrong with the Vero or the stream itself. Disabling snooping makes the router send the multicast to everything, so the Vero always receives it — which is why it works now.

Sam

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