Live TV frame drops

Help and Support Vero 2
1

I received my Vero 2 last week and it is a pretty snappy device. I experience some problems with Live TV using the DVBLink PVR add-on and a DVBLink Server on a separate Windows PC. I see a lot of frame drops for content with bitrates higher than ~9Mbps and audio is delayed so much I can’t fix it with audio offset settings. There are also frame drops for lower bitrates, but not nearly as much. I have not seen this before on Kodi running on Windows, but I don’t know if this is related to the Vero 2, OSMC or Kodi. I have uploaded my config and log when playing content with frame drops - Config and Logs. I can also play contents through an iOS app (DVBLink) and I see no frame drop or audio problems here.

I hope some one can help…

2

Hi

I sometimes see some buffering in your logs. Two things that would help:

  • Can you try recording a channel that is causing problems for a minute or two, copying it to a USB drive and watching locally? Do you still get problems?
  • Can you provide me with a small sample

Sam

3

Last night I did some testing and I have shared 4 recordings here: Recordings

When recording and watching via OSMC on Vero 2 I saw a lot of stuttering in the video and audio was a lot out of sync. Playing the videos back from a USB drive connected to the Vero 2 would give a nice video playback, but audio is still out of sync. I tried installing Kodi 16.1 directly on my Windows 10 machine running the DVBLink Server and everything would be fine when watching TV and also playing back the videos provided in the link - no stuttering and no audio issues. I also tried removing antivirus completely from the Windows machine to see if this had any effect on the Vero 2, but no. The audio is connected through a ClickTronic HDMI Audio Extracter in both cases, so this is not causing any problems. I have gigabit ethernet (HP ProCurve switch) between my DD Octopus NET DVB-C device, the DVBLink Server and the Vero 2, so network speed should not be a problem.

I hope you can use the videos to figure out the cause of the problem. My primary use and reason for buying the Vero 2 is Live TV. Tried playing back some blueray content and this played fine through NFS share on my Synology NAS.

Please let me know if you need anything else.

4

I have downloaded one of the clips and will play it back locally tonight.

Sam

5

Hi

I just tried to play the Danish clip: E03-Mor_er_dd__men_det_taler_vi_ikke_om-2045_20160509-12-10280000-1462819500.ts

I have Adjust Refresh Rate enabled, and I don’t see any stutter playing back from the internal NAND. The audio seems to be synchronised, but it was not always clear as the documentary fades to other clips while some of the speakers are talking.

Sam

6

Well, something is not right when I play back from my USB drive and I also have the Adjust Refresh Rate enabled. I have made a log here taken when I was playing back - look at the ffmpeg logs at 07:42:35 and 07:38:41. Lots of errors when playing back 2 of the videos I shared. And what about these (maybe it’s related, maybe not):

07:42:35 T:2606756848 DEBUG: CVideoReferenceClock: Setup failed, falling back to CurrentHostCounter()
07:38:41 T:2643457008 NOTICE: CDVDPlayerAudio::OutputPacket skipping a packets of duration 24
07:38:41 T:2823128048 DEBUG: ffmpeg[A84583F0]: [h264] unknown SEI type 128

I played around with the audio output disabling Passthrough and sometimes it seemed to have an effect, but nothing conslusive. Another thing is the stuttering at live TV, where it is only on specific channels. Channels broadcasted in 1280x720 will do the stutter after a while, but the ones in 1920x1080 I have never seen it. I have setup my Vero 2 to output 1280x720@50Hz.