OTA TV stuttering

[BGIYYZ]

I’m using an HD Homerun to view OTA TV stations. I don’t know exactly when it started, but we can’t watch more than a few minutes of TV before it appears to freeze only to start up again 10 seconds later.

Tvheadend is used for PVR duties. Recordings don’t seem to have this freezing issue, however when pausing live tv, it will fail if I fast forward to live tv. What happens in this case is it will go back to the beginning of the live tv recording but I can only go forward a few minutes before it returns to the beginning again. I cannot get out of it by pressing the stop button. I’m forced to change to another channel and then change back to the original channel (losing whatever was in the paused buffer).

Now, I can watch the same hdhomerun using the app built into the tv and it works flawlessly (though I don’t have recording or pausing ability). This makes me think the problem lies in tvheadend, Kodi or the vero4k.

Does anyone have any advice on fixing this?

[JimKnopf]

Just an idea: In case you have the tvheadend’s recording and timeshift paths on a NAS the following happens:

• while watching Live TV you get a data stream from the HD Homerun via network
• nearly the same amount of bandwidth needs to be sent to the NAS to store the timeshift data
• if you now pause the Live TV and restart playback with some delay another data stream is created reading the timeshift data

That makes 3 times the original bandwidth of the Live TV stream … good question is whether your network infrastructure and devices can handle this.

[BGIYYZ]

These are all good points. All the storage is indeed on a NAS. Up to semi recently, it was never an issue, that’s why I’m wondering what is going on.

Are there software tools you can suggest to measure network speeds between the Vero4K and the NAS? The Hdhomerun and the Vero4K are plugged into the same router, but the NAS is connected via powerline networking.

[darwindesign]

If your NAS allows for running iperf then this would probably be the prefered method…

[How To] Check Network Performance with iperf3

Sometimes it is important to check the network performance between your OSMC Device and the device providing your media (NAS, Server, PC). Especially when you are connected via wireless the throughput variations can harm you viewing experience. This short How To should give you the required information how to install iperf3 and how to run the respective tests. When doing these tests it is suggested to have a simple setup (single switch between Sender and Receiver and avoid other traffic on the …

The powerline adapter would be a likely bottleneck and I would actually suggest to reboot it first and see if the issue clears up since it would seem your saying this setup had been working previously. If feasible it would probably be best to move your NAS to a location where it can be directly connected to the router as well.

[CaptainMoody]

I am having very similar problems to the OP.
There is something going on with TVHeadend at the moment and it’s been like it for a few weeks.
The CPU load on my server slowly builds over 4 or 5 days and the TVHeadend stream becomes more unstable:

Once I restart the TVHeadend service everything is ok again for a few days.
I haven’t had any time to look into it unfortunately.

[sam_nazarko]

Must be a bug. The TVH version in our App Store doesn’t seem to be exhibiting this issue.

Sam

[CaptainMoody]

This is the version number:
HTS Tvheadend 4.2.8-36~g5bdcfd8ac
Looks to be from November last year and I’m pretty sure it hasn’t updated recently.
I wonder if it is a dependency or something that TVH relies on to run that’s updated and causing an issue?
I run TVH on a headless linux server