LE 10.0.3 RPi 4 TVH Video freezing whilst Audio continues

    I have checked the buffer and I have seen a very interesting thing:

    If I play the video through tvheadend (LiveTV —> recordings) I have ZERO buffer.

    If instead I go to Videos and play the file from there, buffer goes up to around 420MB and then goes down to 390 and stays there.

    Of course playing a video being recorded doesn’t update the standard player time, so seeking is not possible etc etc but at least I could try to stream it that way.

    But why can’t I see any buffer when I use TVH?

    By the way I also tested PVR Simple IPTV and I get around 8-20 KB of buffer only (these values change continuously)

    It would be nice to set up buffering also for LiveTV

    My advancedsettings.xml is the following:

    Code
    <advancedsettings>
<cache>
<buffermode>1</buffermode>
<memorysize>536870912</memorysize>
<readfactor>5</readfactor>
<curlclienttimeout>10</curlclienttimeout>
<curllowspeedtime>10</curllowspeedtime>
</cache>
</advancedsettings>

    Edited once, last by ciclista71 (January 27, 2023 at 10:58 AM).

    This seems similar to a problem I've been experiencing with YouTube for many months on LE10. The video would freeze after a short buffer but the audio would continue to play on. The best information I found on the issue came from https://github.com/xbmc/inputstream.adaptive/issues/678 . It was ever present on 10.0.3, but I haven't tested it in 10.0.4 as I had already upgraded to an LE11 nightly by the time they released that.

    For me, upgrading to a recent LE11 nightly running Kodi 20 final has solved this buffering/video freezing issue completely. I would suggest there was some change in inputstream.adaptive that hasn't yet/won't be backported to Kodi 19. There is still a problem occasionally losing audio while seeking through streaming content but overall the experience is better. So if you want to wait a bit the LE11 final should be out in the coming months, and it may solve your problems. Or you can test it today with the newly released LE11 Beta. Hard to migrate backwards though, so make a backup of your current setup just in case you need to return to LE10.

    Edited 2 times, last by the_third_pi (January 29, 2023 at 7:45 AM).

    This is causing a lot of problems if you are using iptv in libreelec. Now i am connected via cable but occasional buffering is normal in iptv as not all servers are perfect. But everytime the stream buffers, i lose video. It freezes and audio continues just as we all mentioned here. The only fix is disabling drm prime however, 1080p streams take a huge hit when i do that. Playback is not smooth without it.

    Note: I am on 10.0.4

    Quote from the_third_pi

    For me, upgrading to a recent LE11 nightly running Kodi 20 final has solved this buffering/video freezing issue completely.

    I've tested LE11 beta and I'm still getting the same issues.

    Quote from popcornmix

    It would be useful to confirm if the issue is reproducible from a recorded file (played through file interface of kodi).

    If it is we can investigate the file.

    I doubt this would work as the issue appears to manifest when there is a problem with a network stream.

    Quote from popcornmix

    I think kodi just doesn't recover well when switching into and out of buffering where there isn't enough network bandwidth between the client and server.

    I used to have issue like this when using a wifi connection, but it's been perfect since switching to wired.

    I will test with the debug logging suggested but the issue isn't a poor connection, both client and server are hardwired on the local LAN. In my case it's likely my TVH server is having moments it struggles to re-encode the h264 stream. I have to use this feature as the build of Hyperion I'm using doesn't like the native resolution of SD channels.

    I know of another user which has the same issues with a HDHomerun setup. Their RPi4 client and HDHR tuner are hard-wired into a Mesh WiFi network so that's obviously the issue there. Unfortunately there is no cost effective solution there to hard-wire either.

    We can both live with occasional drop outs, it's the fact Kodi doesn't recover without interaction from the user that's annoying.

    I'm sorry that upgrading to LE11 has not solved those problems for you. My problems were specific to YouTube and I am confident my internet speed and connectivity are not factors here. The best I can understand about it is that certain videos were being served from data centres from very far away, and when that would happen I would encounter buffering which would freeze the video. I've tried using yt-dlp on suspect videos and had much lower than normal download speeds on those videos. I blame YouTube CDN as well as Kodi's (or inputstream.adaptive's) less than graceful stream error handling. That being said, LE11 has fixed those buffering problems for me on YouTube by-in-large.

    For your streaming issues the best course would be to engage with the inputstream.adaptive team on Github. They have an issue tracker with issues that may relate to yours like https://github.com/xbmc/inputstream.adaptive/issues/1091 They are also the people who are probably going to be the most knowledgeable when it comes to streaming-specific problems and solutions with Kodi.

    When it comes to antenna, I have nothing but problems trying to recover a stream from a station with poor signal quality, regardless of the device. Wish I could offer more tips there. Best of luck.

    OK then here is a hypothetical solution idea for our problem here. Is it possible to increase the buffer amount and buffer time for video decoding, i mean would it be possible somehow for the videos to play "after" 10 seconds or 20 seconds of buffer time so that if the stream is interrupted, the decoder continues to play the stream from its buffer memory and rebuffers when the connection is reestablished. That means a "delayed" playback for live streams i assume. I'd be OK with that. As long as it plays, i am ok with delayed play (they are actually delayed anyway).

    What i assume the problem is that as long as there is a steady stream of data coming to the decoder of Kodi, it just decodes the stream and plays it. The problem starts when this steady stream is somehow interrupted. There is no way to stop such interruption (yes i am cable connected) so gotta find other ways to resolve this issue.

    Today i wanted to watch a live youtube broadcast. It was a basketball match. My Pi3 is "cable connected" to my router. My internet connection is 50mbps and stable. I do not have any other issues regarding youtube playback on any other devices that i have which are connected to the same network, even on wifi. The youtube addon that i am using for playback is from official Kodi repository. The very same issue that we all mention in this thread was replicated while i tried to watch this live game. Video playback momentarily stopped (probably due to buffering) and after that, only the audio continued to play. The frozen video frame stayed on screen. I had to stop and restart the video. I tried to increase the buffer amount to max (100mb) in the youtube addon settings to no avail. After a few incidents, i just gave up and watched the rest of the game on my laptop on Chrome, which is wifi connected. I had no more issues.

    I do not remember any such problem when i was using Libreelec 9.*. This started after 10.* and forward. I have tried 11 beta and it also has this. People with very fast and stable internet connections probably do not really experience this (or maybe they do) as their streams are never interrupted, but people who do not have "perfect" internet connections are definitely scratching their heads due to this.

    Link for github bug report: https://github.com/LibreELEC/LibreELEC.tv/issues/6993

    Edited once, last by twilightened: Merged a post created by twilightened into this post. (February 12, 2023 at 5:50 PM).

    Quote from chewitt

    Pithy comments normally inspire the forum staff to ignore posts. Just saying..

    Well I wasn't addressing the forum staff there was I? Unless of course devs and forum staff are the very same people.

    PS: Ignorance was probably the wrong word. I was going for the word "ignore" there. So a correct word choice would probably be "neglect"?

    Edited 2 times, last by twilightened (April 24, 2023 at 8:48 PM).