LE 12.2.1 TVH 4.3 no picture, only sound for SD channels only

    Hi,

    since a few days I only get a black screen but working sound when trying to watch a SD tv channel.

    HD tv channels still work with picture and sound.

    I'm using LE 12.2.1 legacy amd64 with current tvheadend 4.3 .

    If I disable hardware acceleration (VAAPI) in video player settings, the SD channels work again. HD channels still work without VAAPI.

    A few days ago this definitely used to work and suddenly I just got a black screen with most channels.

    Maybe somebody here can help me figure out what's going on?

    I live in southern Germany and the cable TV provider (Vodafone) is supposedly migrating from MPEG2 to h264 for SD TV, but I am not sure if this information is even correct or if the cable provider actually changed anything (yet)...and HD channels which work flawlessly have always been h264 if I am not mistaken.

    Debug log with VAAPI enabled and trying to watch SD tv: https://paste.libreelec.tv/expert-cockatoo.log

    Any help in figuring out what's going on and maybe being able to re-enable VAAPI would be much appreciated.

    Peter

    I don't see anything that looks obviously wrong. The channel is opened and you can see ffmpeg parsing content. Two audio streams are found; one is mpeg2audio which I'd guess is stereo, and one is ac3 which I'd guess has 5.1 audio, which is selected alongside the H264 video content.

    Disabling VAAPI changes the process flow inside Kodi, although I'd have to go look at code to understand more. I'm wondering what differences might exist/show in the logs as a first step. Please share some additional debug logs (separate logs/pastes if possible, as these are easier to search).

    • Show an SD channel with VAAPI disabled
    • Show an HD channel being opened

    NB: LE did bump the Tvheadend version last week https://github.com/LibreELEC/LibreELEC.tv/pull/10719 but the list of changes in the update are not particularly interesting (compile fixes, translation updates, etc.). There are also ffmpeg changes to improve the transcoding capabilities (mentions of VAAPI here, but this is encoding not decoding) so I'm not immediately seeing a connection to the problem reported.

    I see this issue this with some rare DVB-S streams, eg. MBC feeds from Eutelsat 21.6e.

    As a workaround you can enable "Use HTTP streaming for channels" in HTSP client addon settings.