(Updated) EDL Skipping not Working with 7.95.2

BrettB · February 5, 2017 at 1:11 AM

I use LibreELEC running on an RPi 3 as my primary user interface/client. I have the recording drives mapped as SMB drives from my NextPVR server to the RPi and use advancedsettings.xml with path substitution to redirect the player to access the .ts files directly from the SMB drives rather than via NextPVR's HTTP streaming (in order to get .edl skipping support).

Recently I've been having problems with several recordings where the playback will stall for various lengths of time (from seconds to minutes). Sometimes Kodi will display a Buffering message. Other times it just stalls for a while before beginning playing again. Often this happens during/after a commercial skip or a manual skip forward during playback. So far, I haven't been able to track down the cause. I don't think that it is network/hardware related. It seems more like it is related to the contents of the .ts file because some files will exhibit this problem multiple times during playback and other files will play just fine.

I just updated to the latest LibreELEC Beta (v. 7.95.2) and am still having the problem. When the problem happens, the kodi.log file is showing some/all of these errors:WARNING: CRenderManager::WaitForBuffer - timeout waiting for buffer
ERROR: CDVDAudio::AddPacketsRenderer - timeout adding data to renderer
ERROR: Previous line repeats 73 times.
NOTICE: CVideoPlayerAudio::Process - stream stalledAnd when this situation just happened while playing a file, I turned on debugging (at 14:43:42 in the attached kodi-smb.log), continued waiting and watching through a couple of skips, and then zipped the attached logs.

To rule out the LibreELEC/RPi SMB client, I tried switching to NFS. Still the same problems. (see the kodi-nfs.log file)

I'm wondering if anyone else is seeing similar problems or has ideas about where I look next to try to fix the issue(s).
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Quote from BrettB

I use LibreELEC running on an RPi 3 as my primary user interface/client. I have the recording drives mapped as SMB drives from my NextPVR server to the RPi and use advancedsettings.xml with path substitution to redirect the player to access the .ts files directly from the SMB drives rather than via NextPVR's HTTP streaming (in order to get .edl skipping support).

Recently I've been having problems with several recordings where the playback will stall for various lengths of time (from seconds to minutes). Sometimes Kodi will display a Buffering message. Other times it just stalls for a while before beginning playing again. Often this happens during/after a commercial skip or a manual skip forward during playback. So far, I haven't been able to track down the cause. I don't think that it is network/hardware related. It seems more like it is related to the contents of the .ts file because some files will exhibit this problem multiple times during playback and other files will play just fine.

I just updated to the latest LibreELEC Beta (v. 1.95.2) and am still having the problem. When the problem happens, the kodi.log file is showing some/all of these errors:WARNING: CRenderManager::WaitForBuffer - timeout waiting for buffer
ERROR: CDVDAudio::AddPacketsRenderer - timeout adding data to renderer
ERROR: Previous line repeats 73 times.
NOTICE: CVideoPlayerAudio::Process - stream stalledAnd when this situation just happened while playing a file, I turned on debugging (at 14:43:42 in the attached kodi-smb.log), continued waiting and watching through a couple of skips, and then zipped the attached logs.

To rule out the LibreELEC/RPi SMB client, I tried switching to NFS. Still the same problems. (see the kodi-nfs.log file)

I'm wondering if anyone else is seeing similar problems or has ideas about where I look next to try to fix the issue(s).

Another discovery: During automatic commercial skipping, if I display the timeline on the screen while playback is "stalled", it shows the current position proceeding through commercial section in real-time (while the audio and video are black). And then when it gets to the end of the commercial section, there is a brief "stutter" and then playback continues normally.

BrettB · February 5, 2017 at 4:42 PM

UPDATE:

So after using 1.95.2 for a day now, I've found that EDL auto skipping does not seem to work at all with this version. (See the logs in the original post.)

pavlov70 · February 5, 2017 at 8:29 PM

Hi,

I'm running an Intel NUC with a MythTV backend and EDL no longer works for me with 7.95.2 whereas it was fine on 7.95.1. Show plays fine up until the first commercial skip. The display goes black but I can manually skip forward or back. Interesting observation about the timeline. I'll check mine and work on posting the logs.

EDIT: logfiles here: Ubuntu Pastebin

BrettB · February 5, 2017 at 8:45 PM

Quote from pavlov70

I'm running an Intel NUC with a MythTV backend and EDL no longer works for me with 7.95.2 whereas it was fine on 7.95.1. Show plays fine up until the first commercial skip. The display goes black but I can manually skip forward or back. Interesting observation about the timeline. I'll check mine and work on posting the logs.

I would guess that if you just wait after the display goes black, then it will eventually begin playing OK again (after the length of time of the skip has passed). I would be interested in having you confirm if you see the same behavior.

pavlov70 · February 5, 2017 at 9:19 PM

Quote from BrettB

I would guess that if you just wait after the display goes black, then it will eventually begin playing OK again (after the length of time of the skip has passed). I would be interested in having you confirm if you see the same behavior.

Normal playback does indeed resume if I let it continue. In fact, normal playback resumes pretty much where it would if EDL skip was working normally. Basically it appears as though Kodi is blanking the screen and sound during EDL cuts instead of skipping.

BrettB · February 5, 2017 at 9:23 PM

Quote from pavlov70

Normal playback does indeed resume if I let it continue. In fact, normal playback resumes pretty much where it would if EDL skip was working normally. Basically it appears as though Kodi is blanking the screen and sound during EDL cuts instead of skipping.

Yes. That is exactly the same behavior that I'm seeing.

chessie · February 8, 2017 at 2:24 PM

I'm seeing the same issue with pvr.mythtv but strangely enough commercial skipping is working on my RPI boxes OK. I posted this on the Kodi pvr.mythtv add-on forum yesterday:

Janbar,
I started having an issue with commercial skips on my main Libreelec system, which is an Intel build, after upgrading to the Krypton beta's. The problem is that when it begins to skip I just go to a blank screen for up to 3 minutes before the video resumes. I can skip or forward through it OK. MythTV is 0.28 and all connections are via 1000 mbs ethernet. I have several Raspberry devices on other TV's in the house running Krypton beta that don't have the problem. The system having the problem has a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 video card. I though that may be the problem, but after removing that and switching to the onboard Intel GPU, the problem still exists. As a last resort, I backed up everything and did a clean install. It still hangs up at commercials. I turned on debug in both the pvr.mythtv addon and Kodi after the clean install. If you have a chance, can you please look at the log and see if you can figure out whats causing the error? The first commercial skip in the program begins at 18:39:37 in the log. Play back is fine until that time. The video remains a black screen until around 18:42:59 when I get some flashes of video on the screen and by 18:43:08 I have video and audio back in sync. I have no problems with recorded videos other than the commercial skip on that one system (which has been working fine for over a year). The log is located here - ShCL .

BrettB · February 9, 2017 at 1:23 PM

Quote from chessie

I'm seeing the same issue with pvr.mythtv but strangely enough commercial skipping is working on my RPI boxes OK.

Which RPi model(s) do you have? I'm using an RPi 3. And the edl skipping works fine in 7.95.1 (and earlier versions), but constantly fails in 7.95.2.

chessie · February 9, 2017 at 1:49 PM

RPI3's. Both wired and wireless. I tied the latest Milhouse builds from a week or so ago on the Intel and I still had the problem on that system.

zaphod24 · February 13, 2017 at 4:35 PM

Quote from chessie

RPI3's. Both wired and wireless. I tied the latest Milhouse builds from a week or so ago on the Intel and I still had the problem on that system.

I'm seeing this with 7.95.3 on my Odroid C2 as well. If it matters, the PVR backend is MythTV.

Looks like the Milhouse RPI build includes a fix for the issue now, PR 11646. Perhaps that can be back-ported to Krypton before LE 8.0 final?

BrettB · February 14, 2017 at 12:46 AM

Quote from zaphod24

Looks like the Milhouse RPI build includes a fix for the issue now, PR 11646. Perhaps that can be back-ported to Krypton before LE 8.0 final?

Let's hope that it does get back-ported because LE is pretty much unusable for me with the bug.

zaphod24 · February 14, 2017 at 2:23 AM

Quote from BrettB

Let's hope that it does get back-ported because LE is pretty much unusable for me with the bug.

I'm able to skip the commercial and restart playback by using the up button on my remote. It's not as good as it automatically skipping but it works for now.

Jaaxx · February 17, 2017 at 7:38 AM

It's a kodi issue. It's still in v17 final, but a fix is proposed and should make its way in soon. See HERE

zaphod24 · February 23, 2017 at 3:16 PM

Updated to the official LE 8.0 release last night, unfortunately the fix for EDL skipping does not appear to have made it in the release. Any idea when it might be included? Is there an 8.0.1 release planned soon?

nerddtvg · March 25, 2017 at 1:27 PM

Quote from zaphod24

Updated to the official LE 8.0 release last night, unfortunately the fix for EDL skipping does not appear to have made it in the release. Any idea when it might be included? Is there an 8.0.1 release planned soon?

Version 8.0.1 was just released and this was included! It just worked for me.

Edit: Maybe not. It skipped once but now I'm not even getting the prompts for commercial breaks.

Edit 2: I take Edit 1 back. It just worked again without intervention in the middle of a show. Maybe my commercial breaks are broken.