[FernetMenta]

Effect: After about 5 seconds of watching a Live TV channel the display quickly goes black for a couple of milliseconds.

Now I got it, you are talking about milliseconds
Yep, this is caused by a reconfiguration of renderer after player has calculated the actual fps. PVR streams have no hint for fps set when they start playing, so they default to 25fps which is fine in 50Hz. For interlaced material player will detect 50fps after a short while and reconfigures render.

Now that PVR is merged this long known issue gets a higher priority. I will look into it.

[ChristianG]

Okay, just some more input:
- It doesn't matter if the TV Channel is interlaced or not. I've just tested with 1080i and 720p PAL channels, both are suffering the black-screen issue. Doesn't this fact conflict your theory?

Open questions:
A) Is there any way to manually configure or override XBMC to NOT reconfigure the renderer for Live TV (and still having "Adjust display refresh rate to match video" enabled)? Is there any configuration for the backend (TVHeadend in my case) for improving the situation?

B) I still have stuttering for Live TV sometimes after a channel switch. Any idea how I could solve this? (I can fix it manually by stopping Live TV and restarting playback for the Live TV channel - but I think you would agree this is a non-optimal workaround)

Thanks again for your help

[FernetMenta]

Both 1080i and 720p result into 50 fps. I had this fixed already in a testing branch some time ago.

A)
It requires a fix in the XBMC code.

B)
I guess you should open a new thread for this. Hard to say anything without having more info.

[ChristianG]

Okay, I think we should close this thread as "unsolved" in this case.

Thank you very much for helping me to isolate the root cause of the problem. I hope there will be a bugfix in the pulse-eight repo soon.
By the way: Would you recommend me to switch to another repo?

Thanks again! Was glad to have your support :-)
Have a great weekend!