[heatpipe]

First, thanks ahead of time for such an awesome product any support you can provide. I am writing though because I have an odd problem.

I'm having intermittent success with streaming video. Most of the time video fails to stream with XBMC indicating "no video data found on this channel". As indicated, here is a link to the ServerWMC.log in Pastebin with the reproduced failure.

However, if I first start watching a channel in WMC, I can successfully stream the same channel. What's odd is that even if I stop and shutdown WMC entirely, the XBMC client continues to operate; allowing me to switch between channels freely. Eventually after the client disconnects, and some time elapses, I end up back in my initial state of not being able to stream anything.

Any ideas as to what's going on?

[krustyreturns]

Weird! The remux is crashing for an error I haven't seen before, and that's REALLY strange that running wmc fixes it.

First off, see if you still have this file:
D:\Recorded TV\TempSWMC\savedfordebug\LiveTV_Omega_Digital Cable_707_2014_02_09_15_38_04.wtv

when you can, upload it to here:
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0...sp=sharing

and let me know when its there.

Does WMC just need to be just running, or do you have to view the channel first? Could you generate a similar log to the one you just posted, but after the fail make the magic happen with wmc, then play the same channel again in xbmc. In other words, I want to see a log with a fail and a success on the same channel.

[heatpipe]

Wow you're fast!

Ok. I've uploaded the original .wtv file.

To answer your question, if WMC is just running, I still get the failure. If WMC is running and watching a different channel, I still get the failure. It's only when WMC is on a given channel, and I stream that very same channel does it start working. Once working, I can stop WMC entirely, and it all continues to work until I bounce the XBMC client.

Here's the log of the working case as you've requested.

And thanks for looking at this so fast! Let me know how else I can help you to diagnose this.

Regards

[scarecrow420]

Given it's happening on a AudioTypeSpanningEvent GUID, it is no doubt related to the changes I made to look for the hearing impaired audio tracks. As krusty says, upload that file so we can debug it and fix the issue I agree though that I can't understand how having WMC running at the same time could affect it in any way!

On another note, I noticed you are using a network tuner, can you confirm that this PC running WMC and ServerWMC is the only PC in the house that is using this tuner? We have seen other problems when people thought they could use the network tuner from more than one PC leading to tuner conflicts etc.

[heatpipe]

Just in case this bit of information helps, once I get the first XBMC client working, it works for everyone. Meaning I can start other XBMC clients and they can start watching their own channels just fine.

---

scarecrow, I can confirm no one else is using the tuner. I made sure to power down all clients that can talk to the HDHomerun prime.

[krustyreturns]

The only thing I can think is that wmc is building the filter graph for this channel slightly differently then we are (I know, that's not supposed to happen). The interesting thing that heatpipe discovered is our calls to the recorder are using WMC's filtergraph.

Amazing. Are you thinking what I am thinking?

@heatpipe, are you running swmc with administrator privileges?

[heatpipe]

krusty, yes it's running with administrator privileges.

[krustyreturns]

Does this magic trick stop working if you don't?

[scarecrow420]

Could you also upload a sample WTV file from the same channel, when it DOES work (ie because WMC was open and tuning that channel also)? Just a couple of minutes is all that is required...

Id like to compare the 2 WTV files between not working, and working cases.

[heatpipe]

Since you've all been so available to help, I've been testing various permutations to get some consistent behavior.

@krustyreturns I should clarify my comment above. I normally run it as a user which is a member of the Adminstrators group. I tried running it via the explicit 'run as administrator' and it didn't seem to make a difference.

It seems that on occasion it does work without having to tune WMC to the specific channel. All of this time, I've been tuning to the same channel (707) which has been showing Olympics coverage on NBCHD. I'm wondering if somehow this particular channel has content that's hitting a bug of interest to scarecrow.

@Scarecrow I've done as you've asked. Here's a copy of this latest log . I've uploaded a bundle of video files to GDrive that are associated with the log. What you'll notice is that my attempts to execute my "trick" didn't work at first. You can see several failed attempts to stream channel 707. What ended up working was tuning to a different channel first (706). Once that worked, I was then able to stream channel 707. Hopefully you can get some interesting information from this.

Thanks again all.

EDIT: fixed GDrive link

[scarecrow420]

heatpipe, I have downloaded that zip file a number of times and it is corrupt each time. could you re-upload it please?

Ive looked at the file you originally uploaded and can see that the problem is the audio stream AudioType and Language sections seem to have 2 extra audio tracks that each have a different number of bytes to what we expect in these sections. It would be good to see the working files to see how/why they are different!

Once I fixed the logic to at least skip past these ones, this is the results of the StreamDescriptors

2014/02/11 22:22:39.974 Remux::FindDescriptors> wtv scanned (7.62 sec), Streams found:
2014/02/11 22:22:39.977 > Video: ID:26 Unknown
2014/02/11 22:22:39.978 > Other: ID:27 MS TV Caption
2014/02/11 22:22:39.978 > Audio: ID:28 AC3
2014/02/11 22:22:39.979 > Audio: ID:29 AC3
2014/02/11 22:22:39.979 > Audio: ID:30 (eng) AC3 5.1 48000 Hz 384 kb/s
2014/02/11 22:22:39.979 > Audio: ID:31 (spa) AC3 2.0 48000 Hz 192 kb/s
2014/02/11 22:22:39.980 > Video: ID:32 MPEG-2 MP-HL 1920x1080i fps: 30000/1001 AR: 16:9


Note the audio stream 28 and 29 which we are unable to determine many details about (including disposition, channels, bitrate, language etc)

So here are some interesting observations when testing the raw WTV file and the remux TS output in XBMC and WMC

Playing the WTV file in XBMC emits a split second of audio then fails with the following errors on XBMC log

22:37:32 T:10560 DEBUG: CDVDPlayerAudio:: Discontinuity1 - was:393123.343273, should be:75400.000000, error:-317723.343273
22:37:32 T:10560 DEBUG: CDVDPlayerAudio - CDVDMsg::GENERAL_EOF
22:37:32 T:10560 WARNING: CDVDMessageQueue(audio)::Get - asked for new data packet, with nothing available


Playing the WTV file in WMC works fine, but only shows only 2 languages - english and spanish (though they both appear to have only english commentator voice rather than a spanish commentator but that may just be how it is)?


With my above workaround, the output from our remuxer (TS file) with all 4 streams present

- plays in XBMC with 4 audio tracks - showing as Unknown - AC3 Stereo and Unknown - AC3 5.1, as well as English and Castillan. The unknown tracks have that split second of audio, then nothing... and Eng/Spa both have the same english commentator voice as the WTV file in WMC does

- plays in WMC with split second audio then silence, with no identied/selectable audio languages at all


So weird! I can only conclude that something is very wacky with that WTV file (or these Winter Olympic broadcasts) that WMC is able to ignore but we are trying to process (and indeed XBMC is also trying to process). Not surprising since alot of our remux code appears to be similar/modelled off ffmpeg and other opensource WTV processing code.

It will be good to see some of your other test files once you re-upload that zip file, so I can see what they look like audio wise

The fix I have so far doesnt really work as it causes us to remux the audio tracks which later dont work anyway, so I think if an audio track is encountered with these type of data fields, i haev no choice but to remove it during remux. Which is essentially what WMC seems to be doing itself anyway given that it only displays the 2 eng/spa languages

[krustyreturns]

Heatpipe,

I don't know why scarecrow is having trouble with the files you uploaded to my g-drive, because they work for me. I have been working with his fix for your problem with those files and we think we have discovered the problem some users have complained about: that occasionally doing a channel change fails. For whatever reason, your system has this problem in spades. So just wanted to say thanks for uploading those test cases, these should go a long way to eradicating this bug.

[heatpipe]

@scarecrow: I uploaded the files again. I tried downloading it from GDrive and the checksum was good so you should be set.

@krusty: It's funny. For the past two days I could stream all channels. Not the slightest hiccup with 3 concurrent XBMC clients. And today, none of the clients could stream a channel. I tried my "trick" and sure enough, I could get the clients working again. So strange.

If there's anything I can to help you debug, please don't hesitate to ask. Thanks again.

[scarecrow420]

Sorry i forgot to say that krusty re-upped the indiidual files which worked for me, not sure why the zip was giving me grief. Sorry you uploaded them again when ive actually already got them!

If you have the ServerWMC logs from yesterday's successes and today's failures feel free to post them up. I think it will pretty much confirm though that the times it failed is due to these weird streams. We think they are the tail end of video/audio streams of the previous channel/tuner data "bleeding" into the current stream. We have made fixes to handle them in our remuxing to TS, which will be in the next version. So basically we can filter these bad streams out when remuxing to TS but this wont help XBMC when it is playing the actual WTV files (eg for playing back completed recordings).

We actually wanted to see if you can help to determine whether this "stream bleeding" is present in scheduled recordings or whether its a phenomenon only seen with live viewing and channel switching etc. So what you would need to do is, get yourself in the state where "things arent working". Then schedule a recording of that channel (this needs to be scheduled recording not instant recording, so make sure you are not streaming the channel already). Stop the recording after a couple of minutes, and then upload the WTV file. We can analyse it to see what the streams are like. You can also try playing back the completed recording in XBMC (make sure its completed otherwise we remux it to TS) and see if it plays or not. If it doesnt play then i expect when we analyse it we will find the same stream problems. What we HOPE though, is that the windows rec service is already making sure that these things dont make it into the WTV file... it does seem to delay a few seconds before the recording starts so possibly that is to make sure no bleeding occurs. It would be great if it doesnt affect scheduled recordings since to fix that would require ffmpeg/XBMC changes, similar to what we have had to do in our remuxer.


Questions:

Do you have Pre Start tuners option enabled in ServerWMC? It got disabled by default in the last version anyway but we do sometimes say that a reboot is needed to fully confirm the change. So if you upgraded and havent rebooted it could still be doing stuff maybe

When these failures occur is it after channel switching or it can even happen on the first channel you tune?

[krustyreturns]

heatpipe,

After scarecrows test, see if the 1126 version of serverwmc solves your live tv problem.