[mythtv-users] Transcoded recordings playback fails: audio failure, video stutters (was Last MythTV Gentoo ebuild... buffer issues)

[Roger Heflin]

On Sun, Dec 18, 2011 at 5:52 PM, jk90090 <jk90090 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I fired up my backend mythfrontend, it's a slower Radeon card instead of
> an Nvidia, and playback works there, albiet with some minor stuttering
> which for the moment I'll just chalk up to the RAID check I have running
> at the moment.  The investigation continues...  confusingly...
>
> -J
>

Check your network using on the backend/frontend when this is happening.

There is an old feature in myth that had it stream from the backend to
the frontend within myth vs with nfs.

One of my frontends was setup (a long time ago) to stream that way and
matched what you are seeing and the network bandwidth being used was
way too high (50Mbyte/s for something that should have been
<1mbyte/second)).

Here is the info from my post I made after I figured it out:

Setting AlwaysStreamFiles appears to no longer be in settable in the
frontend settings, and StreamFiles appears to be badly broken in some
cases, but while the setting has been removed from the frontend
settings menu the frontend playback code seems to still stream files
if that value is set.   So if you had an older frontend that this was
set on the playback code will still use it in 0.24-fixes, but you
cannot change it anymore without directly touching the DB.

I did the following and it made the difficult frontend start to work:

update mythconverg.settings SET data=0 where value='AlwaysStreamFiles';

Previous to that using the build-in streaming resulting the the
backend sending out data across the network as fast as it could
(35-40MByte per second) and saturated the network and still was not
fast enough to keep the video/audio going...something in the streaming
code seems to act up and be either duplicating data or just sending
data wrong on the network, this resulted in choppy audio/video on one
of my 2 frontends (the other one did not have alwaysstreamfiles set).

Suggestion: someone should change the playback code to ignore this
setting if this setting is no longer changeable in the menu and is
broken, which it appears to be in at least my case.