[mythtv] firestick 4k lock up with interlaced playback

[John Pilkington]

On 18/12/2018 15:29, David Engel wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 18, 2018 at 09:56:40AM -0500, Peter Bennett wrote:
>> I have had a report of mediacodec playback locking up with interlaced h264
>> on a firestick 4k. I have been using the fire stick for a lot of playback of
>> progressive h264 without problems. It seems that interlaced content may be
>> what is causing the issue.
> 
> FWIW, I let mine run for ~35 minutes on h.264/1080i this weekend as a
> test.  No issues found.  I can try to let it run longer this evening
> if it would help.
> 
> David

Mine had an update on Friday, too.  With MediaCodec decoding it still 
reliably locks up at the end of the station ident on the recording (BBC 
FOUR HD, DVB-T2, Feb 2016) from which I took the clip posted earlier. 
After what seems a long time it quits  with 'Video frame buffering 
failed too many times.'

With standard decoding nothing seems wrong and the playback quality is 
excellent.  I have looked at adb log output in both cases but see 
nothing that seems unusual at the position where things lock up.

--------------

ISTR that mythtranscode used to have problems when subsidiary streams 
would suddenly start up or close.  That could perhaps be what is 
happening here.  In the sample I posted there was no obvious event in 
the main streams that coincided with the failure, but it was close to 
the end of the programme. The one I mentioned above was at the start of 
the content.  Stream analyses around the fail points might be useful; at 
present I don't know the easiest way to do that and I can't record from 
the HD channels.

----------------------

https://www.mediafire.com/file/ah09b5pzh1o5ggy/firestick_itvHD.ts/file

is a longer file cut from a recording made this year.  It plays in 
mythfrontend on the firestick with the Standard decoder but sticks at 
'Please wait' with MediaCodec.  It plays with my nVidia card too.

John P