I have been using the DVR functionality for about a year now with mostly good results. I have noticed a couple of issues that seem to have cropped up sometime during the last year (I couldn’t pinpoint exactly when). There are two separate issues:
- Issues with pixelation and playback stopping for a second or two - it picks back up after the short delay with no issues
- This appears to be related to recording on certain channels - There are times when the audio “skips” - it is kind of hard to describe, but an example would be that someone is talking and then there is kind of “burp” at the end - you can hear everything they say, but it has some kind of odd skip that is noticeable. It seems to get worse the longer the recording goes.
I’ve some some searching, and tried a few things, but nothing has changed either of these behaviors. I’ve tried playing back the raw .ts file using VLC and it seems to have the same issue, so it doesn’t appear to be an issue with the transcoding during playback. It seems to be something happening during the recording process. My Plex server is on a reasonably well powered desktop - an Intel i5-7600 with 16 GB of RAM. The machine does not appear to be taxed, so CPU horsepower does not seem to be an issue. The disk storage is local to the machine (not NAS), and all connections are hard wired (not wifi).
Has anyone else experienced these kinds of issues? Are there suggestions on what to try? I have current HDHomeRun firmware and am up to date on the Plex server software.
Thanks in advance for any help or guidance you can provide.
Nobody has seen any issues like this? Or have any ideas on what I might look at to address? It is still occurring, but I’m stumped as to how to proceed.
I think I have seen the same thing as you - I get this “burping” frequently on certain channels (MTV, Animal Planet - for examples). I found that if I change the playback to transcode (by switching the bit rate to a lower bit rate than is playing) the issue gets “fixed”. Fixed is the wrong word, but if I transcode it stops the show from skipping around, instead it just “burps” and continues to play. While annoying, it’s mostly limited to a few recording here and there.
I did some quick debugging and found this to be more likely an issue with either HDHomeRun Prime box or the feed from cable company. Plex doesn’t seem to be the issue - I am confident in that because I tuned directly to the tuner via my TV DLNA player and found the feed coming in to be jittery and pixelated. I would stop the feed, reload the feed from same channel and the issue would go away. Maybe something Plex could add is the ability to detect a bad stream from the box and attempt to mitigate it (spin up another tuner to same channel, if no issue, then stitch the recording from tuner 1 to tuner 2 into same file without issue, however this seems like more work than is likely worth from their perspective).
I have seen the “skip” issue when watching regular TV, so I think that may well be related to the cable feed. Even though it can be annoying, I can live with that. The audio issue is the more problematic one. As it gets worse, it makes it harder and harder to focus on the show - you keep hearing the audio “burp” at the end of a sentence. It is very distracting. It is odd that it only seems to occur on some channels though.
My HDHomeRun shows the signal strength to be 100% though - still not sure what to look at…
Thanks for the response.
