Last week i received a dual OTA tuner from silicondust… figuring I’d get the latest and greatest after i first see how feasible this is for my family…
Anywho, my pms (latest stable) is based upon a win10 IoT enterprise os installed on a ryzen 5 7600 with 192gigs of ram, and just to save time, it’s very well set up and works perfectly… however the OTA streaming experiences buffering/garbling.
I have a theory, because apparently this doesn’t happen if i were to install the SiliconDust HDHomeRun app on my roku (haven’t done it, no interest in doing it, but i’ve read what others have experienced)…
here goes the theory: I was watching tv and all the OTA channels are coming in with an ‘i’ format (1080i, 720i, 480i, etc) but the pms server is then up-converting the stream to a ‘P’ format (so it’s converting 1080i to 1080P, etc…)… well, wouldn’t that cause a problem?
the incoming 1080i stream can’t keep up with the post-converted, outgoing 1080p stream.
Put another way, the 1080i buffer is unable to replenish the 1080p buffer quick enough, so it gets hung-up…
is there a setting that would stop the upconverting? so, an incoming 1080i mpeg stream stays at 1080i (just converts to h264)? I don’t bother with dvr so that’s not an issue.
and just so you’re aware, the antenna is a mohu curve and the signal integrity/quality/etc is 90-100% as per the SD homerun scan results.
thanks
Server Version#: latest
Player Version#: N/A
Tuner Make/Model: silicondust HDhomerun dual
Guide/Lineup name:
Using XMLTV?: unknown
Channel number/Name:
<If providing server logs please do NOT turn on verbose logging, only debug logging should be enabled>
So this will be a tough sell but the problem is somewhere in your environment. A Ryzen 5 7600 should have no problem with 1080i to p conversion.
Where the HDHomerun clients stream directly to the device, Plex has to make a trip through the server to enable it’s “DVR” functions, even if it is just to watch LiveTV.
Buffering and garbling are two very different things. OTA is digital so any degradation in picture is almost always signal.
4 things come to mind.
The HDHomerun devices only have a 100Mbit network port which can cause problems with some switches/hubs interoperating with 1Gb devices.
If you have Closed Captioning/Subtitles enabled along with Hardware transcoding. Disable one or the other.
If this is a virtualized Windows 10, many DVR functions only use the CPU.
The Dual is very old and relies on a helper program but that usually fails by not tuning. It also has a poor tuner that needs a stronger than normal signal.
Nope. A CPU of the caliber that you have in your server is twiddling its thumbs most of the time – even when there is no hardware transcoding support available for the task. Meaning, it has more than plenty of power at its disposal, to perform the task of transcoding MPEG2-1080i to AVC-1080p in real-time.
Not sure where you’re getting this idea from. You might have a major misconception about how video decoding/encoding/transcoding works.
ok, so maybe it is the age of it… the reason i bought this one was for experimental purposes; to see if it would serve my family’s needs so I could help my folks get rid of all the comcast cable boxes… i figured if this worked, i’d just buy the latest and greatest… incidentally there was a firmware upgrade that seems to have made a noticeable improvement. the coax run is pretty far as well (must be 25ft)…
anywho, gonna bug my family some more to make sure i can cancel that comcast bill… it’s ridiculous how much we pay to only watch a couple of stations that are ultimately available OTA…
you’ll have to excuse my misinterpretation of the issue; i’m now pretty sure (not certain, but pretty sure) it is NOT a buffering issue… like you suggested, it seems to be a signal issue, stemming from the antenna… i have a mohu curve and while that should be enough to reach the broadcast tower, there are a lot of cell towers in the vicinity (i live in boston, on the first floor, so not only am i somewhat low to the ground, i’m surrounded by other buildings). I read that a lot of people have problems with the 5G and LTE signals interfering with their OTA tv signal, so I ordered a filter that’s supposed to filter those frequencies out.
if that works, i’ll order a new hdhomerun, as i said this was a trial so i could get a feel for things and work out any bugs before i plunk down money for a device which otherwise wouldn’t have worked.
