Live TV plays fine, Recorded TV stutters

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docmattman

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Live TV plays fine, Recorded TV stutters

#1

Post by docmattman » Tue Oct 01, 2019 1:22 am

I'm using Linksys DMA2100 extenders to playback MC content. If I watch Live TV, it works fine. Nice and smooth. No stuttering, glitches, freezing at all. When I play Recorded TV it randomly glitches, pauses, stutters, etc. Quite often it will show the "Network Issue" notification at the top. If I briefly pause or rewind a few seconds, the playback goes smoothly for a minute or two, then the stuttering starts again. I can watch/record a live episode perfectly fine, then if I try to watch the same (or any other) episode from Recorded TV, it stutters and gives network issues.

This is INSANELY frustrating. I get a ton of flack from the wife about it too (which definitely makes things much worse). I'm working from a fresh install of Windows/Media Center. Everything is wired via Cat6 ethernet cable. I have an HDHomerun Prime 3 network CableCard tuner. At first I set recorded TV to store on a secondary drive. Then I assumed there was an issue with HD that it was playing back from that was causing the stuttering. So I changed the recorded TV to be stored on the same fast SSD drive the OS is running on. Same result, still get the annoying stuttering.

Does anyone have any advice on where to start with this issue?

Roginator

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#2

Post by Roginator » Tue Oct 01, 2019 2:58 am

Upgrade to a Google Mesh router or similar?

stuartm

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#3

Post by stuartm » Tue Oct 01, 2019 3:57 am

Not likely that a router would behave differently on a live stream vs a recorded stream of the same content. Especially given it's hardwired to the extenders. If you had said that the recorded stream glitches were in the same place even if rewinding and replaying than I would have suspected your tuners since live starts off using different tuners than recording uses. Also, usual wisdom was that it was best to use a HD to do recording/playback because win 7 could behave poorly using flash media as the recording drive. It still does sound like some kind of problem with the disk system though from your description. I would suggest trying a different HD for the storage drive, and best if it's not a USB drive as drives sold for use on USB often have aggressive spin down timeouts which might be causing such an issue.

docmattman

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#4

Post by docmattman » Tue Oct 01, 2019 10:55 am

Thanks for the reply. I have tried 3 different HDD for tv storage. They all behave the same way.

docmattman

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#5

Post by docmattman » Thu Oct 03, 2019 1:01 pm

Also, all the HDDs I've tried have been internal drives. I've tried 2 spinning disks and 1 ssd. The same issue persists with all of them.

mhfnet

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#6

Post by mhfnet » Sat Oct 19, 2019 4:19 am

This same issue is happening to me. It seems when a recording is started in the background without WMC open the recordings are getting corrupted. When I go into WMC and play a recording that was started in the background either while its still recording or has completed you can see the pixelation/studdering. If I stop the active recording that's studdering the channel goes back to looking fine and I can start recording again and it also looks fine. Also recordings that were started when WMC is open seem to be fine. I believe this started happening a few months ago and not sure if it was after a Windows Update? Question is does WMC ever receive updates as maybe that corrupted something? At this point I am thinking of re-installing WMC by turning the feature off then back on unless there is an easier way to reset WMC?

stuartm

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#7

Post by stuartm » Sat Oct 19, 2019 5:45 am

From your description I would suspect one of your tuners is possibly bad. When WMC starts a recording that is not of the channel currently being watched it uses the last tuner in the tuner list. When WMC plays a channel live it uses the first tuner in the tuner list. Your behavior description is consistent with the last tuner being problematic.

mhfnet

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#8

Post by mhfnet » Sat Oct 19, 2019 5:59 am

I started 2 recordings to see if one of them has the problem then reverse the order and see if it switches and saw it did! Like you said one of the tuners is bad.

Rainey

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#9

Post by Rainey » Wed Nov 06, 2019 9:51 am

What is the network setup? Are your PC TV and extender plugged into the router?

Some setting in the router can effect this, that is why it is recommended to Plug
both the WMC PC, TV and the Extender into a Ethernet switch that connects to the router.

If that is not the problem then it could be limited through put of the network or hard drive read or write speed.
I always record to a USB3 drive as i am using older win7 PC's and the internal drives write speeds are 25mbps where the USB3 is 100mbps.
You can browse to the HDHR ip address and see the TV tuners and it will show the bit rate of the channels you are watching, the Hard drive write speed must be faster than all channels add together plus if playing a recording you have to add the read speed of that stream also.

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