Hi folks,
So I've installed newest release (R5 F1) and I'm playing around with MythStreamTV. If I go through and select a program then start streaming (I've tried all kinds of settings and even dropped everything down as low as it can go for the streaming properties) then I fire up the link Winblows Media Player comes up and starts buffering.. It's constantly buffering and I'll get a little snapshot of video then back to buffering. I've checked my CPU and disk and network usage in rrd and all are pretty low. Running this on a P4 2.4 ghz. with 512 meg ram. wired 100 meg lan. Is there a readme that shows tweaking on the streaming?? Or anything someone might have experienced like this and have some insight??


Thanx,
Aqua

Im getting recordings to stream, but they are TOO FAST....almost like the Chipmunks.

Havent had a chance to debug yet. Anyone else see this?

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R5F1 - Dell P4 2.4Ghz 500MB - PVR250 x 2 - GeForce FX 5200 - Onboard sound/NIC 80GB ATA/250GB ATA/400GB SATA

khrusher:

I'm having the same problem with the streaming. On all default install settings, all the streams tend to be slightly too fast.

It isn't to the point where they sound like chipmunks, but just basically a slight 'fast forward'. This occurs with any stream configuration I set up on MythWeb.

I saw from other threads that you've been working with mythstreamtv for a few months. Have you always had this issue, on other releases?

I'll post if I find the issue.

I just installed R5F1 and StreamTV has the same or similar problem as described above. For me it streams OK, but both on the LAN and across the internet it is skipping frames, it constantly play at a too-high rate of speed (pitches are noticeably high) and keeps dropping frames by advancing to the next one. The effect is that every 5th word of dialogue is sliced in two, making it unwatchable. I notice VLC 0.8.6a is being used; perhaps there is a way to revert it to 0.8.5? By the way I tried watching the streams with VLC player 0.8.6c and that didn't help either. This problems occurs with both WMV and DIV3 encoding.

I did some work wtih mythstreamtv on an older version of mythtv. When I was working on it, mythweb was still in the 'old' themed format.

I have recently upgraded to R5F1 and now hav issues.

My pre-updated system was working perfectly, streaming recordings, Live TV, using streaming setting save in the database. I would like to get bacl to that but the first step is getting the streaming to work for recordings.

I thinking about rebuilding ffmpeg and vlc. Maybe post-R5F1 builds will have this corrected.

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R5F1 - Dell P4 2.4Ghz 500MB - PVR250 x 2 - GeForce FX 5200 - Onboard sound/NIC 80GB ATA/250GB ATA/400GB SATA

I'm not having "too fast" problem on my home lan running R5F1 and VLC 0.8.6 (wxWidgets interface). In mythweb the only change I make from default is http protocol. However I do experience considerable pixelation and lineart deinterlacing seems to be somewhat helpful - viewing on an analog lcd.

hmm, all of my testing has been via Internet to work....but that worked before the upgrade.

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R5F1 - Dell P4 2.4Ghz 500MB - PVR250 x 2 - GeForce FX 5200 - Onboard sound/NIC 80GB ATA/250GB ATA/400GB SATA

I should have said that the files I record are 720x480 MPEG2 files. And this is a clean install from scratch of R5F1. My next test will be to watch a "live" recording just after it begins - since it is streaming out at a speed faster than real time, at some point the client will "catch up" to the current recording, then we'll see what happens....

Well a quick update from my end after some testing tonight.
I tried several media players. And results aren't consistent across them:
VLC - 'slightly fast forward' effect in playback with what seems to be a sporadic audio jitter
MPlayer - Audio / Video fine. However, out of sync even with autosync settings enabled
Windows Media Player - no sound (actually, i never got sound from WMP)
Media Player Classic - Doesn't load / render

These are all from manually opening with the Open URL options in each player (i.e. http://(ip address):8001 )

Also, these issues occur for all settings of audio and video encoding. However, the seemingly best results for testing were with: DIV3 video, MPGA audio, 128 kbps video, 65 kbps audio, 25% size, 5 fps, HTTP.

On top of this, the mythstream.sh dies after approximately 3 seconds after it is called.
Using the following call:


The results from the mythstreamtv log are:




After the 3 mins, the processes die as well.

So thats where I am at right now.. any good alternatives? (Tried MythTV Player for windows, but the audio was out of sync there and there is currently no support for syncing I believe)

tzoom84, your description of the playback problem that I'm seeing is perfect. Playback seems noticeably faster than real time, and there is a jitter in the audio that keeps leaping ahead, lopping off words in the dialogue. It's hard for me to tell if the video is "jumping" as well. I'm not having problems with the stream dying though, I can run it for a long time without it dropping. This is an installation (on Sunday) of R5F1 from scratch on a blank HD so I've made no modifications to mythweb or mythstream.

interesting comments on the various players. However, I see vlc errors in the server output even w/o starting a client.

I have tried streaming an old recording R4V? and had same results.

Also my results are consistent for all video and audio formats

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R5F1 - Dell P4 2.4Ghz 500MB - PVR250 x 2 - GeForce FX 5200 - Onboard sound/NIC 80GB ATA/250GB ATA/400GB SATA

khrusher, I'm curious where is the output of VLC, how would someone check it while running a stream? I'm curious to see if this "stock" installation would show errors.

in the directory that has mythstreamtv.sh, there is a log.txt file.

/myth/streamtv/log.txt on my R5F1 box.

you can increase the verbosity of the VLC output by adding 'v' to the command in mythstreamtv.sh in two places. change the -v wiht -vvv



for debugging, you can run the mythstreamtv.sh right form the command line, takes a bit to get the args correct, but does make it easirt (IMHO).

Here is an example:

this will pump the messages to the screen

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R5F1 - Dell P4 2.4Ghz 500MB - PVR250 x 2 - GeForce FX 5200 - Onboard sound/NIC 80GB ATA/250GB ATA/400GB SATA

Thanks khrusher, for the log info, now I'm going to read these logs. But I just had to quickly post that I discovered that switching the audio portion of the recording settings to 48kHz instead of the default 32kHz resolved the audio problem with streaming, for me. Now I'm going to check the logs and report what they say about the change.

Some updates on my end.
1. I noticed that the mythstreamtv.sh uses the VLC command without ever setting the audio codec selected in mythweb. If one wants to switch this, they can change mythstreamtv.sh to:

..note the change from 'mpga' to $ACODEC where acodec= is.

Although, the reason why it is probably mpga by default always, is because the other two don't seem to work...at least for me. So even though I changed it to allow that argument, I always keep it at mpga

2. It turns out that my streams DON'T die off after 3 minutes as long as I have mythweb open to the 'create stream' page, where the web controls lie. Kind of weird but I'll stick with that for now and just leave mythweb open. Perhaps it looks for a logged in user to stream?

3. I still can't seem to fix my audio jitter, despite whatever audio codec or speed I use. I did switch to basically every video and audio codec listed on the VLC site (using a manual command to start the stream from command-line each time). But no luck.

I do get a lot of warnings when I spit out the log. Here are some examples of warnings within the first 30 seconds - 1 minute:



These are in no particular order, because most of them tend to repeat throughout the streaming process. Additionally, the most POPULAR warining is the "drift is too high" warning which sort of overloads all the others over time.

Are these warnings normal? I don't know how to interpret them, as issues, or nothing special.