jameshost

EyeTV 3 & HDHomeRun - Bad consistent stuttering/freezing

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Hello all!

I have been a long time user of EyeTV and HD Homerun for live OTA on my Mac. However at some point in time within the last few months the live video has become more and more choppy until it's become annoying enough to be not watchable. It will run steady for seconds at a time, maybe 20, 30 seconds at times, but then freeze video and often audio as well, up to multiple seconds with no A/V. I can't say for sure what's changed to precipitate the freezing, but I did try to upgrade the HD Homerun source as well as EyeTV to latest while trying to solve it..

Current setup:

macOS Sierra / iMac Retina 27" Late 2014

EyeTV 3.6.9 (7518)

HDHomeRun HDHR-US / Firmware 20161119

Anyone know where I should even start to look first? I'm connecting over WiFi, but this has perfect pings and throughput without any latency or jitter. The signal strength's are shown in the Devices panel as 100%, Signal Quality upper 80%s to 90%s.

I appreciate if anyone can point me in a direction to look because I can't find anything on the network side of things. Thanks!

 

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11 hours ago, jameshost said:

Hello all!

I have been a long time user of EyeTV and HD Homerun for live OTA on my Mac. However at some point in time within the last few months the live video has become more and more choppy until it's become annoying enough to be not watchable. It will run steady for seconds at a time, maybe 20, 30 seconds at times, but then freeze video and often audio as well, up to multiple seconds with no A/V. I can't say for sure what's changed to precipitate the freezing, but I did try to upgrade the HD Homerun source as well as EyeTV to latest while trying to solve it..

Current setup:

macOS Sierra / iMac Retina 27" Late 2014

EyeTV 3.6.9 (7518)

HDHomeRun HDHR-US / Firmware 20161119

Anyone know where I should even start to look first? I'm connecting over WiFi, but this has perfect pings and throughput without any latency or jitter. The signal strength's are shown in the Devices panel as 100%, Signal Quality upper 80%s to 90%s.

I appreciate if anyone can point me in a direction to look because I can't find anything on the network side of things. Thanks!

 

Check the cpu load of your mac while running EyeTV 3.

Probably, your hardware (HDHomeRun) is fauty...

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14 hours ago, thomaskud said:

Check the cpu load of your mac while running EyeTV 3.

Probably, your hardware (HDHomeRun) is fauty...

Not a CPU issue on my mac, at least, but that did lead me in an interesting direction.

So I was double checking and saw the usual EyeTV process at ~10 to 20% cpu back and forth, but also an EyeTV H264 Decoder process also with about the same.

Which is weird because this should be MPEG-2, not H264.. Upon loading the HDHomerun's web UI, it was offering transcoded streams which I absolutely don't need.

So needless to say, I disabled that and went back to just native MPEG2 and it's ..... better, but not fixed. Still stuttering. So I'll keep looking in the HDHomerun angle, not EyeTV, for now. Thanks!

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Do you have only 1 HDHomeRun? If not, does the other one work ok.

Is it just playback or is it the recording that is not good?

One thing I had an issue with was the Power Supplies for the HDHomeRuns. They get noisy and cause the recordings to be choppy.

What are you recording to?  I record to a NAS, UnRaid of up to 4 1080 streams at once and often play a 5th...

I started having playback issues, not sure if it was changing to a different file system on a new drive I installed but I then started recording to a Cache drive instead of Directly to the Array drives and the problem was solved. Seems that I was taxing the array drives, it would record and play fine with 2 streams but not 4. So by recording to the Cache I could play previous recordings off the array without issue.

I also found Mountain Lion plays better then El Capitain, so I'm sticking with ML as long as I can. I haven't tried El Capitain since I changed to recording to the Cache Drive.. No need to at the moment.

Maybe you'll find something useful in the above.

 

 

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Have you figured this out? I have the same(?) issue after updating to Mojave. The image and sound frequently freeze for brief periods of time (1-30 seconds) and the cursor becomes a beach ball. No other apps are misbehaving when this happens and my processor load is not at capacity.

late 2014 Mac mini, Mojave

eyetv3, 3.6.8

eyetv hybrid

The freezes are different from when there’s poor signal. I’m watching the strongest signal channel I have and I never experienced freezes like this. Both audio and video stop simultaneously and as I said, I get the beach all if I move the cursor. If I click on the desktop, I also get the cursor when I hover over the spotlight menu icon although I do have the recommended eyetv folder excluded from indexing.

Also, I had some difficulty running Eyetv after the update. It kept crashing and numerous times I had to disconnect and reconnect the Eyetv hybrid usb dongle.

Also possibly related, my *entire* system audio will stop occasionally and the only thing that restores it is unplugging and replugging the the mini headphone jack on the back of the computer.

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