MP2 audio hickups

[Yoshi]

First of all, thanks for your great product!

I don't know if I'm in the right place, but I have no clue if it's Sundtek or TVHeadend to blame  

I'm using your MediaTV Home and MediaTV Pro tuners with TVheadend on an ubuntu 14.04 LTS VM. The latest drivers are installed for the tuners and TVHeadend is 3.9.699~gfbe885b. My provider is Ziggo in The Netherlands.

As clients I'm using MacOS (VLC and XBMC 13.0), Windows 8 (XBMC 13.0) and XBMCBUNTU (13.0) and they're all affected.

Now the problem; The Music Choice non-stop radio channels get a few times per minute a hickup in sound. It's a stream of MP2 audio @ VBR. The weird thing is that the XLNT non-stop radio channels -also mp2 audio @ 192kbps- don't suffer the same behavior.

In TVHeadend BER stays at 0, transport- and continuity errors also at 0. Debug logging in TVHeadend shows nothing when the hickup occurs. Same for XBMC logging, no error in the xbmc.log when it occurs.

Is this a known problem? To be sure I offcourse tested the Music Choice radio channels on an official Ziggo tuner and there they're playing just fine.

Any idea?

[Sundtek]

Did you try to record that stream and play it back afterwards?

[Yoshi]

I just recorded a channel with VLC 2.1.4 (Mac OS 10.9) with a .ts file as output. Also hickups in the audio.

[Sundtek]

Did you check other channels on the same transponder (frequency)?

[Yoshi]

I just tried a radio channel in the same transponder as one of the Music Choice channels, RNE radio -MP2 @ VBR and it's also affected. Now I've also tried a TV channel in this transponder and it plays fine. No errors.

Maybe it's just the radio channels with VBR? The channels with fixed bit rate seem to play fine...

[Sundtek]

Are you using VLC to play back the files?

Whatever is carried over the DVB-C network MP2 or VBR MP2 the device doesn't care about that - the endapplication has to support the VBR file actually.
But it might also be that your signal is not properly, you might try to attach the device closer to your cable TV box (just to be sure that your TV cable is not the reason for the hickups).

[Yoshi]

I have to correct myself on the VBR part. What I see is in a sudden drop in bitrate, which I have mistaken for being a VBR stream, and then the hickup occurs.

I just tested with XBMC but it's the same issue with VLC. I can try tomorrow maybe with one of the tuners closer to the cable box, but I'm pretty sure the signal is fine.

I updated the Sundtek driver yesterday and I noticed this: http://support.sundtek.com/index.php/topic,1606.0.html I also have 6875 symbol rate. Should I scan for channels again maybe?

[Sundtek]

There was a change with Symbolrate 6875 indeed, maybe you can contact us via Skype-Chat (sundtek)?
I think it should just work as it, re-scanning possibly might give you some different result.

[Yoshi]

Ok, tomorrow I'll try rescanning. If that has no effect I'll move closer to the cable box.

I'll post the results here. Thanks for the help so far, much appreciated!

[Yoshi]

Already did some testing; rescanning didn't solve the issue. I moved an official Humax Ziggo tuner to the place where my sundtek tuners are. Playback is fine of the mentioned channels. Did a quick signal check in the Humax diagnostics menu and the signal quality is at 100%.

Will try to move the sundtek closer to the cable box later today.

[Yoshi]

I'm very very sorry it took me so long to respond to this topic.

I've tried moving the setup to connect the Sundtek tuner directly to the cable box. The problem persists. Is there any way I can check if this is a bug in the TVHeadend software? The affected channels are all encrypted and I'm using your tuner with a smargo reader. I can't think of any software but TVHeadend to let me play the encrypted channels.

Could you still please be of any help?

Thanks very much 

[Sundtek]

The freetv ones are all okay?

Try to run /opt/bin/mediaclient --loglevel=max

and then tail -f /var/log/mediasrv.log

what's the output of the driver?

[Yoshi]

Log: http://pastebin.com/v5XyHZsC

I also tried a fresh installation of the Sundtek tuners and TVHeadend on a laptop for testing purposes. Same issue. I think I can rule out a hardware issue on my server?

I only have a few unencrypted radio channels, but those are playing fine.

[Sundtek]

What does /opt/bin/mediaclient --readsignal=20 -d /dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend0 show up (while listening to that channel)?

This is an old MediaTV Pro I or MediaTV Pro II I guess?

The logfile looks okay so far.

[Yoshi]

I have a MediaTV Pro order no. .... and a MediaTV Digital Home order no. .....

Code: [Auswählen]

== reading digital TV signal ==
SIGNAL: [.................................] (100%)  BER:      0 FREQ: 738000000  Hz LOCKED: YES MER: 356 SYM: 6875000 MOD: QAM256
SIGNAL: [.................................] (100%)  BER:      0 FREQ: 738000000  Hz LOCKED: YES MER: 357 SYM: 6875000 MOD: QAM256
SIGNAL: [.................................] (100%)  BER:      0 FREQ: 738000000  Hz LOCKED: YES MER: 358 SYM: 6875000 MOD: QAM256
SIGNAL: [.................................] (100%)  BER:      0 FREQ: 738000000  Hz LOCKED: YES MER: 356 SYM: 6875000 MOD: QAM256
SIGNAL: [.................................] (100%)  BER:      0 FREQ: 738000000  Hz LOCKED: YES MER: 358 SYM: 6875000 MOD: QAM256
SIGNAL: [.................................] (100%)  BER:      0 FREQ: 738000000  Hz LOCKED: YES MER: 357 SYM: 6875000 MOD: QAM256
SIGNAL: [.................................] (100%)  BER:      0 FREQ: 738000000  Hz LOCKED: YES MER: 358 SYM: 6875000 MOD: QAM256
SIGNAL: [.................................] (100%)  BER:      0 FREQ: 738000000  Hz LOCKED: YES MER: 356 SYM: 6875000 MOD: QAM256
SIGNAL: [.................................] (100%)  BER:      0 FREQ: 738000000  Hz LOCKED: YES MER: 358 SYM: 6875000 MOD: QAM256
SIGNAL: [.................................] (100%)  BER:      0 FREQ: 738000000  Hz LOCKED: YES MER: 356 SYM: 6875000 MOD: QAM256
SIGNAL: [.................................] (100%)  BER:      0 FREQ: 738000000  Hz LOCKED: YES MER: 358 SYM: 6875000 MOD: QAM256
SIGNAL: [.................................] (100%)  BER:      0 FREQ: 738000000  Hz LOCKED: YES MER: 355 SYM: 6875000 MOD: QAM256
SIGNAL: [.................................] (100%)  BER:      0 FREQ: 738000000  Hz LOCKED: YES MER: 357 SYM: 6875000 MOD: QAM256
SIGNAL: [.................................] (100%)  BER:      0 FREQ: 738000000  Hz LOCKED: YES MER: 358 SYM: 6875000 MOD: QAM256
SIGNAL: [.................................] (100%)  BER:      0 FREQ: 738000000  Hz LOCKED: YES MER: 359 SYM: 6875000 MOD: QAM256
SIGNAL: [.................................] (100%)  BER:      0 FREQ: 738000000  Hz LOCKED: YES MER: 360 SYM: 6875000 MOD: QAM256
SIGNAL: [.................................] (100%)  BER:      0 FREQ: 738000000  Hz LOCKED: YES MER: 358 SYM: 6875000 MOD: QAM256
SIGNAL: [.................................] (100%)  BER:      0 FREQ: 738000000  Hz LOCKED: YES MER: 358 SYM: 6875000 MOD: QAM256
SIGNAL: [.................................] (100%)  BER:      0 FREQ: 738000000  Hz LOCKED: YES MER: 354 SYM: 6875000 MOD: QAM256
SIGNAL: [.................................] (100%)  BER:      0 FREQ: 738000000  Hz LOCKED: YES MER: 357 SYM: 6875000 MOD: QAM256