Vu + DUO support

[unreal]

Thanks for your response.

Sometimes the audio is not there from the beginning and sometimes it disappears after few minutes and it can sometimes also come back after a while. Same goes for the recordings ending unexpectedly: sometimes they end immediately after starting and sometimes they go on for 5-10 minutes and then suddenly stop. However, if you go back and forth in a recorded file having audio issues, it always disappears and comes back at the exactly the same point, so it looks to me that it is in the recorded file and not in the playback. As I said, this might be related to other recordings starting and ending in the background while recording, but I'm not 100% sure.

As soon as I get another recording with problems (unfortunately the ones that had issues have already been deleted), I will run the mediaclient -lc and get back to you with more information.

[Sundtek]

hmm the problem is that command is only useful during a recording, but you can still crosscheck that way.

If you have such a file can you provide us a sample so we can check the videostream?

Additionally you can check the signal strength:

/opt/bin/mediaclient --readsignal=0 -d /dev/dvb/adapter1/frontend0
or
/opt/bin/mediaclient --readsignal=0 -d /dev/dvb/adapter2/frontend0

If Audio just disappears there are could be a few possibilities (also shows up who is responsible):
* Signal strength issues (Sundtek)
* USB Performance issues (VU+/Sundtek)
* Codec issues (VU+)

[unreal]

hmm the problem is that command is only useful during a recording, but you can still crosscheck that way.

If you have such a file can you provide us a sample so we can check the videostream?

Additionally you can check the signal strength:

/opt/bin/mediaclient --readsignal=0 -d /dev/dvb/adapter1/frontend0
or
/opt/bin/mediaclient --readsignal=0 -d /dev/dvb/adapter2/frontend0

If Audio just disappears there are could be a few possibilities (also shows up who is responsible):
* Signal strength issues (Sundtek)
* USB Performance issues (VU+/Sundtek)
* Codec issues (VU+)

Ok, good to know I'll try to find some time to do some testing today, hopefully I can reproduce the problem by just adding some random recordings, taking the pid information and then check if any of the recordings has problems.

Signal should be fine, at least every time I've checked the values, they have been near perfect. Also, I have seen no problems in live signal when I've had no recordings or in the recordings (or live) if I have only one recording at the time, which also I think makes the signal issue unlikely. However, it is not a big task to confirm that as well anyway while I'm on it.

As far as the codecs go, there seems to be another issue with Dolby Digital tracks in general, them not being played when I enter a service with DD sound track and I need to go and put the "downmix" setting on and off again to get the DD audio tracks played, but I do not think the recording audio issues are related to that. All the recordings with audio problems have been pretty basic MPEG2 SD video / one PCM stereo audio track stuff, so nothing special with the codecs at all.

Anyway, I'll get back to you this evening once I get some testing done.

[unreal]

Of course, the testing I had time to do today did not reproduce the problem, at least not in a way I described it. I was able to complete 4 recordings at the same time, three from a same multiplex and every recording had the sound in place.

However, I did notice that during the test recordings, there was once a "timeout reading PAT" after changing a channel and during the playback of one of the recording I saw a PMT timeout dialog, otherwise they were now working fine. Also, all of the "real" recordings from tonight seem to be ok and there was at least one 10-minute period where four recordings were on at the same time, all from the same multiplex. So, after a very short testing period it seems that updating vuplus drivers at least made this better, even if it is not perfect yet. In the release notes of the latest drivers it says "Increase the number of demux device", so maybe it is some kind of demux resource problem and hopefully they will make it even better in the future...

In case you want to take a look, I do have the recording file that has the "PMT timeout"-problem when you play it back and also some mediaclient --lc output from the time of the recording, but at least for now it seems it might be a problem in the DVB drivers rather than Sundtek drivers.

[Sundtek]

If PMT Timeouts occur please check the signal strength.

/opt/bin/mediaclient --readsignal=0 -d /dev/dvb/adapter1/frontend0
and/or
/opt/bin/mediaclient --readsignal=0 -d /dev/dvb/adapter2/frontend0

Also you can enable the logfile to see if there are any Transport Stream errors

/opt/bin/mediaclient --loglevel=max
tail -f /var/log/mediasrv.log

[unreal]

If PMT Timeouts occur please check the signal strength.

/opt/bin/mediaclient --readsignal=0 -d /dev/dvb/adapter1/frontend0
and/or
/opt/bin/mediaclient --readsignal=0 -d /dev/dvb/adapter2/frontend0

Also you can enable the logfile to see if there are any Transport Stream errors

/opt/bin/mediaclient --loglevel=max
tail -f /var/log/mediasrv.log

Signal strength was 99%, BER 0 all the time when I monitored it yesterday. Also, PAT / PMT errors, like all the other problems (audio disappearing and recordings ending unexpectedly) only appear if there are some recordings at the same time, I've never seen those if there are no recordings in the background at the same time.

A little correction to my report from yesterday, it seems that all the recordings from the evening were NOT ok. One of the recordings had ended after 40 minutes when it was scheduled to end at 1 hour and 10 minutes. The recording may have ended at the same time when either a live channel was changed in the box or, more likely, when my wife started to watch a previous recording from the hard disk.

I will take a look at the recording file a little later with a TS analyzer to see if it gives me any clues what went wrong before the recording unexpectedly ended. I will also take a look at the other recording (the one that had PMT errors) on PID level and see if there are any clues.

[Sundtek]

What does your setup look like?

1x watching DVB-S?
1x recording DVB-S?
2x recording DVD-T?

[unreal]

What does your setup look like?

1x watching DVB-S?
1x recording DVB-S?
2x recording DVD-T?

The setup is 2xDVB-C, used for both recording and watching. Sat tuners are of course there, but they are not connected / used, I don't even own a dish So, everything comes to the box through the two Sundtek tuners that are in the DVB-C mode.

I now looked at the problematic recordings with a stream analyzer and noticed a couple of things:

 - The recording causing the "PMT timeout" error actually has no PMT at all. How that is even played back is a bit of a mystery to me (maybe the box looks at the content of the PIDs and decides what is video and what is audio?), but all it has is the PAT and the audio, video and teletext PIDs of the recorded service.

 - The recording that ended unexpectedly 30 minutes before it should have been seems ok otherwise, but maybe ten-fifteen seconds before the end of the stream, the bitrate of the PAT seems to go crazy, jumping from (normal) 6-7 kbps to several hundred kbps and back and finally a second before the end of the stream it goes to 1,5 Mbps... not sure if these values can actually be true (I'm using Dektec StreamExpert for analyzing that I have at least previously found relatively reliable), but something strange definitely happens with it since that kind of behavior does not happen with the recordings that have ended normally.

 - In the recording where the audio disappears after around 1,5 half minutes, the pid is there first, with normal bitrate and then suddenly the bitrate drops to zero and the sound of course disappears at that moment. After that, the analyzer shows the PID as "ghost pid" because it is still in the PMT, but there is no data in that pid anymore.


I would think these problems are all somehow related, but without knowing the details of the drivers etc. it is of course impossible to say much more about the potential reason. Overall, it seems that once more recordings / playback is going on at the same time, the PIDs start to drop off from the recordings / live playback.

[Sundtek]

VU+ is also following this discussion now.

[unreal]

VU+ is also following this discussion now.

Ok, good to know.

I have basically now written everything I know about the problem here, but I can still report if something new comes up. I still have the recording files for each individual problem (PMT missing, sound disappearing, recording ending unexpectedly) if you or VU+ want to investigate them, but since they are relatively large files, I would prefer an external location to upload them to.

Basically what I would like to find out (I'm sure you and VU+ would, too ) where exactly the problem is and if I could avoid it somehow, by changing software image, updating / downgrading drivers or something like that. Of course I know I could probably avoid it by recording only one program at a time, but that just does not seem reasonable given that I only upgraded from my old Dreambox (that could easily do 4 recordings at a time) to get a box with a better hardware in terms of processor, memory, flash etc. resources. The biggest issue I think is the unpredictability, sometimes the recordings seem to be error-free even if there are 4 recordings at the time and sometimes issues occur with only two simultaneous recordings, maybe due to difference in what has been done at the same time (changed channels, watched previous recordings etc.)

[unreal]

Any news on this? It's still happening every now and then and it is really annoying not being able to trust that recordings are correctly recorded. Is there something I could try to do, update / downgrade etc?

[Sundtek]

We're just waiting for VU+ there's not much we can do so far we couldn't even reproduce this yet..

[mbo]

Hi,
I run ViX 2.1.4 and the Sundtek runs very well

I've the problem with the DD audio thou. All mpg audio works ok. Now if I change to channel with DD audio, there is no sound. I have DD downmix set to NO as default. If I turn the DD downmix to ON the audio appears as expected. If I turn it back to NO, the sound disapears but after appr. 5 sec the DD start to work as it should. If I change the channel again I have to do the downmix trick again for any DD audio to be sent to my receiver.

If I record the show with DD and no downmix turned ON, it plays back with DD audio working perfectly (no trick required).

Thanks

[mbo]

Hi,
I did get second Suntek (same home edition) which still has the same DD audio problem. But on top of this the "fail tune" message pops out every few days and only the box restart will fix it. Is there any firmware versions availible for those sticks?

Thanks

EDIT: according to DD audio issue I do use HDMI output and maybe this is the problem?

[Sundtek]

We reported this again to VU+

Unfortunately from our side there's nothing we can do here, we can just pass the audio data to the VU+ system and rely on the decoding of their interface.
What we can imagine is that the interface is hardcoded to mp2/3 on their side, let's see what they will reply to our last emails...