[Zgemma H7] [ZGemma H7S] Play a paused timeshift not working most of the time

[Mick Seymour]

Recently, when I pause a live sat broadcast, pressing Play/Pause again to play it does nothing; the broadcast stays paused. The only way to get the broadcast back is to press Stop and choose to leave timeshift . It works once or twice after a reboot but then fails again. Pause/Play works perfectly on stored timer recordings.

I upgraded from OpenVIX 5.3.022 to 5.4.009 recently and I think that is when the problem started. I've since upgraded to 5.4.012.

I have attached two logs with debug turned on. PlayPauseWorkingEnigma2_debug_2021-05-22_14-30-37.log is it working correctly after a reboot. Play/Pause starts at line 789. PlayPauseNotWorkingEnigma2_debug_2021-05-23_11-02-58.log is it not working correctly. Play/Pause in this instance starts at line 5791.

Any advise would be appreciated.

 

[Mick Seymour]

I spent the day testing various scenarios around the disk not spinning up fast enough and play/pause worked every time. At one point after playing a live stream timeshift I stopped the stream and answered yes to leaving timeshift and not to save as a movie, then pressed stop again and was asked the same question. I'm thinking maybe the box thought it was in timeshift already, causing play/pause to not work reliably.

All seems to be fine again.

 

[ronand]

I rarely have a problem with timeshift on my H7S. About 1% of the time (ie once every few weeks) it wont resume but I can live with that as thats actually good compared to any other receiver I had used in the past. Pressing stop gets me back to live tv.
Timeshift is heavily dependent on drivers provided by the manufacturer and cant be changed by image developers. However the same drivers are in use in both the 5.3 and 5.4 images (the last update was in 2019) so that would rule that one out. If this is happening a lot then I would suspect it may be related to your hard drive rather than the image.

 

[Mick Seymour]

Thanks.

The drive is new, which could be a good or bad thing. It was fitted about a week before the problem started. I've had two other drives fail (corrupted recordings or not coming on line) since the box was new 16 months ago. If the problem returns, I'll swap out the SATA cable and see what that does.

 

[djbobw]

Not sure if anyone worked out what was causing this, but I have the same problem on a Zgemma H9 Twin. The drive worked fine for Timeshift in my Vu+ Solo2. Everything else works fine, just Timeshift. As you had, it stops when I press Play/Pause, but then won't start again. I don't use the feature very often, but I do use it for Formula 1 to sync up with the radio commentary.

 

[Mick Seymour]

I use this feature just about every day.

I swapped the drive back to the previous one and replaced the SATA cable. Pause/play worked for a couple of days, as it always does after a reboot, but then would not resume again. I figure it can't be the drive or cable as the drive checks out fine.

What I did the last time it happened was reboot the gui rather than the whole box and resume worked again. It's been ok for 5 days now.

I don't really know what a gui reboot does but I wonder if the gui gets tired or has a memory leak of some kind.

 

[Mick Seymour]

I'm resurrecting this as I have a set of steps that reproduce the problem every time.

We watch a game show every weekday evening where we pause live TV on each round to give our ageing brains time to take in the questions. At the moment we are also watching a lot of pre-recorded TV so are hit with the problem every day.

1. Reboot the GUI from the menu. This clears the problem.

2. Press Play/Pause whilst watching live TV.

3. Press Exit to clear the GUI overlay.

4. Watch the paused screen for (say) 5 seconds. I don't think the timing is relevant.

5. Press Play/Pause. The video restarts OK.

6. Press Stop and select "Yes but don't save timeshift as a movie".

Steps 2 to 6 can be repeated as many times as you like and everything works.

7. Press File to view the pre-recorded TV list.

8. Press Play/Pause on a pre-recorded video. The video starts.

9. Watch the playing video for, say, 5 seconds. Again, I don't think the timing is relevant.

10. Press Stop to stop the playing video.

11. Press Exit to return to live TV.

12. Press Play/Pause whilst watching live TV.

13. Press Exit to clear the GUI overlay.

14. Watch the paused screen for (say) 5 seconds. I don't think the timing is relevant.

15. Press Play/Pause. The video does not restart.

16. Press Stop and select "Yes but don't save timeshift as a movie".

The only way to get the live TV Play/Pause feature working again is to reboot the GUI, or the whole box.

I'm running the latest firmware, 5.4.014. I was going to go back to 5.3.022 which I had no problems with when I hit on this sequence.

How do I get this looked at by the devs?

 

[Trial]

Hi,
did you try to press OK instead of play/pause when you paused something?

Ralf

 

[ccs]

I'd record the programme rather than use timeshift, works fine for me.

 

[adm]

Hi,
did you try to press OK instead of play/pause when you paused something?

Ralf

The problem (or similar) has been reported at least twice before (V5.4.004 onwards) where after watching something recorded and then returning to the previous live TV channel being watched prior to watching the recording pausing will lock up the box, with regards getting a moving picture back.. The dirty solution is after returning to live TV change channels at least once before activating timeshift.

Currently (V5.4..014)there may be another problem with timeshift but I've only experienced the problem twice and not done any systematic testing or observations. When timeshift spans a program boundary the > key (the one below the 9 key on my remote) is not skipping to the start of program marker but returning to live TV. The timeshift buffer isn’t lost and I can return to it by pausing and then jumping back to the start of program marker. I have configured my disk to be always spinning and timeshift to start 10 seconds after changing channels.

 

[BrokenUnusableAccount]

The problem (or similar) has been reported at least twice before (V5.4.004 onwards) where after watching something recorded and then returning to the previous live TV channel being watched prior to watching the recording pausing will lock up the box, with regards getting a moving picture back.. The dirty solution is after returning to live TV change channels at least once before activating timeshift.

Currently (V5.4..014)there may be another problem with timeshift but I've only experienced the problem twice and not done any systematic testing or observations. When timeshift spans a program boundary the > key (the one below the 9 key on my remote) is not skipping to the start of program marker but returning to live TV. The timeshift buffer isn’t lost and I can return to it by pausing and then jumping back to the start of program marker. I have configured my disk to be always spinning and timeshift to start 10 seconds after changing channels.

Timeshift's awareness of program boundrys seems worse than useless to me since the boundries are taken from the EPG times and they often occur before a program actually ends or after a program actually begins.
It's also as good as impossible to learn to use it since it's only possible to practise using it once for each program boundry that occurs.
You can't just call up a few program boundries out of thin air to practise on after finding you don't seem to understand how it works.
I often find absolutely bizarre inexplicable things happening when stepping back and forth through programs I have had to pause to answer the phone.

 

[adm]

Timeshift's awareness of program boundrys seems worse than useless to me since the boundries are taken from the EPG times and they often occur before a program actually ends or after a program actually begins.

Until recently I've found them to be useful and are not just the EPG times. The start and end boundaries do not include any adverts, apart for the 10 second "this program is sponsored by" adverts.

 

[Mick Seymour]

Hi,
did you try to press OK instead of play/pause when you paused something?
Ralf

Yes, I tried that. All is does is bring up the GUI overlay, not restart the timeshift.

 

[Mick Seymour]

The problem (or similar) has been reported at least twice before (V5.4.004 onwards) where after watching something recorded and then returning to the previous live TV channel being watched prior to watching the recording pausing will lock up the box, with regards getting a moving picture back.. The dirty solution is after returning to live TV change channels at least once before activating timeshift.

Currently (V5.4..014)there may be another problem with timeshift but I've only experienced the problem twice and not done any systematic testing or observations. When timeshift spans a program boundary the > key (the one below the 9 key on my remote) is not skipping to the start of program marker but returning to live TV. The timeshift buffer isn’t lost and I can return to it by pausing and then jumping back to the start of program marker. I have configured my disk to be always spinning and timeshift to start 10 seconds after changing channels.

Interesting.

Are these and the Play/Pause problem on a buglist to be looked at?

 

[BrokenUnusableAccount]

The problem (or similar) has been reported at least twice before (V5.4.004 onwards) where after watching something recorded and then returning to the previous live TV channel being watched prior to watching the recording pausing will lock up the box, with regards getting a moving picture back.. The dirty solution is after returning to live TV change channels at least once before activating timeshift.

Some information about the currently viewed channel appears to get lost, or partially lost, after playing a recording.
If you have your infobar set to show, among other things, the channel number it no longer has access to it after playing a recording and dashes are shown instead.
(You can stil use CH+ and CH- and either will return things to normal with the channel number showing)

 

[ccs]

Some information about the currently viewed channel appears to get lost, or partially lost, after playing a recording.
If you have your infobar set to show, among other things, the channel number it no longer has access to it after playing a recording and dashes are shown instead.
(You can stil use CH+ and CH- and either will return things to normal with the channel number showing)

I noticed that for the first time a few days ago, but never got round to reporting it, I guess it could well be significant when using timeshift.

 

[smipx]

Same thing happening here for me. I just decided to give 5.4.014 a whirl (was on 5.3.039). Flashed it to slot 2 and setup my preferred skin. Did a pause on live TV and it paused just fine but the play button does not work to play the paused program :-(

 

[Mick Seymour]

Can someone point me in the right direction on how to find out whether there is a bug report for this please.

 

[smipx]

Not sure if this will help anyone looking into this but I tried to put my H7 to "Deep Sleep" some time after I had been trying to pause then play a timeshift (and after cancelling it and saying "Don't save/Don't record"). I was hit with an error saying "thre are recordings currently running or about to start. I checked my Autotimers and also my Timers and my File List and there were no timers due until 4 hours later and no recordings currently in progress that I could see. I have a suspicion that the ending of the timeshift does not end properly and the system thinks it is still running on those occasions when it is going to refuse to play a timeshift in pause mode. For me, it is not every time but only "sometimes" and I can't pin down on what occasions it will behave and on what occasions it will refuse to start to play again when paused. Other times I can pause/play a timeshift; end the Timeshift and then 10 seconds later I can press pause again and the timeshift kicks back in and plays just fine. Other (seeming random) times it will just pause and not play until I change channels and then it kisks back to life.

 

[Joe_90]

@smipx - I have noticed this issue on occasion. I shut my GB Quad+ into deep standby each night before going to bed. If I have been using timeshift beforehand and saving (or not saving) recordings, then sometimes I will get a message saying that recording are running or about to start. When I check recording schedule there are none due. If I acknowledge the message and shut down, the box will reboot shortly after. A second shut down is successful. I haven't reported it as a bug as I can't replicate it consistently.