Playback in Plex was… not great. At best it would stutter really, really bad (ie play for ~0.5s, pause for 2s, then repeat). Oddly enough playback on my iPhone worked fine… but that could be something client-specific that it’s doing because Apple. I verified playback is fine on the HTPC it was recorded on, so that’s a plus.
I don’t think signal is an issue, I’ve got no errors on the tuner or other stations (HDHR Prime), but it wouldn’t be the first time that my cableco has had a goofed up HBO stream… I don’t remember what it was, but years ago when playing back on a Media Center Extender it would flip out because of a framerate issue. I suspect it was less a matter of maleficence, and more a matter of them just being bad at what they do. It’s also not likely to be anything else on my end… the everything is being recorded on a Win8.1 HTPC which obviously isn’t getting updates.
At any rate, I added the ForceWTVStreamsRemuxing=true option on the no-convert profile, and while it seemed to play back without issue at first, it fell to pieces pretty fast. Same goes with UseWTVRemuxsupp=true.
I tried ForceWTVStreamsRemuxing=true on the MP4 High and it seems like it’s alright! I’ll need to check my Smart-TV to see what it’s doing, but that seemed to have squared it away.
While waiting for the encodes to finish, I did some Googling around, and remembered this blast from the past:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-pictures/extreme-stutter-and-sometimes-flicker-with-hbomax/652f8120-f8bb-474b-ad77-ab81535233fb?msgId=c37ec098-ad01-464b-879f-98f16b033db9&page=1
Since I had the HTPC fired up already (confirming the original video works) I fired up the debug and sure enough the framerate is spazzing out between the two framerates (it’s too fast for me to read). So it’s definitely a funky signal from the mothership. Watching things directly on the HTPC is fine (though it’s obviously not preferred) or streaming is also good… I’m curious what made this pop up all of a sudden after years of working fine.
Attached are logs, if they’re of any interest… definitely seems like a garbage-in/garbage-out sort of thing. I suspect I’m in the minority of users who might be affected by this nonsense, but who knows.
Force-Passthrough_Last Week Tonight With John Oliver_HBOHD_2024_05_12_22_55_00.wtv-HBO-No Convert-2024-05-14T23-05-58.zip (46.9 KB)
Force-MP4-High_Last Week Tonight With John Oliver_HBOHD_2024_05_12_22_55_00.wtv-HBO-No Convert-2024-05-14T23-28-15.zip (439.7 KB)
Use-Passthrough_Last Week Tonight With John Oliver_HBOHD_2024_05_12_22_55_00.wtv-HBO-No Convert-2024-05-14T23-20-47.zip (45.4 KB)