TVHeadend + raspberry pi and performance

Added by Magnus Ottosson almost 11 years ago

Hi,

I'm trying to run tvheadend from a raspberry pi. The raspberry pi runs raspbian from a usb stick ( i heard this gives better performance) and tvheadend from source. It works great for all channels except some HD channels. I see that when I tune in to some HD channels the cpu hits the roof. I have overclocked the raspberry pi to the medium setting (Medium 900MHz ARM, 250MHz core, 450MHz SDRAM, 2 overvolt) because this is the highest setting that still is stable.

Here are some specs of the stream:

Resolution 1280x720
Encoding H264 MPEG4 AVC
Bitrate ~10mb/s

The channel that gives me the most problem is SVT1HD (CanalDigital) on DVB-S2.

Is there anything that I could to to make this run of a raspberry pi?

Replies (4)

RE: TVHeadend + raspberry pi and performance - Added by moped moped almost 11 years ago

Hi,

i used also a Rapi for XBMC, i tried it from USB and also SD but neither of it woked realy good.

Yes it is working, but it is not as smooth as it could be and watching HD from TV or big files from the network is not working propper.

I also found no settings to do so.

For everything that is SD, the Rapi is perfect value for money.

RE: TVHeadend + raspberry pi and performance - Added by Zoltan Arvai almost 11 years ago

I just configured a raspi to handle 3 dvb-t stick (2x it9135, 1x rtl2832u-r820t):
- 2013-12-20-wheezy-raspbian, Linux raspberrypi 3.10.24+ #614 PREEMPT Thu Dec 19 20:38:42 GMT 2013 armv6l GNU/Linux
- Tvheadend 3.9.313~gf25d918

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aPF58ORb6U
http://prohardver.hu/dl/upc/2014-01/23987_box.jpg
Three device plays three different channel from three different mux. Two of them is SD (576i, ~2.5Mbps H264, conax) and one is HD (1080i, ~7Mbps H264, fta). Tuners set to full mux reception (no pid filter), the stream together uses around 10Mbps network bandwidth.

The old raspbian releases had more usb related bugs and many continuity error occured, expecially with hd. The current raspbmc with the new kernel performes much better. It works with 700MHz, but i overlocked it to 950MHz, to be sure.
Downside of the new raspbians: my smartcard reader causes to hang the usb subsystem in the last three raspbian release, previously it worked.

RE: TVHeadend + raspberry pi and performance - Added by Magnus Ottosson almost 11 years ago

I'm running the exact same build of raspbian. When I try to watch SVT1HD via DVB-S I get a stuttering image and this in the log of tvheadend:

2014-01-06 18:44:09.282 linuxdvb: /dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend0 - read() EOVERFLOW
2014-01-06 18:44:09.292 TS: 10903V/SVT1 HD: H264 #512: Continuity counter error, 22 duplicate log lines suppressed 2014-01-06 18:44:09.294 TS: 10903V/SVT1 HD: TELETEXT #577: Continuity counter error, 24 duplicate log lines suppressed
2014-01-06 18:44:09.297 TS: 10903V/SVT1 HD: AC3 #641: Continuity counter error, 24 duplicate log lines suppressed 2014-01-06 18:44:09.440 TS: 10903V/SVT1 HD: CA #100: Continuity counter error, 24 duplicate log lines suppressed
2014-01-06 18:44:10.188 linuxdvb: /dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend0 - read() EOVERFLOW
2014-01-06 18:44:10.193 TS: 10903V/SVT1 HD: H264 #512: Continuity counter error, 23 duplicate log lines suppressed 2014-01-06 18:44:10.199 TS: 10903V/SVT1 HD: AC3 #641: Continuity counter error, 25 duplicate log lines suppressed
2014-01-06 18:44:10.200 TS: 10903V/SVT1 HD: TELETEXT #577: Continuity counter error, 25 duplicate log lines suppressed 2014-01-06 18:44:10.316 TS: 10903V/SVT1 HD: CA #100: Continuity counter error, 25 duplicate log lines suppressed
2014-01-06 18:44:11.052 linuxdvb: /dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend0 - read() EOVERFLOW
2014-01-06 18:44:11.058 TS: 10903V/SVT1 HD: AC3 #641: Continuity counter error, 26 duplicate log lines suppressed 2014-01-06 18:44:11.059 TS: 10903V/SVT1 HD: H264 #512: Continuity counter error, 24 duplicate log lines suppressed
2014-01-06 18:44:11.059 TS: 10903V/SVT1 HD: MPEG2AUDIO #640: Continuity counter error, 9 duplicate log lines suppressed 2014-01-06 18:44:11.064 TS: 10903V/SVT1 HD: TELETEXT #577: Continuity counter error, 26 duplicate log lines suppressed
2014-01-06 18:44:11.135 TS: 10903V/SVT1 HD: CA @ #100: Continuity counter error, 26 duplicate log lines suppressed

I can see that the CPU usage is in the about 97-98% for the tvheadend process with top so I guess that it is the cpu that is the problem.I enabled "Full Mux RX mode" but it does not seem to affect this.

My current raspbian build: Linux raspberrypi 3.10.24+ #614 PREEMPT Thu Dec 19 20:38:42 GMT 2013 armv6l GNU/Linux
Tvheadend build: 3.9.313~gf25d918

It seems like I'm running the exact same setup except that I use a dvb-s card instead of dvb-t. Could it be that the drivers for my card are worse?

Are your channels decrypted? I let tvheadend decrypt the channels by connecting to a cardserver (currenlty running on a seperate box on the same network).

Any other reasons why the cpu load is so high for me or is it expected?

RE: TVHeadend + raspberry pi and performance - Added by Zoltan Arvai almost 11 years ago

It can be driver related. Few months ago we tried a dvb-c tuner (maybe a tbs) with raspbian and it had similar issues like your tuner. Different drivers may use different usb packet transmission type. Which dvb-s tuner do you use?

Here the SD dvb-t channels encripted with conax7, so tvheadend decrypts it connecting to a separate box. With current kernel version (3.6 and 3.10 too) the reader makes the integrated smsc hub to fail. It works only with dwc_otg.speed=1 added to cmdline.txt. This limits the usb to 1.1 (12Mbps). You can give it a try (with unchecked full mux rx), but probably this is not enought bandwidth for a HD channel.

Also you can try ./configure with --enable-dvbcsa, so it will use other decryption lib.

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