Tvheadend

Hi.

I have a poor midband connection at home so I decided to setup Tvheadend on my dedicated server to transcode h264 IPTV streams to a lower resolution & bitrate. I'm trading quality for reliability. The server has an Atom C2750 processor and anywhere between 400mbps and 800mbps bandwidth. Transcoding SD (720x576) streams works perfectly however transcoding 1280x720 and 1920x1080 streams results in a lot of stuttering on video (there are only very rarely interruptions to audio). It's unwatchable. I'm using the Kodi frontend from the offical repo.

Before I get to the obvious: I've gone through streaming profile configurations exhaustively and I know from monitoring throughput bandwidth is not the issue.

As for the CPU issue, htop doesn't seem to show a system running out of juice. Checking individual CPUS no 1 core is topping out at 100% or anything close to it (though the running thread says 90% overall CPU usage) when trying to transcode the higher res/bitrate streams. There are a couple errors/warnings in the log when running the faulty HD streams but after searching I'm not sure what the issue is or what the fix is, other than it is ffmpeg not tvheadend as such. Assume the decoder havs a problem with the incoming stream which results in the faulty encode.

Just a general query before delving more deeply into this with logs (I have attached a log covering a faulty stream) though I'm not sure what I should be looking at beyond what I've tried): should the above system be able to transcode at least 1 stream 720/1080 to lower? Afaik there is no doubt it should. If anyone could point me to something that would shed more light on this I'd really appreciate it.

I'm using HTS Tvheadend 4.2.8-17~gd64d8c8 from the repo. Linux is Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS, kernel 4.4.0-142-generic #168. 16GB RAM.