Hi everyone, I have a question about timeshift. I personally rarely use it, but I got my folks set up with a Zgemma H2H running openATV and they can't do without this function, so they have "automatic timeshift" enabled. Anyway, I mounted a 128 GB 3.0 USB stick as HDD, and everything works quite well, recordings are always fine and even timeshift is okay for the most part, except for the fact that, from time to time, when in timeshift mode (or when watching a programme whilst it is still recording, for that matter), the playback either appears to freeze (hence, no audio either) for a few seconds before readjusting itself, or it just skips forward a couple of seconds.
The thing is that if I rewind when that happens, the playback at that exact same point is always smooth, which obviously means that the timeshift/recording is okay and no frames are actually dropped, but it's just the video playback that gets choppy for some reason. Don't get me wrong, that doesn't happen very often (I'd say once or twice in an hour), and I've noticed it only seems to affect HD channels that have a very high bit rate, and even those channels may be totally fine for several hours on end. Still, when it does happen, it is quite annoying.
Now, I'm no expert, but I can think of two logical reasons for this. Either the box gets overwhelmed at times when in timeshift mode (or, like I said, when watching an unfinished recording), therefore it's unable to properly handle simultaneous recording and playback, or the flash drive's speed is at fault here and, when faced with bitrate spikes while recording, it prevents the box from accessing the recorded file fast enough to have a smooth playback. What do you think, and is there anything I could try to fix this? I've already gone through a few things both in the timeshift and recordings menus, such as enabling a single or multiple buffer files, but I saw no improvements either way. I should also mention there is no swap file set up and have no idea if that would make a difference.
The thing is that if I rewind when that happens, the playback at that exact same point is always smooth, which obviously means that the timeshift/recording is okay and no frames are actually dropped, but it's just the video playback that gets choppy for some reason. Don't get me wrong, that doesn't happen very often (I'd say once or twice in an hour), and I've noticed it only seems to affect HD channels that have a very high bit rate, and even those channels may be totally fine for several hours on end. Still, when it does happen, it is quite annoying.
Now, I'm no expert, but I can think of two logical reasons for this. Either the box gets overwhelmed at times when in timeshift mode (or, like I said, when watching an unfinished recording), therefore it's unable to properly handle simultaneous recording and playback, or the flash drive's speed is at fault here and, when faced with bitrate spikes while recording, it prevents the box from accessing the recorded file fast enough to have a smooth playback. What do you think, and is there anything I could try to fix this? I've already gone through a few things both in the timeshift and recordings menus, such as enabling a single or multiple buffer files, but I saw no improvements either way. I should also mention there is no swap file set up and have no idea if that would make a difference.