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Discussion topic: Lip sync issues, black screens, waiting for programme to load

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TeeLL
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This message was authored by TeeLL This message was authored by: TeeLL

Re: Lip sync issues, black screens, waiting for programme to load

As a bit of an update, the black screen and waiting for programme to load things seems to have gone away. 

 

The lip sync issues still regularly appear. The audio is ahead of the video.

 

Ignore the rest -  this is for the Sky people and nerds.

 

Regarding lip sync, I think I can guess what the technical issue is. I think it is a technical problem or a technical trade off that Sky have made in their firmware, or at worst a bug.

 

I assume they're using HLS for streaming (but there are alternatives) and audio and video packets are sent as discrete packets/payloads. However when you're streaming, the size of the stream the bandwidth is largely video.

 

On the device side (Glass) I think Sky have a problem with their firmware and maybe their hardware. Because the audio and video are encoded and decoded separately,  you can run into synchronisation issues if the timestamps for audio and video are not observed correctly.

 

If you care about lip sync issues, the job of the firmware should be to drop video when the audio and video get too far out of sync. You do. this because audio glitches are really annoying.  If you do not this, well this you end up with this horrible lip sync issue.

 

Why does this happen? Well, it's probably an issue because your video decoder (or a related software path) can't run fast enough, the video is relatively high bandwidth (large amount of processing) and I'd bet there some other application process/running which is taking up CPU / memory bandwidth. Of course this could be due to underspec'd hardware too.

 

If the Sky streaming app on Glass "never" drops video you'll see this manifest with lip sync issues.  Some people might argue that dropping video is worse than losing audio and video sync, they're wrong.

 

 

This message was authored by blackie1 This message was authored by: blackie1

Re: Lip sync issues, black screens, waiting for programme to load

I have updated the software as told by Sky but last night on TNT SPORTS HD it was still the same. As I said the lady from SKY said that they have a known problem and gave me a £15 Tesco voucher. Surely until they get it sorted they should give a monthly refund as I am not getting the service that I took out a contract for

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