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RogersMoin
Hey @Vunanne!
That's certainly a unique issue. I can appreciate the concern as there's the potential to miss a portion of the recorded program. From my understanding of how the recording process works on Ignite TV this certainly should not be occurring. Have you perhaps had a technician out there yet to review this issue? It's possible there may be an issue with the STB itself. Are you experiencing this with all boxes, or just one? Does the time extension resolve the issue for you?
Thanks!
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RogersMoin
@RogersAndy After seeing @Vunanne 's post, I did some testing last night and can confirm that the clock on one of my set-top boxes was off as well. (I only looked at one.) I would have expected the time shown on the Guide to be either truly accurate or lagging (25 to 30 seconds slower than the "wall clock") but still in sync with a the clocks on channels such as CP24 and in sync with program start times. I found the clock on my STB to be almost 1 minute slow.
The time on the STB can be off for a variety of reasons: the clock source that they sync to could be off or there could be an issue with the set-top box's operating system sometimes taking too long to process interrupts. (Clock ticks get missed and the STB's system time slowly drifts slower and slower.) If the STB's clock is drifting, things should go back to normal (or at least get better) after the next time sync. However, it also doesn't really matter how accurate the STB's clock is; it's mainly used to display the correct Guide data, not to initiate recordings. (You don't want the STB's clock to be off by too much but it certainly does not have to be accurate to the millisecond.)
What really matters is that the clocks on the cloud PVR back-end systems are not only accurate but also aligned with program start times, which appears "slow" due to the encoding delay. As a test, I recorded a program on CP24 overnight and observed the program's clock when I played the recording. It started a few seconds before the scheduled time and ended a few seconds after. The recording was perfect and none of the program content got cut off.
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RogersCorey
@RogersCorey Something weird is definitely going on. This morning, I checked all three of my set-top boxes: the first was ~5 seconds behind real-time, the second was more than one minute behind and the third was ~45 seconds behind.
I power-cycled ALL of them. You would think that their clocks would now be in sync. In the same order, the first was close to real-time, the second was ~45 seconds behind and the third was close to real-time.
I checked again 15 minutes later: the first was still close to real-time, the second was ~30 seconds behind and the third was ~45 seconds behind.
It looks like the STBs' clocks are getting set to real-time on boot, then getting their clocks reset to a different time when they receive updates from the back-end.
I can't explain the > 1 minute lag unless we are also getting clock drift due to OS/device driver issues on the STB that are causing timer ticks to get missed. This is also the sort of thing that could cause the STB to be slow to respond to button presses, or even for video streams to freeze in some cases. (Edit: It's also possible that we could be getting some clock drift as a result of efforts to fix video stream freezing. I'm just guessing. Without seeing/knowing what is actually going on in the code, it's impossible to tell.)
@mascf1 wrote:
The time displayed on the TV from the Xi6-T box is always 30 seconds behind the network time. All other connected devices are accurate to the second with the network time. Is there a way to sync the time on the TV box?
I know this may seem strange but the time on the Ignite set-top boxes needs to be slow.
The main reason for this is that with IPTV, the source signal needs to be encoded for transmission on an IP network (and this process takes time) and be given some buffer depth for streaming, so any channel that displays a live clock will be off by approximately 25 seconds + any delay that the broadcaster also adds at the source. As a result, shows will also appear to start late so the time on the set-top box needs to be adjusted (and made artificially slow) so that the program grid in the Guide will be in sync with the show that you see on-screen.
@mascf1 wrote:
That really doesn’t make any sense when the Ignite TV app running on other devices or the Ignite TV Web portal on Windows all have have no issue using accurate network time.
The only downside with how things are now is that the clock will appear slow while the screen saver is activated. It would not break Ignite TV if the STB was synced to "network time" but then there would be a disconnect between clocks that are broadcast on a channel and the set-top box clock, and it's weird when the Guide is out of sync with the program that you see on-screen. (When the STB clocks got really out of sync, the original poster in this thread did not know whether or not to adjust recording times so as not to miss any part of a program.)
With some of the smaller IPTV providers, their encoding pipeline is very slow and their streamed channels can lag by more than one minute. In that case, it is unsettling when the "Guide" clock and the EPG itself is not synced with the program content.
As I pointed out in this post, I would expect the STB to either be in sync with the "wall clock" or with the streamed program content. It's an implementation decision but I would argue that it is better to sync the STB time with the on-screen content.
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