Notices

I previously loved TvCatchup Player. Having the ability to portably watch freeview channels on my phone is awesome. But now, I click the app and select any channel and teh sound plays but the image is frozen

How can I fix this

I agree that tvcplayer was a great app, I used to use it often. Mine used to work seamlessly at stock speed, but for the past few months it had begun to slow down to only one or two frames every few seconds (audio OK). When that first happened, I tried overclocking, but that made little difference - less bad, but still totally unwatchable.

I assumed this was probably a combination of my n900 (2yrs old, never reflashed) losing performance and (maybe) a change in the stream bitrate, and just gave up on it. However I tried again last week (I was interrupted whilst watching something that I didn't want to miss on my big screen TV; had to leave the room, and I thought I'd use tvcplayer to at least follow the audio while I was away). To my surprise, the video was working much better again - several fps at stock speed. I overclocked to 850Mhz, selected the "quality" preset, and it was nice & smooth :-) There has been no change to my n900, so I'm assuming (again) that the improvement must be down to the stream.

So, if you haven't tried for a week or so, try again now. If you find it's now borderline watchable as opposd to frozen (and you are OK with potential impact on your CPU), overclock to 750Mhz or above and it will hopefully be a lot better.

I really do not want to overclock my device. Considering it worked in the past suggests there has to be a way to get it working again at stock speed

@eggtimer

There hs been a recent upgrade to mplayer. Have you downloaded this from the repos?

Once i downloaded the upgrade, I went in to TVCplayer Mplayer options and set to "speed". Works fine for me on 3g and wifi.

May be more help on the main TVCplayer thread tho?

err ... I'm not aware of any mplayer upgrade - I've got SVNr30099-4.2.1 and i've never consciously upggraded mplayer.

There is nothing showing in the repos for mplayer, there's no TMO announce thread with a .deb or binary attached, and a google search of TMO didn't reveal any recent mplayer news either. Care to expand on what mplayer version you've obtained and from where?

fair enough, however just because something worked in the past doesn't stop it becoming unusable in future owing to server-side changes. Dropbox & Groove spring to mind as examples of such app's; BBC iplayer is a closer example of a video streaming service which used to work great on n900 but which is now very difficult to use owing to repeated changes at the BBC end (stream formats, bitrates and flash versions etc.).

Having said that, I've just tested tvcplayer again and it now seems to be working much better for me again, even at stock speeds. Using the "quality" preset:

600Mhz: occasional pauses/slowdowns but watchable unless it is live action/SFX stuff
700Mhz: noticably smoother, no significant pauses but still (less frequent) slowdowns
750Mhz: as good as performance when I originally installed tvcplayer
800Mhz: creamy smooth

The only changes at my end are that I recently changed the channel and position of my wireless access point to minimise overlap from the plethora of other AP's in the many neighbouring flats (wifi eye is your friend!).

I don't know if that has made the difference or whether something else has magically improved the performance of my n900 but there must be some reason. Maybe a server-side performance improvement? how many servers/admin staff do they have to host the streaming on what is a free, ad-supported service? (they may simply have tweaked load-balancing or whatever).

Anyway, you could see if messing with your AP helps you any. If not, you could PM arajantie. Thereafter, a speculative reflash may be worth a try.

Otherwise I'm afraid overclocking is the quickest, easiest, and possibly only practical way to get you back to where you want to be without external help. And, seriously, with the age of the n900, and the ~2 years worth of overclocking experience of hundereds of users on TMO, is it really such a scary prospect to push the CPU to 75%-80% of it's maximum speed for the odd half-hour's viewing pleasure :-) FWIW, I've watched probably 10-15 full 90 minute football games on my n900 running at 900Mhz (internet streams, played onto big TV's while I've been abroad or staying over at friends etc.) and my phone is still perfectly fine after 22 months.

Good luck!

i keep getting login unsuccesfull when it loads in x-term?
Anyone know why..?
It used to work.

Same here, been like this for 6minths+ now. This was one of my favorite apps too.