Tvheadend

Repeating what I said in another recent post... does this happen on a restart of the machine, by any chance? Linux tends to move USB devices around, which is fine if it's a keyboard but not so much use if you're expecting to find a tuner in a given place. You can tell because the adapter location will be blank, but a new adapter (with no services/channels) will appear on a different location (e.g. /dev/dvb1).

Post a screenshot of your adapter config page if you like, let's see if there's anything obvious. Check the drop-down to see if you have multiple tuners while you're there, and see what the config looks like for the others if you do.

It happens "sometimes" on boot, rather than on restart specifically. I thought it might be something like that. Currently (it happened on this boot, but I've since restarted tvheadend), the device path is /dev/dvb/adapter0, which is what I'd expect. There's only one tuner in the drop-down on the config page. I've attached a screenshot in case there's anything useful there, I can do it again next time it happens before I restart tvheadend if that helps.

Please - grab that screen and check the dropdown before you restart.

Have a shufti at this thread as well, it might give you something to play with:

https://tvheadend.org/boards/4/topics/7109

Looking back, I'm still left confused by what driver this stick uses, but if it's your only one then you should find it easily enough with lsmod - you can try the adapter_nr trick then. It's probably quicker to reboot your machine half-a-dozen times than it is to crack the udev route, sadly...!

Ok, here's a screenshot when it's not working, before I restart tvheadend.

However, the tuner is still at /dev/dvb/adapter0, as expected:

mark@homestar:~$ ls -lR /dev/dvb/
/dev/dvb/:
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 120 May  7 17:47 adapter0

/dev/dvb/adapter0:
total 0
crw-rw----+ 1 root video 212, 1 May  7 17:47 demux0
crw-rw----+ 1 root video 212, 2 May  7 17:47 dvr0
crw-rw----+ 1 root video 212, 0 May  7 17:47 frontend0
crw-rw----+ 1 root video 212, 3 May  7 17:47 net0

It's as though the tuner's being set up correctly by the OS, but not until after tvheadend has started. Does that make sense?

Oh, and the dropdown on the config page only shows the one tuner.

I guess that's possible... it wouldn't explain why the tuner goes walkies during use, though, if that's what's happening. If that isn't what's happening, though, that's perfectly plausible.

I guess the test for your hypothesis would be simply to always restart tvheadend after a reboot, or add a delay - either a sleep in the start script, or perhaps re-order the upstart jobs so the tvheadend one runs later?

Can w_scan lock onto the tuner when it's in this state? That'd also help isolate things.

<pause>

Found this on a quick search if it's useful:

https://tvheadend.org/boards/4/topics/8977

I've not noticed the tuner disappearing while watching/recording.

I've tried adding a delay using the TVH_DELAY setting in /etc/default/tvheadend, and it seems to be working. Thanks for your help.

Ah, yes - I thought I'd seen that, but couldn't find it in my file so assumed I'd imagined it. D'oh.