Tvheadend

I submitted a description of this issue on the issue tracker today at this link:

https://tvheadend.org/issues/2595

The problem is that it appears that if you have a channel that goes down for an extended period of time, in this case an entire weekend, TVHeadEnd will mark it as “Missing in PAT/SDT” (visible in the "Automatic Checking" column under Configuration-DVB Inputs-Services) and once it has done that there appears to be no way to re-enable the channel. The only thing you can do is delete it in both the Channels and Services tabs, which cause any PVR timers you have set for that channel to disappear, and then re-scan the transponder and hope the channel reappears, then map it to channels again. EDIT: I was wrong about this - see the discussion under my issue in the link above.

I note that you can set each service to “No Auto” which I assume means it will not do this check on that service only - the help screen is silent about this setting - but I would really prefer it not do this sort of check on any channel. If there is a way to disable this as a global setting, I don't know where it is - is there such a setting?

Strangely you cannot set Automatic Checking back to its original blank state once either the system or the user have modified it. And your only choices are “No Auto” and “Missing in PAT/SDT”, and I can't figure out why anyone would want to manually set a channel to “Missing in PAT/SDT”. But even if you set the channel to “No Auto”, once it's been set to “Missing in PAT/SDT” it appears that TVHeadEnd will never tune that channel again until you delete it and re-scan it in. EDIT: actually you can set it back, it's just not very obvious - again see the discussion under the issue report.

Beyond all that, once I got the channel back, I was trying to recreate my PVR timers and when I attempted to save one TVHeadEnd crashed and nothing I could do would make it come up again, not even a reboot. I wondered if it might be a bug in TVHeadEnd so I updated to the latest unstable version and that apparently fixed the problem. Just to be safe I deleted the timer that had caused the crash, but after that I could recreate my PVR timers with no issue. I don't know what I would have done if no update had been available.

Anyway, my main question right now is, am I missing a setting somewhere that will disable this "Automatic Checking" thing for all channels? Once I get a channel entered I want TVHeadEnd to assume it is valid until such time as I remove it. Things are a little different in North America in that we have satellite feeds that shut down on Friday night or very early Saturday morning and don't come back up until Monday morning. Also there are some weak Ku-band signals that can get knocked out for a couple days or longer if the weather is bad. I don't want TVHeadEnd to decide these are no longer valid and disable them in this manner. Is there any way to do that without having to set each one to “No Auto” individually?

EDIT: It appears that most of my concerns have been addressed by Revision 1afee166. Thanks to Rob vh for his comments and to Jaroslav Kysela for fixing this.