Tvheadend

Probably not what you want to hear, but...

I've just tuned to two channels in succession, over three carriers and two brands of tuner - DVB-T/T2 (Hauppauge and PCTV) and then DVB-S2 (PCTV).

Both channels are off air at the moment. The terrestrial channels are time-shared, though, so the frequency will still be used (of course, it's muxed anyway) but the PIDs won't be.

In both cases, I tuned Kodi (Kodi 15.2-02e7013/pvr.hts 2.1.18 - Isengard official releases on Ubuntu 14.04.03/kernel 3.19.0-33) and left it for 10 minutes. During the test, Kodi complained that no signal was detected, but kept trying to tune anyway. On the tvheadend web interface (Status -> Subscriptions), I could see the Kodi connection, and see the state cycle between "Testing" and "Bad" before retrying. I could also see it probing both DVB-T and -T2 tuners on the first test, as the channel is mapped to different services on different logical networks. The -S2 test just flips between Testing/Bad.

Nothing crashed, nothing even hiccupped. Granted, I'm using tvheadend 4.1-1070~g3346bcb, so that may be relevant, but...

Where did you install tvh from in the end? I lost track of your other thread (with the valiant Mr C) - PPA, I guess, if you switched to Ubuntu. You can install the debug symbols from that PPA, but that's only half the issue, in that you'd need to delve a little deeper...

Try sudo apt-get install tvheadend-dbg as a starting point.

Very odd, though. You've seen it on different OSes (Debian and Ubuntu), different tuners (TBS and HDHR), different versions (3.9.x up to 4.0.7)... and that's a significant crash on the tvheadend side, to wipe out your recording schedule.

Next steps would be to actually get a crash log, which roughly involves:

1. Shutting down the tvh service
2. Starting it from the command line with relevant options
3. Waiting for the crash
4. Pulling the backtrace to see where tvh was when it shot itself (which is where the -dbg stuff comes in, as that translates hex addresses to source code line numbers and functions)

More information here - I have done it, but not for a l-o-n-g time, so it's not fresh in my mind. We can try to flounder through, though...

Before that... nothing in syslog? Perhaps start there - either start tvh from the command line or add the -D -s switches to /etc/default/tvheadend...

Just to add I have experienced this myself a number of times especially if the tuner fails to keep a lock on a signal unfortunately when this does happen Tvheadend just exits without any segfault or other kind of error message. I haven't experienced it in a while though and the only thing I can think of that causes it is the tuners driver.

Well just as a general comment, I have read in other places that people don't think much of the TBS drivers for various reasons (one of which is that they aren't open source, but that's not relevant here). I guess I don't understand why a bad driver, if that's what it is, should cause TVHeadEnd to completely crash. Anyway, it seems like you're saying that even if I tried to create a log, there is a good chance it wouldn't show anything useful. And honestly I just don't like the idea of installing additional software for debugging purposes if there's any way to avoid that. So maybe I should just wait and hope this won't be an issue when 4.2 comes out.