Tvheadend

What source are you using (DVB-T/DVB-S/IPTV)?
What EPG source(s) are you using (EIT, OpenTV etc.)
Are you using bouquets? (if not, why? )

On my setup, using Sky UK and OpenTV EPG, if I manually set the channel number, if I want it to be returned to the default, I simply delete the channel and the bouquet automatically recreates the channel with default options. This also works for the channel name and EPG source so is a good way to 'fix' a broken configuration.

If you aren't aware, bouquets are a way to automatically map a channel lineup to match the original providers equipment and is a super-simple way of setting up your channels. If you are already aware and/or chose not to use bouquets then ignore this bit

Hello,
there are some bouquets listed, but i didnt create them.

i activated some of them and deleted some channels, shoud they reapear or do I have to press a button for that?
when I remap under services, will it replace all the channels or just the missing ones?

My Kodi now loops the channel scan and i cant watch any TV, think i broke something?

I could still do with knowing the answers to the questions above before I can (try to) help you.

ok, sorry.

I use DVB-S on a DVBSky S950.
For EPG i think its only the data that comes via DVB-S.
I dont use the bouquets, have to read about that.
I tried to delete a channel and did a rescan under services, it just added the deleted ones,
so to solve my problem its easiest to just delete all channels and rescan, than they all will be zero again.
It is a couple of days work to give the channels i like the first numbers, all the ot important stuff can have a number later by the autonumbering function i think

One of the questions I forgot to ask is, do you actually want to use the channel numbers assigned by your provider? If not, then I'm not going to be able to help you, the easiest thing to do might be to kill the TVHeadend configuration and start over. If you are wanting to use your providers channel numbers then I've just tested what happens if you mess up channel numbers when you are using bouquets.

See the attached screenshots.

Screenshot 1 shows where I've "broken" (changed) the channel number from the one assigned by the provider
Screenshot 2 shows deleting the channel
Screenshot 3 shows TVHeadend recreating the channel (within seconds of it being deleted) with the channel number assigned by my provider.

Basic configuration which includes the use of bouquets is;

• Set up your DVB inputs
• Set up your network(s)
• Perform a scan
• Do NOT manually map any channels at this point
• Select a bouquet to use (Configuration > Channel/EPG > Bouquets - if this screen is empty, ensure you've waited long enough for TVHeadend to scan for bouquets)
• The columns "# Services" and "# Services Seen" shows how many channels are in the bouquet versus how many have been scanned by TVHeadend - they should match, if they don't you probably have muxes missing and should enable "Network Discovery" to allow TVHeadend to find muxes that were not included in the initial scan
• Check the 'Auto-map channels defined within the bouquet' check box
• When you mark a bouquet and the 'auto-map' check box and click "Save" the channels will be automatically mapped (including the channel numbers that your provider uses)

Hello,

i did the steps.
deleted all my channels.
I have a lot of boquets listed, most witth the same name, but different sources and stuff.

How do i get the channels back?
I did click "auto map to channels"

i would be fine with the channels numbers from astra.

Jonathan Thomson wrote:

Basic configuration which includes the use of bouquets is;

• Set up your DVB inputs
• Set up your network(s)
• Perform a scan
• Do NOT manually map any channels at this point
• Select a bouquet to use (Configuration > Channel/EPG > Bouquets - if this screen is empty, ensure you've waited long enough for TVHeadend to scan for bouquets)
• The columns "# Services" and "# Services Seen" shows how many channels are in the bouquet versus how many have been scanned by TVHeadend - they should match, if they don't you probably have muxes missing and should enable "Network Discovery" to allow TVHeadend to find muxes that were not included in the initial scan
• When you mark a bouquet to use and click "Save" the channels will be automatically mapped (including the channel numbers that your provider uses)

Hi,

I'm in the UK and have a freesat dish on a TBS 5922SE set-up which I know works fine, (I've had it working on tvh before), but ALL of the 'Services' are shown as '0' whereas the 'Services Seen' is shown as '435'???

That's the opposite of what I would have expected.

Is it just a matter of 'updating' the bouquet thingie somehow or does it sound like something more substantial?

Edit: Sorry, I should have said, this is on tvh 4.0.9-6

On the bouquets screen, I expect ALL the services to read 0 unless you have enabled one of the bouquets. As per my post above, the '# Services Seen' gives an indication of how many of the channels in that bouquet have been detected/scanned on the satellite and '# Services' is how many of those services are mapped to channels - it will be zero until you follow the exact steps below.

So, for Freesat, have a look through the bouquets list, around page 9 it changes from "BSkyB" to "England" - the bouquets from that point are the Freesat ones, you need to pick the correct region (the regions are displayed as <Country> <Service Type>: <BBC Region>/<ITV Region> so if you lived in say Liverpool (which is served by BBC North West and ITV Granada) and you wanted the HD mappings, you'd pick;

England HD: N West/Granada

Put a check box in the bouquet that matches your region and also in the 'Auto-map channels defined within the bouquet' check box and click on the "Save" button - TVHeadend will automatically map the channels as per the Freesat lineup for that region. The same applies for every other satellite provider but I can't give specifics other than for the UK which is served by Sky and Freesat.

To repeat my earlier statement, you do not need to map any channels manually . The whole point of bouquets is to ensure your lineup matches the one created by your provider.

Rupat T wrote:

Hello,

i did the steps.
deleted all my channels.
I have a lot of boquets listed, most witth the same name, but different sources and stuff.

How do i get the channels back?
I did click "auto map to channels"

i would be fine with the channels numbers from astra.

Just follow my steps EXACTLY as described in this thread. There may well be duplicate bouquets but just choose the one that matches your provider and region (if your provider has regions) and the one with the highest channel count perhaps.

Jonathan Thomson wrote:

On the bouquets screen, I expect ALL the services to read 0 unless you have enabled one of the bouquets. As per my post above, the '# Services Seen' gives an indication of how many of the channels in that bouquet have been detected/scanned on the satellite and '# Services' is how many of those services are mapped to channels - it will be zero until you follow the exact steps below.

So, for Freesat, have a look through the bouquets list, around page 9 it changes from "BSkyB" to "England" - the bouquets from that point are the Freesat ones, you need to pick the correct region (the regions are displayed as <Country> <Service Type>: <BBC Region>/<ITV Region> so if you lived in say Liverpool (which is served by BBC North West and ITV Granada) and you wanted the HD mappings, you'd pick;

[...]

Put a check box in the bouquet that matches your region and click on the "Save" button - TVHeadend will automatically map the channels as per the Freesat lineup for that region. The same applies for every other satellite provider but I can't give specifics other than for the UK which is served by Sky and Freesat.

To repeat my earlier statement, you do not need to map any channels manually . The whole point of bouquets is to ensure your lineup matches the one created by your provider.

OK!

It hasn't got any 'services' yet because I was trying the wrong 'bouquet'. Got it! )

I only have 'England - HD' and 'England - SD' so I've checked the 'enable' coloumn on both of those and clicked 'Save' at the top left of the list of coloumns. Nothing appears to be happening, tbh.

When I select 'England - HD', for example, and click the edit button it pops up a box which says 'enabled' which is set to yes, (i.e. with a little tick in it), but nothing else is set including 'Auto-Map to channels.

BTW the number of services is 40 for both HD and SD. I assume that's about right for freesat.

Edit: As you were. There IS an England SD for west midlands with 242 sercies listed. I've clicked enable on it just now... sorry my friend

To be fair there's quite a lot of them, so...

mmh, i still dont get it.
Im deleted the channels under "Channel/EPG".
Should i delete the services under "DVB Inputs" too?
When I map all services all of them get channel number 0.

In the bouquets page there are "Enabled" and "auto map to channels", "Enabled" is acitvated on all of them, the other not not.

Or does Astra(in germany) not provide Channel Numbers?

40 is way too low. I've just filtered on "Granada" and there are 272 channels in the SD bouquet and 273 in the HD one.

Make sure you have 'Network Discovery' turned on for you DVB-S network (New muxes + changed muxes works well for me) that will automatically find and add any muxes that TVHeadend didn't include in the initial scan - the TVH scan files are wildly out of date from what I can gather but Network Discovery is more reliable as if/when new muxes are added (or when channels are removed or moved between muxes) this will ensure your lineup is changed accordingly.

BUT

I have indeed missed a step - you have to check the 'Auto map channels defined in the bouquet' check box.

@ Rupat T - that applies to you too!

Sorry about that chaps - I've updated my post above to avoid confusion.

Rupat T wrote:

mmh, i still dont get it.
Im deleted the channels under "Channel/EPG".
Should i delete the services under "DVB Inputs" too?
When I map all services all of them get channel number 0.

In the bouquets page there are "Enabled" and "auto map to channels", "Enabled" is acitvated on all of them, the other not not.

Or does Astra(in germany) not provide Channel Numbers?

See my post above - sorry about the confusion. You need to check 'Enabled' AND also the 'Auto-map channels defined within the bouquet' check box.

Just using the 'Map all services' button in the Services list will not work as TVHeadend doesn't know what channel number to use - the bouquet contains the additional data to populate the channel number.

Jonathan Thomson wrote:

40 is way too low. I've just filtered on "Granada" and there are 272 channels in the SD bouquet and 273 in the HD one.

Make sure you have 'Network Discovery' turned on for you DVB-S network (New muxes + changed muxes works well for me) that will automatically find and add any muxes that TVHeadend didn't include in the initial scan - the TVH scan files are wildly out of date from what I can gather but Network Discovery is more reliable as if/when new muxes are added (or when channels are removed or moved between muxes) this will ensure your lineup is changed accordingly.

BUT

I have indeed missed a step - you have to check the 'Auto map channels defined in the bouquet' check box.

@ Rupat T - that applies to you too!

Sorry about that chaps - I've updated my post above to avoid confusion.

LOL

Yeah, it's called getting old mate

Yes, I have 242 for SD and 272 for HD for the west midlands UK so that's more like it.

Anyway, I didn't seem to be getting anywhere, (it wasn't adding anything as you say), so I tried clicking the 'automap' option as you suggest. Unfortunately it STILL didn't add anything. HOWEVER, that was in the circumstance where I already had

What I've done in the meantime is to 'reset' back to the basic 'adapters' and 'networks'as before and it's presently scanning the muxes. I HAVE seen it find several of the BSkyB bouquets so that's as expected and I assume it's found the other ones too.

Just going back a stage, your post detailing what to do included the instruction...

'The columns "# Services" and "# Services Seen" shows how many channels are in the bouquet versus how many have been scanned by TVHeadend - they should match,'

Presumably we've now agreed that's incorrect, haven't we? i.e. the 'Services seen' column should show the services actually found when the mux is scanned whereas the 'Services' column should show those you've successfully mapped by using the 'bouquet' thingie and, until it's run, that will ALWAYS show '0'?

Is that right?

Anyway, it's just finished the mux scanning so I'm going to try and run the bouquet for SD west midlands with automap turned on and see what happens.

I'll let you know.

Edit: Hang on... now the bouquets for England HD & SD for west midlands have disappeared along with almost all the rest.

So much for THAT plan

What's the setting you have for 'Initial Scan' and 'Idle Scan'? I'm wondering if they're added even if they're not the first time through on the initial scan?

The bouquets can take a while to appear, when I do a fresh install, it can take 10-15 minutes after scanning finishes for them to appear (around the same time the EPG data comes down).

The statement 'The columns "# Services" and "# Services Seen" shows how many channels are in the bouquet versus how many have been scanned by TVHeadend - they should match,' is still valid, just in the wrong order. It stands true AFTER you've enabled a bouquet and the auto-map feature (so for example if TVH 'sees' 272 channels in the West Midlands HD bouquet and you enable auto-map, you should end up with 272 mapped channels. For any bouquet where auto-map is not enabled (or the bouquet disabled) then it will indeed always show zero.

I do remember getting bouquets to work first time round was a bit of a faff but honestly they are the best way of managing your channel lineup, especially in the UK where channels frequently come and go, change transponders (even change satallites sometimes) and move around the Sky/Freesat EPG - to manage that manually is a nightmare.

Both 'Initial scan' and 'Idle scan' are enabled on the adapters tab, and on the 'Networks' tab 'Network discovery' is set to 'New muxes + changed muxes' and 'Skip initial scan' and 'Idle scan muxes' are both unchecked - the latter can cause all sorts of problems as it constantly (and I mean constantly) scans for changes. I had channels disappearing and reappearing daily because of this setting which caused havoc with my channel tags (which I use to group my channels into the logical groups that are on the Sky guide - e.g. 'Entertainment', 'Movies' etc.) - when a channel disappears then reappears, the channel tags are reset - you can imagine how annoying that gets to constantly have to re-add my channel tags back in

OK! I've just done exactly what we discussed and the bouquets OTHER than the BSkyB ones and the foreign ones DEFINITELY aren't there now and it's been about an hour and half.

It's obvious to me that, at some point, I'd added those bouquets by some other method... maybe when I'd added the 'Services' by clicking on the 'Map All' button before?

I don't know.

To be clear, I have a load of channels now because, after waiting for an extended period, I tried the BSkyB one for the west midlands for HD and it's found them, (658 to be precise), and I've checked them, they work... BUT they include a load of channels that are encrypted.

I'm guessing that the bouquets will keep them up to date but, as I say, the freesat ones, (which both you have and I DEFINITELY saw before I reset everything), are gone.

So, I dunno!

If it works as we think then I'm going to try wiping the installation and reinstalling tommorrow.

I'll let you fellas know.

Anyway, enough for today.

Laters

Ugh what a ballache.

If you want to keep the BSkyB mapping but without the encrypted channels, open the bouquet you've mapped and change the 'Channel mapping options' unchecking 'Map encrypted services' - that should just map any channels with the encryption flag not set.

Junking the config and starting again might be best to ensure there's no old config left over - you could always move the current directory to a temporary one and then start again. Not sure what platform you're using but I use Ubuntu and would do the following in this scenario;

sudo systemctl stop tvheadend OR /etc/init.d/tvheadend stop
sudo mv /home/hts/.hts/tvheadend /home/hts/.hts/tvheadend-bak
sudo dpkg-reconfigure tvheadend
sudo systemctl start tvheadend OR /etc/init.d/tvheadend start

The third line will prompt you for the admin user/password combo so that you can actually log in to the web UI

WAY ahead of yer

Yeah, I've actually removed tvh atm and the whole '/home/hts/ directory, (yeah, I'm on Ubuntu too... 16.04:)), and have reinstalled tvh and am just in the process of trying a fresh install just using defaults apart from the very basic changes we've discussed.

The annoying thing is I had it all sorted by using the 'old' method of mapping 'manually, as it were, but then saw a link on this board, (or maybe another one? I forget), which said these bouquet johnies were the way to go to 'improve' things.

HEY! I'm sure it's true once you get them sorted but, y'know...

I suppose once they're done they sort themselves out, right?

I'll let you know how it goes.

Andy

Ha! You sound like you are very much like me, a tinkerer - doesn't matter if it's working or not, if there's a new "thing" to play with to hell with it all lol

So yeah, once they are set up and working they effectively manage your channel lineup automatically for you. Recent example, the BBC recently added 16 new channels for the Olympics (8 SD and 8 HD) and they automatically appeared, with the right channel numbers, in my Kodi EPG because they were added to the Sky North West bouquet and in turn automatically added and mapped by TVH.

You'll be an expert at setting up all this stuff by the time it works as you want it to. I've replaced Sky in my house with TVH and Kodi clients so I have the added stress of having a wife and child that depend upon all this working for them to be able to watch TV!!!

AH, OK, it works as long as you do as we discussed and gives a couple of 'England' entries, one as 'England - HD -' and another 'England - SD -' and if you select one of THEM, (clicking all the boxes on the 'edit' button), it adds the relevant entry in the 'bouquets' list for 'England - HD - W. Mid' or whatever

IOW it doesn't populate the Channels list but adds the bouquet which does... for the UK at any rate.

I'm going to have to play around with it a bit more but, that's for tomorrow

Jonathan Thomson wrote:

Ha! You sound like you are very much like me, a tinkerer - doesn't matter if it's working or not, if there's a new "thing" to play with to hell with it all lol

So yeah, once they are set up and working they effectively manage your channel lineup automatically for you. Recent example, the BBC recently added 16 new channels for the Olympics (8 SD and 8 HD) and they automatically appeared, with the right channel numbers, in my Kodi EPG because they were added to the Sky North West bouquet and in turn automatically added and mapped by TVH.

You'll be an expert at setting up all this stuff by the time it works as you want it to. I've replaced Sky in my house with TVH and Kodi clients so I have the added stress of having a wife and child that depend upon all this working for them to be able to watch TV!!!

A wife AND a kid to keep sorted, eh?!

Nah, that's not being a tinkerer.. that's masochism, pure and simple

The little woman is strictly controlled as to what she's allowed to touch, (plus she's got her own TV), and my daughter's nearly 40 so she can sort herself out at her place

It keeps me amused now I'm retired though so it's all good

So I tried some more experiments this morning.

When you say you had to do some 'faffing about' to get it working at the beginning... did you have to click the 'Map Services' button on the 'Channel/EPG' - 'Channels' page?

I can see how the bouquets thing can work with moved, added or amended channels but I CANNOT get it to populate the Channels without clicking a 'Map Services' or 'Map all' button somewhere... no matter HOW long I leave it.

I mean, it might be nice if someone who did the programming actually told us how it was MEANT to work, but you can't have everything I suppose.

That seems to be the ONLY way to generate a list of channels which can then be further amended AFAIK.

OK! I've FINALLY sorted it out

I added a single 'Channel' manually on the channels page for ITV based on the information here:-

http://en.kingofsat.net/pos-28.2E.php

It says there's an ITV entry at 11425H which is the same as the Freesat.

As long as you've selected an appropriate bouquet and set it as enabled, if you THEN go back to the 'Channels' page and click 'Play', (the little blue thing on the extreme left of the 'ITV' entry, and open THAT in something appropriate, (I used VLC), it will populate your Channels page with data.

I'd imagine it would do the same thing if you played the 'ITV' entry in, say, Kodi or whatever.

Of course, once you've got it populated with Channels, at some point it will have an 'Idle Scan' even if you don't choose to play that specific channel or, maybe, it will be updated when it tries to get some EPG data... that, I'm not sure about.

BTW, if anyone else is reading this, I believe I'm correct in saying that the Freesat data has moved from that detailed in the post at the bottom of this page...

https://tvheadend.org/boards/5/topics/14068

... which mentions 11428. It's now 11425.

Andy Bennett wrote:

OK! I've FINALLY sorted it out

I added a single 'Channel' manually on the channels page for ITV based on the information here:-

http://en.kingofsat.net/pos-28.2E.php

It says there's an ITV entry at 11425H which is the same as the Freesat.

As long as you've selected an appropriate bouquet and set it as enabled, if you THEN go back to the 'Channels' page and click 'Play', (the little blue thing on the extreme left of the 'ITV' entry, and open THAT in something appropriate, (I used VLC), it will populate your Channels page with data.

I'd imagine it would do the same thing if you played the 'ITV' entry in, say, Kodi or whatever.

Of course, once you've got it populated with Channels, at some point it will have an 'Idle Scan' even if you don't choose to play that specific channel or, maybe, it will be updated when it tries to get some EPG data... that, I'm not sure about.

Tvheadend needs to tune to the transponder to load the bouquet data, a force scan would also trigger it as long as there are no muxes already queued for scanning, but yes it would eventually populate the channel list.

BTW, if anyone else is reading this, I believe I'm correct in saying that the Freesat data has moved from that detailed in the post at the bottom of this page...

https://tvheadend.org/boards/5/topics/14068

... which mentions 11428. It's now 11425.

11428 still works, it's just a clone of 11425 - I use it often.