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Can't stop excessive data usage with IPTV

Added by Julian Somebody about 6 years ago

Help please! I love what I've seen of TVheadend so far and I really want to use it but my experiments so far have been nothing short of catastrophic. I'm hoping this is easy to fix although I've done a lot of Googling and not found anything...

My setup is TVheadend installed by a simple 'sudo apt-get install tvheadend' on the latest version of Raspbian Stretch Lite running on a Raspberry Pi 3 B+. The install went perfectly and I then set up a single IPTV network using a URL provided by the provider. So far so good and it found all the channels that I expected and I can play them from the client running on my nVidia Shield.

My problem is that TVHeadEnd seems to be constantly cycling through the 4,000+ services found on the muxes such that in just 10 minutes of running it consumed 4.3GB of download data! I have confirmed that it is TVHeadend doing this because when I stop the service my download data drops to about 100MB in 10 minutes which is just regular browsing I think.

I did find one thing on the internet here (https://tvheadend.org/boards/5/topics/30022) but on the network settings "idle scan" was already disabled and I tried disabling "on scan start" just in case but it made no difference. As soon as I restarted TVheadend I saw massive download data consumption resuming and if I went to Status/Stream on the web interface I saw it cycling through the services that it has detected one at a time with brief high bandwidth on each one.

The services that I see it scanning in the Status/Stream display seem to be services where the initial scan failed (because they are VOD streams). Might it be that even with idle scan off it still keeps trying to get failed streams to scan successfully? Alternatively, are there settings lower down in the hierarchy, e.g. at the Mux or Service level, that need to be changed to stop this behaviour? If yes then is there any way to do bulk changes because going through > 4000 Muxes and/or Services and changing a setting on each individually is impractical.

Might this be EPG data that it's trying to extract because all the services have EPG data set to auto-update but I can't see a way to turn that off on a bulk basis without again having to do 4,000 entries individually. I'm actually happy to kill the EPG functionality completely because I have an EPG subscription service running on my nVidia shield client that gives me what I need there so don't need TVheadend to supply any EPG data at all.

Where I'm hoping to get to is, after a one-time scan, for TVHeadend to sit totally inert (unless it's executing a scheduled recording) generating no network traffic until I put in a request from my nVidia Shield Kodi PVR client to play a channel at which point it streams the requested channel and then goes back to its inert state when I press the stop button to stop watching. Is this possible?

This is a show-stopper issue for me because I have a fast (200Mbps) but data-limited (200GB peak-time data per month) internet connection and so far TVheadend has used 25% of my total monthly peak-time data allowance in the last 12 hours or so that I've had it running during daytime hours (and another chunk of my off-peak data because I left it running overnight last night). I have the service stopped at the moment but unless I can find a solution to this I'm afraid that I simply won't be able to use TVheadend in my setup.


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