Tvheadend

I've been having this same (or similar) problem for a long time, without realizing it. Tvheadend will not show all available services. I thought it was bad reception (I'm using an antenna, not cable). But then I recently tried MythTV instead, and it received all stations perfectly. I went back to Tvheadend, and again, it did not show all channels. Out of the 52 channels MythTV receives, Tvheadend can only see 35. However, it does actually see about 52 services, but in the list many are blank, like it could not receive the information from them, and I cannot use them. On occasion, an odd symptom will occur. The name(s) of one or more services will be swapped with the name of a service that tvheadend cannot receive. It is usually temporary, and doesn't affect channel reception (I don't suddenly receive the missing channel). Also, I'm not on DVB-C. I'm in the United States, working with ATSC digital channels. Not sure if this means it's a different problem. This has been with every version of tvheadend I've tried (2.12, 2.99, 3.2, and 3.4).

Is there a way to have MythTV find the channels, then import the information into tvheadend and just turn off service scanning completely?

Sadly, I'm back to using MythTV until this gets resolved. Neither works perfectly, and I wish there was a Linux TV server with the best features of both. Tvheadend changes channels more quickly, is easier to set up, has a MUCH nicer web interface, streams channels more smoothly across my LAN, and I can easily copy/paste icon URL's from the TV station's web site (MythTV's channel icon search is terrible, gives badly outdated icons, and doesn't let custom icons come through on XBMC). But MythTV can timeshift, receive EIT information (tvheadend apparently won't work with ATSC EIT), and is better and faster at service searches. Once tvheadend has all these things, it'll be just about perfect. I know you guys are working on it. It's just hard to wait when there's so much TV to watch!

Mike, thanks for your input. It is always nice to know that you are not alone ;-)

First of all: I really like TVHeadend because of it's simplicity, clear interface and documentation. What I miss is the issue described above + time-shifting.

Back to the issue: I notice that some services are not mapped to a channel, and that most of the unmapped services also have a mapped version. I will do a test to see if I can view the unmapped stream using VLC.

VLC was not able to open the stream (no error message as well, no clues), so I decided to map the service to a fake channel manually. XBMC then shows the channel, but unfortunately says that there is no input..

A friend has a different setup: Windows 7, MediaPortal and XBMC. MediaPortal also does not show all channels. So what is the magic done by MythTV?

Any hints to solve (or workaround) are more than welcome :-)

So, does MythTV work on your system as well, too? Or are you just going by my comments about it? I'm still not 100% sure we're looking at exactly the same thing, especially if VLC and MediaPortal also doesn't show them on your end. I'll have to try VLC (don't have MediaPortal) on my HTPC when I get home.

No, I never tried MythTV. I installed it, but that's it. After starting it, I thought it was too hard to use, so I uninstalled it again.

MediaPortal does not run on Linux, so I haven't tried that one myself either.

I tried to open a TV Headend stream that was not mapped to a channel using VLC. I did not try to read the signal directly into VLC.

Ok, I see. You were using VLC to view your tvheadend streams.

MythTV is a very different beast than tvheadend. You have a lot more you have to set up initially before it'll work. But once you've got your MySQL database running and your tuner recognized and linked to an input in the backend, it's not too bad. In most cases, from that point on you take the defaults on everything and you're good.

I've definitely found tvheadend to be a lot simpler, with more stable framerates (MythTV seems to be a little stuttery, and doesn't stream as well across my LAN). I just wish it gave me all the channels I know I should be getting and that the time shifting version was finally released.

I hope that one of the members of the development team reads this and can answer the question: what can we do to make it happen?

Do we need higher priority on this issue?

https://tvheadend.org/issues/1194

Unfortunately I'm not a developer, but willing to provide something that I can provide and is useful to the project.

I agree. Hopefully we'll hear something from the devs about this issue.

Discovered some things.

First, I removed MythTV and reinstalled tvheadend 3.2. This time it was really bad. It didn't even find the previously-found 52 services, blank or not. At first it only found about half and wouldn't find any more during idle scanning. Then I forced it to do another scan (by restarting tvheadend so that it goes into "initial scan" mode), and it found a few more. It took about 4 or 5 forced initial scans to find the 45 it can see now, and it's topped out at that number even with subsequent forced scans. MythTV and my television plugged directly into the same antenna finds all 52 just fine on the first channel scan.

Second, on the blank services it finds (labelled "Unmapped" without any channel ID), I found out that I can actually give them a name manually, and it will let me view them and map them to channels, and they are some of the missing channels. The TV and MythTV names them just fine from their broadcast ID's, but tvheadend apparently doesn't. And it will occasionally falsely rename already-defined channel ID's as the missing channels' ID's. This only lasts for one tuning scan cycle, then it returns to "normal".

So I'm still missing 7 channels in tvheadend, which I can receive with MythTV and my TV's built-in tuner, and tvheadend cannot see the channel ID's on some channels when the others can.

Any ideas from the devs?

Try up to date version to see if that helps, lots of mods have been made in this area (some good, some bad ).

Adam

Adam,

Thanks for the reply!

Sure, I'll give a newer version a shot. 3.2 is just the one I could find a stable Ubuntu repo for. Is there a specific version I should aim for (3.3, 3.4, etc.)? It would be especially cool if it has timeshifting working, but I realize that's still a "work-in-progress" feature. Also, is there a specific Ubuntu/Mint repo you would recommend, or should I compile my own? Or is there someone who has packaged an Ubuntu Precise deb of the newest version, but not in a repo? I've rarely been successful at compiling, don't enjoy it at all, and try to avoid it whenever possible. But, I'll do it as a last resort.

Thanks again for the input on this!

Hi Mike,

I may have more experience with compiling (I'm not only a Gentoo user, but also cross compiled software for a linux-based mediaplayer), but compiling TVHeadend is one of the easiest, so I would suggest you to give it a try if you can't find a recent packaged version for ubuntu.

This is the starting point:

https://tvheadend.org/projects/tvheadend/wiki/Building

But actually I believe you should be able to use most of the Gentoo guideline as well:

https://tvheadend.org/projects/tvheadend/wiki/Tvheadend_gentoo

Just keep the .deb installed, make sure you have installed these: build-essential git pkg-config libssl-dev bzip2 wget libavahi-client-dev zlib1g-dev

Then:

mkdir -p /tmp/tvheadend/src
git clone https://github.com/andoma/tvheadend.git /tmp/tvheadend/src/
cd /tmp/tvheadend/src/
./configure --prefix=/tmp/tvheadend
make
make install

you can not run the executable; /tmp/tvheadend/bin/tvheadend
(the gentoo init script starts with -C -f)

If you want to uninstall, you only have to remove the /tmp/tvheadend directory.

If you run into issues, just let me know (send me an e-mail, might be better than a huge thread here).

Couple of quick notes:

1. I've not yet publicised this, keep meaning to, stuff gets in the way:

http://apt.tvheadend.org/unstable

now holds an official daily package set (repo key can be obtained from http://apt.tvheadend.org/repo.gpg.key).

2. There is a bug in master that is affecting service discovery, see #1679.

Adam

Ok. I am now using 3.5.74~g8bceacd~precise, from the repo you posted. It finds all services, but still many are blank. I can deal with that, as long as they're all there. I just have to figure out which ones are which. Timeshift works pretty nicely. Although at one point, I tried rewinding a just a bit to catch a word I couldn't hear, and it sent me all the way back to the beginning of the show in one jump. Otherwise, it's fine.

Thanks for the repo!

Hi Adam,

I have removed the .hts directory inside my homedir, compiled latest source (git clone https://github.com/andoma/tvheadend.git /usr/src/tvheadend) and setup the configuration again.

Unfortunately, the problem still exists. The problem I have looks very similar to the one described in #1679: some services not mapped, some services (of type 'other') don't have a service name at all.

The big difference is that I'm using DVB-C, while Graeme uses DVB-T.

Can I provide some more detailed info to get to the root cause? If so, which info do I have to provide?

Thanks in advance!

Update 10 minutes later: hm.. maybe it became even worse with this latest update: service names and channel names don't match now.. that makes it hard to find the channel you are looking for :-)

Update the next morning: after resetting the PVR and EPG database in XBMC the channels match again. Unfortunately I still can view less services than before..

That channel/service thing is probably a known bug in XBMC (it doesn't handle changes in the backend configuration very well imo, I usually end up resetting XBMC config after a change in TVH).

So this was working fine in 3.2 (sorry I'm too lazy to read the thread again)? But is now not working, so we can rule out issues with not detecting the right service type.

As this is cable have you set the ONID value in the adapter config to ensure that you're config is not being messed up by other network data (I know this happens in Sweden at least, that's why Andreas added the issue). It's a shortcoming in the way TVH currently addresses things. Though I guess that wouldn't necessarily explain the diff betweem 3.2 and 3.4.

Can you grab latest master and run with --trace sdt,nit, paste that log. Also possibly worth running TVH with a fresh config and added the network from scratch so I can see the full story.

Ta
Adam

Hi Adam,

I believe that it never worked perfectly, but the services not found differ each time. Maybe because it is just random, maybe because the code changes.

I got the latest master and during ./configure I notice that e.g. dvbcsa is now an option, which is not detected (I do not have the libdvbcsa installed, do I need it?).

I'm surprised by the changes since last update (1-2 weeks ago?): I now have multiple choices for the format in which I want to save recordings, I have timeshift, etc. etc. It feels like I have a total new release now..

Surprisingly now all channels/services are found/matched perfectly! Even timeshift seems to work (oh well, rewind not yet, but pause&play do work).

What happened?

If you picked code up yesterday I fixed a bug in SDT parser that was spotted with the help of another DVB-C user. That was definitely stopping services from being detected.

But lots of otehr good stuff has been added. libdvbcsa is not essential, its mainly there for non-x86 users where there is some thought it might be better optimised. But the existing (default) lib is good enough for most users.

Adam

Thanks, just made a donation!

You can choose: use it to cover the costs, buy some equipment you like, or have a beer with the main development team :-)

Ok, with the latest two or three updates in the repo (I'm now on 3.5.124), I've got significant problems with channels...

Now none of the channels have service names (all blank) and their channel names are all "Unmapped". I have to give them all dummy names (I usually use consecutive numbers at first) so I can watch them until I can figure out which channel is which. I then assign a channel name to them. This is not fun at all.

In addition, there are about 4 channels that I can't get at all in tvheadend, but I can get them fine when I connect the antenna lead directly to the TV. One of these is a channel my kids enjoy regularly, and another is one my wife and I watch a lot. So this is a problem.

Any ideas how this might be fixed? Again, I'm using ATSC, not DVB-C, but it is a continuation of my discussion above. If you'd prefer I make a new thread for this, let me know.

Thanks!

Still having problems with this. I found that if I completely delete all muxes and start over multiple times, I can eventually get all the channels (still no names). But, if I let the programs idle scan or do initial scans at restart, sometimes channels begin disappearing again, and I have to start from scratch again, deleting all the muxes and hoping they all appear. My TV on the same antenna has no problems finding all channels.

Please help! This is getting to the point of being pretty much unusable if I have to keep redoing everything.

Hi Mike,

Sorry for my late reply, but I did not have time to try myself until now.

With the latest GIT master, no issues here (25th of June). It takes about half an hour until all channels are found (there are almost 350 services available).

I did a clean install, so I removed .hts from homedir, and removed /opt/tvheadend before I start compiling and installing.

I made one mistake (which I noticed because of a startup script failure and missing timeshift options in the webinterface): the latest git is now at https://github.com/tvheadend/tvheadend (I used to be using https://github.com/andoma/tvheadend.git).

I hope you can give it another try, HTH!

Martin

hm.. at work we call this 'afterburners' :-)

although tvheadend webinterface shows all channels correctly, and I can view them with google chrome / vlc plugin perfectly, XBMC mixes up things. Maybe I have to reconfigure xbmc tv plugin.

ok, it's easy. In /home/user/.xbmc there is a database directory. Just remove tv22.db and restart xbmc.

Martin,

Thanks. Unfortunately, me and compilers don't get along. So, I really prefer using the PPA. If there's a PPA with the latest git version, I'll gladly give it a try. Right now, I'm on Tvheadend 3.5.204~ge343bfd~precise. Just today, I "deleted" (really just renamed, but it's all the same to the system) my /home/hts folder and started from scratch and let it find all the channels. Still, all the services have nothing listed under "Service Name" and Unassigned under "Channel Name". If I assign a dummy name to channels, they work and I can figure out which is which, but there are some channels that get "lost" after a while for some reason, and I have to clear everything out and start from scratch. If I uninstall TVHeadend and reinstall MythTV, all channels are found and work perfectly, although channel changes are painfully slow, and there are other things TVHeadend does better.

Is there anything I can check on or any info I can give to help get to the bottom of this? This is really frustrating.