Tvheadend

It appears that somewhere along the line an "Automatic Checking" feature was added and appears in the Configuration-DVB Inputs-Services tab. I've noticed a few issues with this, that may affect North American free-to-air satellite users more than others.

The main problem is that today I found that a channel had been marked as “Missing in PAT/SDT” and that caused TVHeadEnd to totally ignore the channel, saying there were no tuners available if I tried to tune it. I believe this probably happened because this particular channel completely shuts down on weekends. I could not find any way to re-enable the channel short of completely removing it in Channels and in the Services tab, and then rescanning the transponder. That caused all my scheduled recordings on that channel to be lost. There are other channels here that either drop their transponders completely at times, or switch between encrypted and unencrypted mode, and once I have them scanned in I would prefer that TVHeadEnd leave them alone.

That brings me to the "Automatic Checking" dropdown. It appears that it only gives you two choices, “No Auto” and “Missing in PAT/SDT”, though I have NO idea why anyone would manually want to set a channel to “Missing in PAT/SDT”. The point is that there is no way to clear this status without setting it to "No Auto", and even then it appears that doing that does not restore the channel to operational status. In my opinion is should be possible to just set this back to a "no entry" (blank) condition (which is NOT possible now) and clear the issue. But "No Auto" is fine if it will stop TVHeadEnd from checking these channels, however I wish there were some way to set that on a global basis since I really don't want TVHeadEnd to lock out ANY channels, and I definitely don't want to lose all my scheduled recordings for a channel when that happens.

Also, there is no mention of this setting in the help file for that page, therefore one has to guess at its function. I'm ASSUMING that "No Auto" is the correct choice if I don't want this to happen again, but I would like to be able to look at the help file and find out if that's a correct assumption.

Finally, it appears there is no way to set a timeout before a “Missing in PAT/SDT” is declared. In my case I would prefer it wait at least a week before it declares any channel as bad, because I live in an area where we can get heavy snow on a dish and sometimes a weaker signal might be unavailable for two or three days or more. Right now it looks like my only option is to go through and set every single usable channel as "No Auto" manually (since as far as I know there is no way to turn this off globally) if I don't want to encounter this problem again, which will be kind of a pain.

So in summary:

• Please update the help file on the Configuration-DVB Inputs-Services tab to show the "Automatic Checking" field.
• Please give us a way to clear a “Missing in PAT/SDT” status without losing existing scheduled recordings.
• Please give us a way to set the number of hours or days that this can be missing before it is declared as such. And/or...
• Please give us a way to disable this checking globally, so we don't have to manually set every single service to "No Auto" if we don't want TVHeadEnd to do this type of checking.

Just as an aside, this led to another issue where while trying to recreate my recording timers TVHeadEnd crashed and would not restart. The only way I could fix it was by upgrading to the latest unstable version, which did appear to at least get me back to normal. But I would REALLY prefer not to encounter this particular problem again!