Tvheadend

Have you try to use Spawn profile to send commands.
It's not real solution but is a workaround.

saen acro wrote:

Have you try to use Spawn profile to send commands.
It's not real solution but is a workaround.

For one thing I can't seem to find any instructions on how to do that, but also it appears that's only available in the unstable branch, and I was making a feature request for a future stable version. I know very little about Linux, so the thought of running unstable software and possibly running into issues I can't resolve is quite frightening. Even doing normal kernel updates on this system (which I only do for security reasons) scares the hell out of me. So, I stick to stable versions of Tvheadend.

Also, it appears that the Spawn profile is really intended for a completely different purpose, and I don't see any way at all that it could be adapted to send a command, then tune a channel, then when streaming the channel is ended, send a different command. I could guess that if someone really knew what they were doing (or if someone could explain how to use that profile) you could MAYBE do one of those, but I need to be able to do both. But really that seems intended for use in transcoding a stream, which is not what I'm doing, at least not as far as I know. My system absolutely cannot transcode video in real time; it can transcode audio but I'm not doing that in this case.

Unstable is enough stable ;)
You can PIPE and use stream in bash script.

Well I thought of that, but there is a problem. Let's say that in a mux in an IPTV network, instead of calling the command directly I call a bash script, e.g. pipe:///home/user/my_script.sh, and then in my_script.sh I put the actual call to whatever I would have gone to directly from the pipe command (for example a call to ffmpeg). This works. And I can add bash commands or calls to other scripts (with an & following to put them in the background) prior to making that call to whatever delivers the actual stream. So far, so good. But what I cannot do is put a command AFTER whatever delivers the stream, because it never gets executed. Once Tvheadend stops the stream it apparently kills the process forcefully, which I suppose is desirable so that streams don't continue to play even when there is nothing receiving them. So I had the thought to launch another script as a background task, that would continuously keep checking to see if the pid of the parent script still existed, and if not then it would run the commands I wanted to run. The problem is that when Tvheadend closes the stream it somehow also closes that spawned secondary script. It does not matter if I use & to put it in the background, or nohup prior to the command. So, running something before the stream begins playing is a relative piece of cake, but running something after it stops appears to be impossible.

I can run my secondary script manually and it runs fine, and watches the first script (the one called from the pipe:// URL) and when that script ends it runs what it should. But for whatever reason, I can't launch that second script from within the first script, because if I do then it will end the moment the stream is shut down. I have read several pages that say that using & to run the script in the background OR using nohup at the start of the line should prevent that, but it doesn't I was up all night trying to make this work, and it would have been more productive to beat my head against a rock, at least then at some point I would have knocked myself unconscious and got some sleep!

When you wake up, you could try invoking your watchdog program using 'at'. Something like (untested)

at -f /path/to/watchdog.sh -t now

Depending on distribution you may need to install the package containing 'at'.

Dave Pickles wrote:

When you wake up, you could try invoking your watchdog program using 'at'. Something like (untested)

at -f /path/to/watchdog.sh -t now

Depending on distribution you may need to install the package containing 'at'.

Thanks for the suggestion, preliminary tests show that a script launched with "at" does survive the closure of the stream (your syntax was wrong but I was able to figure that out, you did say it was untested). This is getting unbelievably kludgy though, which is why I would still very much prefer that this capability be added to Tvheadend if that is possible. But at now least it feels like this might be workable if not elegant.