Problems with EPG over the last week maybe more?

Al B

I have been manualy building and updateing tvheadend on my home server for a while now. But over the last week or so I have been haveing problems with the epg for sattelite channels not being retrieved. The dvb-t channels have full epg at the moment but most sattelite channels have none.

I am currently on build 3.9.1082 and about to build 3.9.1083 just to see if it helps. I have set the OTA grabber to run every hour aswel but that has not helped either.

I have 2 tuner cards:
DVBSKY T9580

DVBSKY S952

The OS is ubuntu 14.04 with kernel 3.15.5 and latest dvbsky drivers.

This is also a fresh install as of yesterday (july 12 2014).

Has anyone else had this problem? or know of a solution?

Kev S

Which satellite provider?

I've been having problems with getting the EPG from Sky UK but Freesat UK's grabber works fine.

Al B

Freesat UK im just using it for the freeview channels so I think thats the one.

ProfYaffle

I have a full Freesat and Freeview EPG FWIW, on 3.9.1074~gd9f1f88.

Do you have the Freesat EPG mux identified and active? (11426H, I think).

Al B

Yeah it appears to be there and enabled(auto) is in the epg scan column and enabled column is true.

I just changed the scan status of that mux to active it returned to idle but appears to have scanned as the epg items went from 4000(ish) to now over 17000.

So I will have to see if it keeps the epg updated now.

ProfYaffle

Oddly, I had to upgrade my kernel to 3.13 because of end-of-support ... and I'm also now getting EPG issues (e.g. nothing on CBBC HD on Freeview or Freesat). Not sure it's related, I'm going to reboot to an older kernel and do some digging...

Have you got any futher thoughts on what you've seen?

ProfYaffle

Odd. Rebooting from 3.13.0-32 to 3.5.0-54 and my EPG is filling fast... I've got CBBC HD events appearing, and I'm up to 43,000 events vs the 35,000 or so I had before the reboot (although I've peaked at nearer 80k in the past).

However, looking at my logs, any epg scan since 12th July seems to throw a 'data completion timeout' error - yet I didn't uprgade the kernel until the 16th. I suspect that's unrelated, though, and is more likely to be an artefact of a tvheadedn upgrade (to 3.9.1074~gd9f1f88) I did that day.

So, my thoughts now...

1. Do I need to recompile tvheadend on the later kernel? Clearly something changed in the EPG code, could that be it? Why would it only show when the kernel changes? DVB API?

2. Do I need to upgrade v4l-dvb (I see no reason why...)? Similar thoughts as above...

3. ... anyone got any other ideas?

ProfYaffle

Replying to myself... looking at .config.mk, I last compiled with (default options):

CONFIG_V4L = no

CONFIG_LINUXDVB = yes

... so it's not V4L... it looks like V4L-DVB and LINUXDVB have been converging, but they're different APIs.

My best guess is that something between kernel 3.5 and now has changed, and the compiled version I have is, therefore, wrong. I'll try recompiling on a later kernel and comparing the filesize/CRC as a start (same code base, different kernel). I just need to wait for the kids' programmes to stop recording for a while...

Al B

Hmm I dont think its kernel related as I have been compileing and updateing through all kernel revisions 3.13.x, 3.14.x and now on 3.15.6 and its only withing the last week(ish) that I have been noticing this problem with the epg.

(This is with periodic reinstalls of the server to clear out my tinkering).

So I think if it was kernel related I would of noticed much sooner.

At the moment I have 15 channels out of 100 in xbmc that have no epg at all this is with having that freesat epg mux active and scheduled to scan each morning at around 6 am.

EDIT:

Also i dont know if its related but my dvb-t channels have been haveing alot of issues playing over about the same length of time maybe a bit longer seems to come and go every couple of tvheadend updates.

ProfYaffle

Yeah, you might be right - I gotSOME new events in the EPG, but not all, so I've rebooted back to 3.13 to see what happens. I'll rebuild tvheadend now anyway.

I lost power a few times this week (partly the network, partly the storms) so I suppose it might also be related to that. Or, or, or...

ProfYaffle

Q: When did the Commonwealth Games streams come on line? About the same time? Could there simply be some channel shuffling and/or EPG updates to accomodate this in some way?

ProfYaffle

A: Yes, that's part of my problem. CBBC HD is off air on Freeview to make room for the games... but still on Freesat. So, I'm getting conflicting EPG updates from the two channels.

ProfYaffle

... but I still seem to be missing BBC Four HD, BBC Three HD and some others in the EPG from Freesat ...

ProfYaffle

Okay, I'm not certain, but it looks like I'm getting pretty much nothing from the DVB-S EPG. At best, I get now/next... at worst, nothing whatsoever on any channel I've checked. I hadn't noticed before because like-named channels are merged with their Freeview equivalents, so the Freeview EPG has hidden the problem.

I've also reverted to a few versions of tvheadend from the past couple of weeks (back to 3.9.1032~g704c17e, anyway), just to see if perexg's latest EPG commits caused the problem... same problem. So I'm back to wondering whether something's changed on the EPG format that tvheadend isn't able to pick up at the moment. I'll ask on #hts when I get the chance, as it's very strange...

ProfYaffle

And.... they're back. Having poked, prodded and tweaked, having added some muxes and altered others, I finally set the networks to Idle Scan as I went to bed last night. Lo and behold, my EPG is now three times the size and all channels are present and correct.

Al B

Yeah that seems to of worked for me aswel.

Set the idle scan and left it all day and all channels seem to have epg now and epg items is over 20000.

I think it used to just populate all on initial scan. But oh well seems to be working for now.

Thomas K

Hello Guys!

A couple of days ago i have done the update of tvh from the unstable repo around 3.9.5xx to 3.9.1073 and after some time (think about 3 to 4 days) I had the same behavior that EIT-EPG data isn't grabbed anymore. I was happy that after the upgrade to 3.9.1083 the EPG data was fetching again. But I think that was the cause of the reboot after updating tvh. Today im missing EPG again on a bunch of channels. So I found this topic. And what can i say? In DVB Adapter -> Network configuration -> "Idle scan muxes" was "false". It seems that this option was magically disabled with the update and EPG was only updated directly afte rservice restart (Maybe option Skip initial scan=false ?). And i bet my 2 cents that enabling "Idle scan muxes" was the reason.

@Prof Yaffle

Thanks for digging into this and your efforts for the community.

Greetings from Austria :-)

ProfYaffle

Gern geschehen :)

Latty Jordan

I'm another who's got this problem. I had build 946 working fine. Upgrading to 1050 caused some problems, I can't remember what exactly, but when I downgraded back to I lost everything on the Automatic Recorder that was specifically tied to a DVB-S channel. DVB-T stuff and programmes not linked to any channel were fine. I'd also upgraded the kernel about that time. I can't remember to and from which, but both were fairly recent Arch Linux on arm5 (pink pogoplug), and it somehow overwrote the working firmware for my DVB-T stick with a non-working version, so I wasn't sure what caused the problem. Especially as I often do a full system upgrade before building tv-headend, in order to have it built against the latest libraries.

Theb I upgraded to 1083, and the problem I can't remember didn't come back. I did notice that I had lost the EPG for a couple of channels that only publish two or three days ahead, but I assumed that was linked to the new cron-able epggrab. Maybe I'd scheduled something to record a bit too close. But I've tried scheduling it with a clear window of at least an hour either side, and still it doesn't pick up anything from DVB-S. Changing idle scan to true doesn't seem to help either.

Latty Jordan

Looking at the messages, I see that it seems to be choking on a transponder that broadcast both in DVB-S/MPEG-2
and DVB-S/MPEG-4, namely 12604H on Astra 19E, and that it never moves on from there. It throws up a couple of errors, nit: invalid checksum (len 832), and eit: invalid checksum (len 1609), and then seems to stop scanning.