Getting tvheadend to work with hauppage hvr1600 and hvr1800

Bob Lightfoot

I recently was recommended by a friend to switch my working mythtv media pc from mythtv to xmbc/tvheadend. So far tvheadened has been one headache after another and far less intuitive than mythtv was. But still I persist cause I refuse to give up. At this point I am stuck with a version of tvheadend my friend pre-built and packaged for me version 3.5.3015 iirc and the version 3.4 I downloaded and built for myself. The building for myself was interesting in that dvb-scan would fail if configure was run as a non-root user {good development practice}, but pass if configure was run as root {poor development practice}. This also meant that make had to be run as root or it would fail. Now the webpage localhost:9981 works when the bin/tvheadend command is active. I went to DVB Inputs -- TV Adapters and clicked Add DVB Network by location only to be presented with an empty popup window. So i resorted to adding Multiplexs manually. For /dev/dvb/adapter0/frontend0 I looked up the stations in question http://transition.fcc.gov/fcc-bin/tvq?city=Louisville&state=KY and entered their center frequencies. These also matched the transport frequencies that mythtv was using. The initial scans complete, but there are no services found. The adapters appear to be Samsung S5H1409 QAM/8VSB according to what tvheadend reports.

I have no idea what log or config files to start looking at to find out why cards and a system that works in mythtv won't work for tvheadend. Suggestions and help are appreciated.

Bob Lightfoot

Well I've kept poking at this. I looked again at the mythtv transport definitions and they were all 8VSB type. So I went to .hts/tvheadend/dvbmuxes and drilled down to change the constelaltion of each from QAM256 to 8VSB. Now 8VSB was not an option in the gui as only QAM64 and QAM256 were presented. Is this a bug or feature? Any way I now have 6 scanned muxes and 16 services found. I pressed the Map DVB services to Channels and am waiting. We'll find out what happens come morning.

Bob Lightfoot

So I waited overnight and nothing mapped. SO now I manually added channel names on the DVB-Services Page and channels started showing up in the EPG Page. At first I used Call Signs on Adapter0 {WLKY-DT1 for ex.} and Station Numbers on Adapter2 {32.1 for example}. THen I launched XBMC and things worked I could view TV of course there was no EPG for some reason. Now I've gone back and used Station Numbers on both adapters to see if it confuses things.

Bob Lightfoot

Well the test proves that if the same channel number exists on 2 adapters it only shows once in XBMC. DOn't know if this means I can only record it once or how this works. More testing and feedback from other user is needed to figure this one out. Worst part of this whole experience so far has been nothing that is "automatic" has worked.

Bob Lightfoot

OK I solved the missing network definitions issue. In short build tvheadened for yourself not rely on friends who build without dvbscan cause they didn;t need it.

Bob Lightfoot

I've also followed the Analogue NTSC How To so that I now have both Samsung Units decoding ATSC TV and the HVR1600 Analogue NTSC working. Still waiting for the EIT EPG to download and start working. Also working on connecting multiple frontends to the one tvheadend backend. It is looking better than my initial post, but still has a ways to go to compete with all mythtv features.

Lance Gilbert

Hi Bob!

I've recently installed an HVR 1600 on an openSUSE 13.1 system running TVHeadend 4.0.7 ... and have encountered difficulty! Foremost, I have to run tvheadend with the -C option to be able to login/access the webadmin interface (despite adding a new user ...). Once logged in, I can see the adapters listed in the TV Tuners tab, but can't get scanning/tuning to work at all. From what I've seen on screenshots of the configuration page, I should see "Add DVB network by location" and "Map DVB services to channels" buttons when selecting the tuner neither button is present.

I tinkered with mythtv prior to giving tvheadend a try, and know that the card is functional, scans, and tunes to OTA HDTV atsc channels in Portland, OR...

Not sure what to do from here ... I've listed output of the service config here:

> tvheadend.service - Tvheadend - a TV streaming server and DVR
> Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/tvheadend.service; enabled)
> Active: active (running) since Fri 2015-10-30 20:28:32 PDT; 53min ago
> Process: 29431 ExecStart=/usr/bin/tvheadend -f -p /var/run/tvheadend.pid $OPTIONS (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
> Main PID: 29432 (tvheadend)
> CGroup: /system.slice/tvheadend.service

> └─29432 /usr/bin/tvheadend -f -p /var/run/tvheadend.pid -c /home/tvheadend/config -u tvheadend -g tvheadend -6 --http_port 9981 --htsp_port 9982

Curious, how far have you gotten with full functionality/config? Respectfully,
ljg