Need help getting channels to map to services

Ronald Hall

I apologize for may being so dense but for the life of me I have been unable to get anywhere with the EPG in tvheadend. I have read countless posts on the XBMC and tvheadend forums without making any progress on this.

My configuration is an HDHR3 (HDHomeRun Prime w/cablecard), running Raspbmc with XBMC 20130630 build. This is a nightly for Version 13 and I have selected it due to a bug in the 20130503 release of Frodo that apparently causes problems with the HDHomeRun (if I’m mistaken please let me know). In fact I have tried about a dozen different builds and found this and the 20130627 builds to at least appear to function as expected. At any rate, all this is using the Model B Raspberry Pi with 512 MB memory. I live in the USA and have a schedules direct account that I use tv_grab_na_dd with. Note I had to install xmltv since it did not exist in the Raspbmc distribution (Aug 2013 release). Since my interest here is using tvheadend to record programs I have removed the xbmc startup so only tvheadend server is running. I have also edited the /etc/dvbhdhomerun file to ensure proper detection and setup of the adapters

I have started the configuration of tvheadend and have gone to the Configuration->DVB Inputs->TV Adapters tab, and selected from the TV Adapter drop down and chosen one of the adapters, in particular “HDHomeRun ATSC 13199A5E-0”, On the General tab from the Adapter Configuration dialog I have selected “Enabled”, “Autodetect muxes” and “Idle Scanning” all other check boxes are clear and then selected SAVE. After a few moments the number of muxes and number awaiting scan were both 157 and after maybe 30 minutes the awaiting scan count finally reached 0 and there was about 495 services found. I then selected the “Map DVB services to channels...” button. If I select the Multiplexes or Services tabs they populate with information, however on the Services tab the Service name field is blank and the Channel name field is grayed “Unmapped” and the Provider and Network fields are blank.

I went to the Channel/EPG->EPG Grabber tab, the check boxes in “General Config” are all clear, on the “Internal Grabber” have XMLTV: North America (Data Direct) selected in the Module drop down with the Grab Interval set to 12 hours. Nothing is checked in either the Over the Air Grabbers or External Interfaces. After this the Channel/EPG->Channels tab has nothing displayed other than the column headings.

Prior to this I had run the tv_grab_na_dd --configure from the command line and it has created the tv_grab_na_dd.conf file in ~/.xmltv directory.

So I have been over this a dozen times with no joy, can anyone tell me what stupid thing I’m missing here? I’m at the end of my wits on this.

TIA
Ron

Dan Colbert

I'm with you, Ron. Everything works except for the XMLTV stuff.

My configuration is a little different in that I have a Hauppauge 950Q USB and I'm trying to use WebGrab+. The XML file generates successfully from WG+, but I still don't get any channel info in EPG -> Channels.

I wish there were something I could do to help you - maybe someone will take pity on us and allow us both to take our rightful place - spaced-out in front of a working PVR after a long day's work.

If I finally figure anything out, I'll make sure I let you know.

Dan

Ronald Hall

Thanks much Dan, misery loves company. I've been playing at this for close to a month now, I would like to put a Pi to some useful work. I have tried running Live TV out of XBMC with my Pi but it just doesn't seem to have the juice to handle HD. SD appears fine but HD is quite pixelated. I'm wondering if I'm wasting my time here trying to record using the Pi, as I would absolutely want HD content, granted recording is way different than rendering. If I every make this happen I'll also be sure to let you know. Thanks for the encouragement

ron

Dan Colbert

Ron,

As I re-read your original post, I'm not sure if this will work for you, but I figured out my problem. It was permissions.

Tvheadend runs everything under a user named "hts". When it calls the grabber (tv_grab_wg++ in my case, tv_grab_na_dd in yours), it runs it under "hts". When I installed and configured the tv_grab file, I did it under my main account ("parents") and it worked great - I could see all of the XML data just fine. Tvheadend could see the grabber in the list, it just never see the subsequent XML.

The reason it saw nothing is because it ran the grabber using "hts". It could see the grabber because "hts" has permissions in /usr/bin. However, it didn't have permissions to see what the grabber was "grabbing" <he-he> out of the "parents" directory structure.

I fixed it by rerunning the config under the "hts" account, thus placing everything in the same directory structure of the tvheadend user. Now tvheadend shows all of the XMLTV data in the EPG.

I hope this solves your problem.

Dan

Ronald Hall

Hi Dan, thanks for thinking of me. However after reading your reply I though that I would go have a look. If I do a ps -ef | grep tvhead I get output as follows:

root 1529 1 0 Oct06 ? 00:00:00 su - pi -c /usr/bin/tvheadend -C -d

pi 1546 1529 0 Oct06 ? 00:07:06 /usr/bin/tvheadend -C -d

This indicates to me that tvheadend was started by root who did an su to the pi user account, line 2 tells me that tvheadend is running as the pi user not hts. In fact the .hts configuration directory used by tvheadend is a sub-directory of the pi user account (/home/pi/.hts). So I don’t think that is what is happening here.

What I have fooled around with in the interim is the following. I gave WebGrabPlus a shot and installed it. I have it running each day and updating the “guild.xml” file within the wg++ sub-directory (/home/pi/wg++). That seems to be happening just fine with the exception that attempting to get more than a day or 2 of tv listings causes it to crash on “Out of memory” This was very similar to running tv_grab_na_dd which never completed on my system as it always bombed on out of memory errors. This all strikes me as odd since when I do a cat /proc/meminfo it shows that I have about 350 MB of memory available. At any rate I did leave WebGrabPlus installed and setup a cron job to run it once a day.

If I run tv_grab_wg++ by hand it basically outputs the guild.xml file to stdout, so I assume that when tvheadend runs it, tvheadend is just “looking” at stdout. At any rate after a day or so of just letting the system do it thing I found that looking at the system logs (/var/log/syslog) that tvheadend was running tv_grab_wg++.

Finally I went to “channels” under the Config->EPG in tvheadend and manually made an entry of a channel and after doing a save the EPG data showed up on the EPG tab. As I added channels by hand the data for those channels was then appearing in the EPG. Seems like an awful and tedious task to have to do this as I have a couple hundred channels (services). This however still left me with the problem that none of the channels were mapped to services and hence I still couldn’t record squat. So yesterday I tried mapping a channel manually and when I did the entries in the EPG appeared “bolded” for that channel (not sure of the significance but “exciting” anyway). I had planned to try an record some random show on that channel (not sure I’ve actually mapped it to the correct channel but I think I have) just to see if this all works. In summary from my perspective (I have to be missing something here) configuration and use of tvheadend makes it generally useless due to the tedium involved. I cannot for the life of me believe anyone uses it if they have to go through that. I started looking at tvheadend because it was “supposed” to be a light weight and straight forward alternative to MythTV backend. If this is “simplier” than MythTV I can only assume folks with a Phd in this field are even remotely able to configure it. At any rate that is my story, anything ring any bells as you read this? Did your Config->EPG->channels automatically fill with information? Did the mapping between services and channels happen automatically?