TVHeadend with 2 tuners

Leigh Davis

Hi All, I have read through these forums a lot and I can't seem to find anyone with the same issue.

I am running Openelec 6.0.3 on RPi 2. I have two identical Hauppauge 950Q USB tuners attached to a powered USB hub, both are detected fine based on dmesg and also both show up in TVHeadend. I should mention I am in Canada (ATSC).

Here is the issue: the reason I have two tuners is because my house is situated between two different TV markets and I need two completely separate antennas to receive channels from both markets. I thought I could "combine" all of the channels in TVHeadend but I'm running into some issues.

First, I have tried disabling TVHeadend, and have run w_scan for both tuners, both pick up all frequencies they are supposed to.

After doing this, I reactivated TVHeadend and manually set up muxes for two separate networks (representing the two different TV markets). Each tuner was set up to run on its own network representing the market it points at. Only 1 mux was detected, the rest "failed". I have tried disabling one tuner then the other and forcing a re-scan, but no additional muxes are successfully detected.

After reading other posts, one issue could be using the Rpi as the backend. All USB devices and network go through one "pipeline", so that could cause issues, but how come both tuners still appear to work fine based on dmesg and w_scan?

I am wondering if this is an issue with TVHeadend itself. I have read that others have been successful using TVHeadend with multiple tuners for the purpose of recording and watching shows at the same time. In my case, each tuner has a mutually exclusive list of muxes it can detect, and I wonder if TVHeadend is capable of using certain tuners for certain channels. I have read that with multiple tuners, TVHeadend picks the first free tuner to tune to a channel. If it's picking the wrong tuner then perhaps that is the reason the muxes are not being detected?

Has anyone had this same issue before? Any advice would be appreciated.

Maury Markowitz

Hey Leigh, I have the same problem to solve and picked TVH on ODroid to solve it. If this doesn't work... damb.

Where are you located? I'm in Ajax. If you're close maybe I can come over with my setup and we can see if it works on my host?

Leigh Davis

Hi Maury,

I'm in Burlington. I actually made some headway after a late night last night. Here are the steps I took:

1. Uninstall tvheadend service and tvheadend PVR client in kodi.

2. Delete all files in my /storage/.hts/tvheadend folder as well as my /storage/.kodi/userdata/addon_data/service.multimedia.tvheadend folder (I was trying to do a complete uninstall and re-install based on other users descriptions).

3. Unplug one of the USB tuners and reboot.

4. Ran w_scan on the one tuner, working fine, detects all expected muxes.

5. Installed tvheadend service in kodi, log into web interface. This time I set up a network for Toronto and used the predefined list of muxes (ATSC US centre frequency list). However, I deleted all muxes that weren't detected by w_scan. I set the tuner adapter to the Toronto network and also added 'Toronto' to the adapter name to differentiate the two. I also changed the priority and streaming priority to '1' (not sure if that makes a difference when using multiple tuners). All muxes scanned successfully (incredible).

6. Set up a network for Buffalo, used the predefined muxes list and deleted muxes not previously detected by w_scan. Plugged in the second USB tuner and rebooted.

7. Logged back into web interface, set the second tuner to the Buffalo network, added 'Buffalo' to adapter name, left priority and stream priority as '0'. Then I did a force scan, and incredibly, all muxes were detected.

8. Mapped services to all channels. This doesn't work perfectly for me, some of the channel names I had to manually change myself.

9. All of the channels were able to play within the web server with the VLC player. So I was pretty friggin happy and rebooted once more.

10. In kodi, installed the tvheadend PVR client, configured, enabled TV service.

Then I try to play the channels within kodi. The channels from the Toronto tuner play fine, however, the Buffalo ones do not (I get the "no input detected" error and it buffers for a long time with no progress). Also, now the Buffalo channels don't play in the web interface either.

I think I'm really close, there's just something I'm overlooking. The Toronto tuner is "adapter0" while the Buffalo tuner is "adapter1", I have a suspicion that is why the Toronto channels work and the Buffalo channels do not.

Again this gets back to how tvheadend treats the different tuners. Still hoping someone could explain how it works and if there is any advice they could give.

Maury Markowitz

"This time I set up a network for Toronto and used the predefined list of muxes (ATSC US centre frequency list). However, I deleted all muxes that weren't detected by w_scan."

Did you actually delete them, or simply disable them?

"I set the tuner adapter to the Toronto network and also added 'Toronto' to the adapter name to differentiate the two"

This is a bit confusing... what is "the two" in this case? I think you mean the one you'reabout to add?

"some of the channel names I had to manually change myself"

I have found this too, CHCH is one for me.

"All of the channels were able to play within the web server"

So you mean that in the web interface you could successfully play channels even though they were mapped to different hardware?

If so, then that is all I need, because I use a ATV client which uses the web interface, so I should be OK.

Leigh Davis

Hi Maury,

I deleted the files. As soon as you re-install tvheadend they come back again. If you don't want to do this you can copy them to "backup" files and delete the originals.

The two tuners I have are identical, so in the tvheadend web interface, the adapter names are also identical. You can edit the names, so I just added a prefix to each one to help remember which adapter was connected to which antenna.

I have played around with it a little more. I set the priority of each adapter to the same value, and have rebooted a couple times and I seem to be able to play all channels in the tvheadend web interface. Haven't tried in Kodi yet.

So the answer is yes, it does appear to be possible.

Good luck with your system!