Diappearing Autorecs

Steve S

Hello! I've been using tvheadend for a couple months and trying to get it solid enough to pass the "wife test."

My entire setup is self-contained on TrueNAS Scale with Tvheadend, xTeVe and Jellyfin installed from TrueCharts and traefik handling the ingress web traffic.

I have the following TV sources:
* HDHomeRun (Old 2 tuner units) connected to an attic antenna (I used these for MythTV a LONG time ago)
* IPTV service, XtremeHDIPTV

The IPTV provider has a HUGE list of channels. Based on research, I implemented xTeVe to filter the M3U to a list that I could handle.

Lastly, the guide data from the IPTV provider is vastly lacking, no episode data, limited days in advance, etc. So, I have Schedules Direct configured, with Dish Network selected as a the provider, and mapped the channels appropriately. All seems to be working very well, except...

A few different times, the autorecs linked to any IPTV channels simply disappear. I don't know why, but I'm guessing that the channels are being deleted and recreated in tvheadend. My current suspicion that I'm investigating is that xTeVe us sometimes providing a m3u with the traefik FQDN as the hostname and sometimes uses the NAS IP and still others, the Kubernetes internal IP address. I could reason that this would confuse tvheadend. What can I check or change to eliminate this?

Lastly, do I need to have xTeVe in the mix? I use the filters and mapping to bring the channel list down to something manageable, rather than the several thousand channels available in the m3u. Can tvheaddend handle this efficiently in its current version?

I'm thinking of installing xTeVe in a Debian VM to eliminate the Kubernetes/traefik complexities. Thoughts?

Thank you!

Steve S

Maybe there isn't enough activity here to get a quick response. I tried posting it on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/tvheadend/comments/14f8fkn/diappearing_autorecs/

Jonas Lang

Here’s all you need to know about autorecs. Have a look through the code and judge for yourself what the problem may be. https://github.com/tvheadend/tvheadend/blob/master/src/dvr/dvr_autorec.c

More information on autorecs here

https://github.com/dave-p/TVH-API-docs/issues/4

In fact there’s loads of information on autorecs which is thrown up by three simple Google search key words

GitHub TVHeadend autorecs. Have you actually tried searching.

Posting the same query on Reddit is not going to encourage anyone to reply any quicker. It’s got nothing to do with what you term “not enough activity here”. Search first and then come back with your results.

Steve S

Thank you for the information.

Yes, I searched. No, I didn't see anything useful. No, I didn't find any documentation that explained things well, so I've had to figure out everything through trial and error so far. The very first time that I publicly ask for help, I'm attacked? Very welcoming.

You assume that I can read C code and know how the system behaves from that? Not likely.

As far as Reddit, I received a helpful non-condescending response rather quickly. There is more activity there, so what's wrong with cross-posting anyway? It wasn't confirmed, but it seems plausible that if autorecs are tied to channels and the channels disappear, TVHeadend might delete the autorecs. The question was why did they get removed and re-created with another ID? That's what I was trying to uncover.

I'll continue to investigate, but it would be nice to get a helpful response rather than a go read for yourself message. I've done that already and still had questions. Is that how you learned?

Jonas Lang

You followed up your original post with another post stating there wasn’t enough activity here to get a quick response. Well I responded by saying do a bit more research before trotting off to some generic forum with the same query. This is not a 24/7 help line.

Now you say you figured it all out yourself. Exactly what the rest of us do after a decent amount of research.

If you want to know the why’s and how’s

of TVH you need to fully familiarise yourself with it. The Docs, the wiki and the forum I guarantee will throw answers to all those questions you need answered.

If you are experiencing a problem it won’t be unique and no doubt some other user will have experienced it too and will have already posted in the forum.

Not condescending, no attacking. Just pointing out the facts. Thorough research first. I’ll also draw your attention to this thread too.

DaveH

The answer you got on Reddit basically seems to say that you should stop using xTeVe (whatever that is) as that is likely to be the source of your problems. So perhaps it's not so surprising that nobody on the TVH forum responded to a problem with some other component that I for one have never even heard of.

So it seems to me that taking it to Reddit was exactly the right thing to do on this occasion, but criticising the TVH forum for not being able to help with a problem that isn't in TVH seems unjustified. It won't improve your chances of getting help in future, though hopefully it won't make it much worse either.

Glad that you're making progress with your problem.

Steve S

xTeVe is a M3U proxy, which allows filtering the feed and associating the program guide, etc. It's mentioned here:

* https://tvheadend.org/d/7109-tvheadend-vs-xteve-creating-failover-feeds
* https://www.reddit.com/r/tvheadend/comments/11dr4ud/tvheadend_vs_xteve_when_to_use_either_or_use_both/

The m3u feed from my IPTV provider is 56MB, has 1191756 lines and 1160536 streams, including on-demand. +When I add this feed to tvheadend, it hangs indefinitely+ and fails to process anything and the web interface will not come up. The proxy was originally designed for Plex, but allows for filtering the m3u to a usable list and offers m3u and xml as well. It worked well with tvheadend at first.

The issue came up with autorecs being deleted and xTeVe certainly didn't do this - tvheadend did. After posting on reddit and the response leading me to remove xTeVe, tvheadend couldn't handle the list from the provider. I also found that sometimes xTeVe provides a m3u list with the FQDN, NAS IP address or the Kubernetes IP address. I thought this could be confusing tvheadend, but then I found it sometimes returns a blank m3u when it's in the process of updating. Ah-ha! I think this likely explains what was happening. The channels were being deleted because they were disappearing from the m3u temporarily. Unfortunately for me, instead of unlinking the autorec from the channel or disabling it, it simply deleted the autorec altogether, leaving me wondering why the wife's programs were no longer being recorded. Does this make sense? Would it make sense to change the autorec behavior for this scenario? It's 100% a tvheadend issue, but it's where the fallout happened and where the fix is needed.

I ended up writing a bash script to filter the m3u down to a list that tvheadend doesn't choke on and lock up.

In my quest to figure out why this happened, I posted here. I was as clear and descriptive as I could be and I expected a helpful response or at least an inquiry for further details that I didn't know was needed at first. Instead, I was accused of not doing any research and told to figure it out on my own. This was my very first post here and I certainly didn't feel welcomed. I've posted on other forums that took a week or two to get a response, so perhaps I jumped the gun, but I don't see a problem with cross-posting.

What you didn't know is that a couple weeks ago I already submitted a pull request on github - trying to contribute back to the community.

I think I was respectful to everyone. If you feel differently, please point out where I could have improved my inquiry.

Jonas Lang

You probably don’t realise it but you’re again coming across as defensive in your latest post. Nobody chastised you. It was literally pointed out to you that if you did a little more research and come back here with the results, which you are now doing now and most importantly this forum is not a paid support line that jumps when a user is experiencing a problem.

It may be best all round if you leave matters rest and put it down to a first post exuberance. I’m sure if anyone else here is familiar with xTeVe with TVH and is passing through that they will respond where necessary.

You mentioned that you submitted a PR on GitHub. Was your PR accepted and merged. Also did you submit a bug report to TVH https://tvheadend.org/issues?per_page=50

Anonymous

Steve S wrote:

> The issue came up with autorecs being deleted and xTeVe certainly didn't do this - tvheadend did.

The default config of tvh is: delete autorecs if a there are more then 50.

Check that "Autorec maximum count" is set to 0.

Default behaviour is: delete the oldest rec if there are more than 50.