Tvheadend not releasing HDHomeRun tuners

Davor Komljenovic

Hello, this has been happening in the last few months and it was not happening maybe 4 months ago.

I am using Tvheadend 4.3-2187_gfd8b9e8ba with HDHomeRun Expand, 4-tuner network tuner. I have been using the same setup for a long time, maybe 10 years, obviously with various Tvheadend versions. I have never had a problem like this until recently.

After a month or so of using Tvheadend and HDHomeRun Expand, all tuners are tuned to a frequency but no tuners are being used by Tvheadend (or any other application). It seems Tvheadend does not release tuners for whatever reason. I cannot catch exactly when it happens. I am using Over-the-air EIT EPG Grabber so not sure if that is causing the issue. That is the main thing I changed in the recent year, I switched from using downloaded EPG to using the over the air grabber.

When all tuners are locked, I cannot do anything with Tvheadend or the tuner until I reset the tuner remotely using a HDHomeRun utility. After that everything works correctly.

I'm not sure if this is a bug or I am missing some weird setting. Can anyone help me fix this? It is frustrating because it is causing lost recordings and repeated restarts of the tuner.

DeltaMikeCharlie

Davor Komljenovic What's the model and firmware revision of your HDHomeRun device?

dj bloc

When this next happens, check the hdhomerun web status tuner detail page to see if the resource lock is from TVH (it will be the IP address of the device running TVH)

It won't be the OTH EPG grabber. I use it regularly and record files and it works fine.

The occasions where I see this problem is if TVH crashes. When it crashes it, obviously, does not release the resource lock in an orderly fashion.

Other than that, I'd guess you have other s/w on the network connecting to the hdhomerun which will confuse TVH because it expects exclusive access to tuners.

costygsm

I have the same problem with hdhomerun flex quatro and tvheadend 4.3

DeltaMikeCharlie

costygsm What's the firmware revision of your Quatro?

JGG

This started happening to me just before Christmas, so possibly around the same time as the OP. Been running TVH 4.2 for around ten years now without any issue on a Raspberry pi, first with 4 USB DVBT tuners, then a HDHomerun Quatro just over five years ago, saving stuff to samba server, but then started losing recordings because subscriptions weren't closing down, it appears. Tried a clean install and even put the Pi and Quatro on their own router with local storage and still got the same problem. Gave up in the end due to lack of spare time and hooked an old Humax to the TV to keep my Wife happy over Christmas as the unreliabilty and constant rebooting to free the tuners up was driving her mad.
Just signed up to the new forum as I was about to revisit the problem but trying Ubuntu on an N100 I've just bought to see if that made any difference, and I find this thread.
Davor, I'll post again if the new setup makes any difference.

DeltaMikeCharlie

@JGG - Are you still using v4.2?
Do you have any more details on your Quatro? Firmware version, etc?

Davor Komljenovic

Hi, I am sorry for not replying earlier. I did not see any replies in the first week so I stopped checking the forum. I also did not receive a single email about replies to this thread. I have to check my forum account settings for notifications.

The problem keeps happening. As of today I am 100% sure it is Tvheadend that is the problem. I just came back from 2 weeks vacation. Tvheadend was running the entire time but no recordings were being recorded (I deleted all scheduled recordings and autorecs) and there were no other physical hardware even turned on (no Kodi or other software since I unplugged all devices except NAS running Tvheadend and HDHomeRun. When I left for vacation I checked the HDHomeRun tuners and they were all free. I just came back and all tuners were locked. The only thing that was running during the vacation was OTA EIT EPG Grabber and HDHomeRun page showed all tuners locked by IP address of Tvheadend.

DeltaMikeCharlie My HDHomeRun model is HDHR3-4DC and firmware is 20230713.

DeltaMikeCharlie

This is a bit of a long shot: There have been a number of users commenting on TVH not releasing HDHomeRun tuners. Because this seems to be happening with TVH v4.2 and v4.3, I’m wondering if something has changed in the HDHomeRun firmware semi-recently.

olgr

Hi.
I'm running tvh since years now - together with HDHomerun Quad. I experienced the same problem starting mid/end December 2023. I think, it started for me, when I added additional IPTV tuners (http://bit.ly/kn-clean-tv-main). The HDHomerun was the only source before. To me it looked like TVH is trying to do network scans on the IPTV and blocking the HDHomerun tuner than. Unlogical, I know, and the only way is to repower the HDR device (I put a Zigbee powersocket there now;-)).
I manually disable network scans on the IPTV network and had only one lock since than...
Maybe this helps?!

Saen Acro

Go to About press Toggle details
and copy paste content of fame /use </> button to format it/

jpatriarca

Davor Komljenovic
Hi all. I've just registered to this forum just to report that I'm getting exactly the same situation in my TvHeadend install, and I own the exact same HDHomeRun model and firmware version.

Anytime this happens, I need to reset/reboot HDHomeRun to unlock the tuner. Each one locked will list the IP of the TvHeadEnd (in this case, being a docker container, the host IP). TvHeadend just lists that's unable to grab a tuner because it's locked. This is the error I got from TVH log in the Docker service:

2024-05-16 19:06:37.047 [ INFO] mpegts: 370MHz in NOS - tuning on HDHomeRun DVB-C Tuner #3 (192.168.10.226) 2024-05-16 19:06:37.047 [ INFO] tvhdhomerun: tuning to a8qam256-6875:370000000 2024-05-16 19:06:37.047 [ ERROR] tvhdhomerun: failed to acquire lockkey: ERROR: resource locked by 192.168.10.107 2024-05-16 19:06:37.047 [ ERROR] tvhdhomerun: failed to reset pfilter: 0

This erros seems to be related with epggrab, where TVH is configured to get EPG only for Tuner #3 for all detected muxes (now limited to one only). I figure out my EPG was almost empty, and checked tuners status and all were locked.

I use this setup for more than 8 years and no lock issues has been detected until the end of this year. Since it was somewhere in December, and I'm using linuxservers TVH container, the update should have been somewhere in December 10th with version 4.3-2175_g583de2330 or December 31st with version Tvheadend 4.3-2187_gfd8b9e8ba (this was the period with the big jump versions at that time of the year.

Also, as seen in the tuner firmware version, it isn't touched since August last year. Which means that until December, no issues were detected until something changed in TVH side.

These are the actual version and details of TVH for your appreciation:

Build: 4.3-2323~g73a6bd00d (2024-05-11T15:48:47+0000)

Configure arguments:
  --disable-ffmpeg_static --disable-libfdkaac_static --disable-libtheora_static --disable-libopus_static --disable-libvorbis_static --disable-libvpx_static --disable-libx264_static --disable-libx265_static --disable-libfdkaac --enable-libopus --enable-libvorbis --enable-libvpx --enable-libx264 --enable-libx265 --disable-avahi --disable-dbus_1 --disable-bintray_cache --disable-execinfo --disable-hdhomerun_static --enable-hdhomerun_client --enable-libav --enable-pngquant --enable-trace --enable-vaapi --infodir=/usr/share/info --localstatedir=/var --mandir=/usr/share/man --prefix=/usr --python=python3 --sysconfdir=/config

Compiler:
  Using C compiler:                        cc
  Using LD flags:                           -lhdhomerun -ldvbcsa
  Build for arch:                          x86_64

Binaries:
  Using PYTHON:                            python3
  Using GZIP:                              gzip
  Using BZIP2:                             bzip2

Options:
  pie                                      yes
  ccdebug                                  no
  cardclient                               yes
  cwc                                      yes
  cccam                                    yes
  capmt                                    yes
  constcw                                  yes
  linuxdvb                                 yes
  satip_server                             yes
  satip_client                             yes
  hdhomerun_client                         yes
  hdhomerun_server                         yes
  hdhomerun_static                         no
  iptv                                     yes
  tsfile                                   yes
  dvbscan                                  yes
  timeshift                                yes
  trace                                    yes
  avahi                                    no
  zlib                                     yes
  libav                                    yes
  ffmpeg_static                            no
  libx264                                  yes
  libx264_static                           no
  libx265                                  yes
  libx265_static                           no
  libvpx                                   yes
  libvpx_static                            no
  libtheora                                yes
  libtheora_static                         no
  libvorbis                                yes
  libvorbis_static                         no
  libfdkaac                                no
  libfdkaac_static                         no
  libopus                                  yes
  libopus_static                           no
  nvenc                                    no
  vaapi                                    yes
  mmal                                     no
  omx                                      no
  inotify                                  yes
  epoll                                    yes
  pcre                                     no
  pcre2                                    yes
  uriparser                                yes
  ccache                                   no
  tvhcsa                                   yes
  bundle                                   no
  pngquant                                 yes
  kqueue                                   no
  dbus_1                                   no
  android                                  no
  gtimer_check                             no
  slow_memoryinfo                          no
  libsystemd_daemon                        no
  pcloud_cache                             yes
  ddci                                     yes
  cclang_threadsan                         no
  gperftools                               no
  execinfo                                 no
  mmx                                      yes
  sse2                                     yes
  W_unused_result                          yes
  f_stack_protector                        yes
  f_stack_protector_strong                 yes
  f_stack_check                            yes
  f_PIE                                    yes
  strlcat                                  yes
  strlcpy                                  yes
  fdatasync                                yes
  getloadavg                               yes
  atomic32                                 yes
  atomic64                                 yes
  atomic_time_t                            yes
  atomic_ptr                               yes
  bitops64                                 yes
  qsort_r                                  yes
  time_ld                                  yes
  stime                                    yes
  gmtoff                                   yes
  recvmmsg                                 yes
  sendmmsg                                 yes
  gnu_libiconv                             yes
  libiconv                                 yes
  ifnames                                  yes
  py_gzip                                  yes
  bin_pkg_config                           yes
  bin_xgettext                             yes
  bin_msgmerge                             yes
  bin_gzip                                 yes
  bin_bzip2                                yes
  ssl                                      yes
  linuxdvbapi                              yes
  linuxdvb_ca                              yes
  libhdhomerun                             yes
  upnp                                     yes
  hwaccels                                 yes
  inotify_h                                yes
  inotify_init1                            yes
  dvbcsa                                   yes
  epoll_create1                            yes
  mpegts                                   yes
  mpegts_dvb                               yes

Packages:
  openssl                                  3.1.4
  zlib                                     1.3.1
  libpcre2-8                               10.42
  liburiparser                             0.9.7
  libavfilter                              7.110.100
  libswresample                            3.9.100
  libswscale                               5.9.100
  libavformat                              58.76.100
  libavcodec                               58.134.100
  libavutil                                56.70.100
  libva                                    1.20.0
  libva-drm                                1.20.0

Installation paths:
  Prefix:                                  /usr
  Binaries:                                ${prefix}/bin
  Libraries:                               ${prefix}/lib
  Data files:                              ${prefix}/share
  Man pages:                               /usr/share/man

Hope this helps! Available to help debugging the issue.

davep

Commit 583de2330 was actually on December 1st. Looking at the commits since, the one that stands out is 3dcb7ec "hdhomerun: Add HDHomeRun server support for LiveTV only (#4461)" on December 9th.
Are you able to revert this commit and build Tvheadend? Alternatively build the current version adding "--disable-hdhomerun_server" to the configure command.
There is a PR awaiting action " Add SSDP Discovery for HDHomerun Server Emulation #1679" which might fix your problem though there seem to be issues with that PR.

jpatriarca

davep Being a docker container, I can change the tag to the release before the commit you're mentioning.

Assuming HdHomeRun server is the culpit, I can confirm I'm not using it at this moment (as I have discovered it a couple of weeks ago and wanted to test) but plan to test it to avoid having the container in host mode.

Would activate and use it mitigate or eliminate the issue?

Regarding PR #1679, any planned data/release for it to be part of the code?

davep

jpatriarca

Being a docker container, I can change the tag to the release before the commit you're mentioning.

If you could try builds immediately before that commit and immediately after, that would prove whether or not the commit was the cause.

jpatriarca

davep Can do that. But due to the incertainity of the situation, I might need several weeks to test it before I can bring a conclusion.

In the past 8 hours, I could see that epggrab worked perfectly and have not locked the tuner in my HDHomerun, as I changed the configuration for epggrab to work in a unique tuner and a unique mux of my service provider.

I'm also limiting initial scan tuners selected to avoid not having 1/2 tuners at all to pick up on stream requests for views and recordings