Issues starting a recording to external HDD

Daniel Morgan

Hi all hope you can help, I'm getting more familiar with Linux and tvheadend. The only issue i have now is even though tvheadend has the recording directory changed to my external HDD, when you start a recording it just has a red exclamation mark next to the channel. My Setup:

Raspberry pi 3B+
Pi TV HAT
32gb sandisk micro sd card
1TB WD elements external HDD (formatted to ext4)

Pi picks up the drive and i believe I've successfully auto mounted the drive on boot. I'm not sure if its a read/write permission issue or something else. If you require any log files, I'm more than happy to provide, you just need to tell me how to obtain it ha.

Thanks

Daniel Morgan

Just a little update, i tried giving a chmod 775 permission to the external hdd, that seemed to allow the recording to go to scheduled. However when the program started the recording instantly failed with an error message "time missed"

Daniel Morgan

Any suggestions?

Jonas Lang

Daniel Morgan what path are you using to the external drive. As long as you have the correct path defined there should be no need to mess around with permissions

Daniel Morgan

Jonas Lang media/(device name)/1.0 TB Volume.

This is the path of my external drive. It's formatted to ext3.

Jonas Lang

Daniel Morgan is that the exact path to your storage drive. It doesn’t look right.

Daniel Morgan

So after looking into it, this is in fact the location of my external drive:
/media/martinpi/357f037a-bfb6-da01-205b-037abfb6da01/Recordings

Recordings folder was created here once i finally figured out how to give the drive permissions, however, now that ive updated TVH storage path as shown above, when i go to a tv channel on kodi and select record, no message appears on kodi to confirm recording schedule has started and when referencing the tab upcoming/current recordings, nothing shows. And to confirm recordings are still not happening the led light on the external drive is solid white, not flashing to indicate activity. If the storage path is correct, why would TVH still not take in a recording? something must be still missing or incorrect?
The following command was given to to give the drive permissions:

martinpi@martinpi:~ $ su
Password:
root@martinpi:/home/martinpi# sudo chmod -R 777 /media/martinpi/357f037a-bfb6-da01-205b-037abfb6da01
root@martinpi:/home/martinpi#

Thanks

Flole

Instead of guessing what might be wrong I suggest taking a look at the debug logs to see what actually is wrong.

Daniel Morgan

Within TVH?

Jonas Lang

Daniel Morgan try this path

/var/media/martinpi/357f037a-bfb6-da01-205b-037abfb6da01

I’m not sure what you’ve done messing around with permissions but that path should work.

Daniel Morgan

Yeahni thought so too. All that happens is recordings go straight to failed recording and the status is "time missed"

Interestingly, when trying to find the debug location within Linux, THV never created a /home/HTS folder. To find anything to do with TVH I had to go to the following path:
Var/lib/Tvheadend

What's even stranger is the initial setup wizard from the beginning all setup perfectly. This has been a strange install I think.

Jonas Lang

Daniel Morgan yes that’s where TVH is installed now. Those changes to the builds were made about one year ago.

As suggested start looking through the debug logs for clues to where your problem lies. If needed post a copy here for others to examine too.

Attaching an external USB drive to your RPI should see it auto mounted and once its path is correctly defined in TVH you should have no need to mess around with permissions to get recordings working correctly.

You could as an experiment install LibreELEC on another SD card and install both the TVH client and server add on, configure them and have both a backend and frontend running simultaneously on your RPI. Again just a suggestion to make life easier.

Daniel Morgan

Brill thank you, could you tell me how I access or get a copy of the debug logs? I had a good look around TVH and around the file paths but couldn't see it.

Thanks for your help

Jonas Lang

Daniel Morgan do you have debug enabled.

Daniel Morgan

Jonas Lang I tried to find the option but I can't find it on the configuration options.

Jonas Lang

Daniel Morgan someone got in ahead of me.

The debug log should give you an idea where the problem lies. I reckon the path I gave you is correct though. Personally if I was using an RPI I’d go the LibreELEC route. You’ll always have the TVH server available to other frontends should you require it.

DeltaMikeCharlie

Configuration | General | Base | Default view level = Expert.

Configuration | Debugging | Configuration.

Daniel Morgan

Jonas Lang thank you that would be good. So I've finally enabled the debug option and set the log path to the TV same head end folder. However after a couple of recording attempts I cant see a log being created. Thanks

DeltaMikeCharlie

@Daniel Morgan - Have you tried adding the external USB drive to fstab and mounting it a boot time?

Daniel Morgan

DeltaMikeCharlie I haven't, and not sure how to do that but will look into it