Pi TV Hat issues with web player and Plex

apbarratt

Hi guys, thank you for this forum first, it's helped me a fair bit these last couple of days getting as far as I have 🙂

So I spotted the Raspberry Pi TV Hat going cheap on Amazon and thought it could be fun to try adding live TV to my Plex server.

After a lot of trial and error, I've managed to install the hat on a Raspberry Pi 3 running the latest Raspbian OS Lite 64bit (bookworm) and used the version of TVheadend that was in apt. I followed the official guide here:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/app/uploads/2018/10/Getting-started-with-the-Raspberry-Pi-TV-HAT.pdf

The guide suggests everything should just work inside the app, that I can watch TV by clicking the little TV icon on the landing page, but for me I only ever see the message "An unknown error occurred." on a black screen for each channel.
The same channels can be loaded directly in VLC or in the web browser itself. For example, I can go to Configuration/DVB Inputs/Services and click the play icon next to one of the channels and see it open correctly and I can click through the whole list as a playlist in VLC using http://tv.local:9981/playlist/channels

The next step then was to try and get this Pi to provide the stream to my Plex server. So I installed TVHProxy from here: chkuendig/tvhProxy and this seems to be successfully running and Plex is able to detect it and the EPG correctly. But much like the TVHeadend UI itself, it's failing to actually start playing these channels with a "Playback Error" of "Could not tune channel. Please check your tuner or antenna."

Could anyone provide any advice for what I might be doing wrong? It seems odd that the Raspberry Pi official guide for the hat seems to suggest the web player on the TVH UI will just work as I'm certain I haven't missed any steps in configuring it :/

apbarratt

Quicky update to say I've just spotted this thread and am having a read through to see if it helps with at least the plex side of things for me 🙂
https://tvheadend.org/d/8698-tvheadend-hdhomerun-emulation-howto

apbarratt

Right then, that took entirely too long but I've now got a newer version of TVHeadend running that includes the new HDHomeRun emulation. Unfortunately, I don't see any kind of sign that it is working :/
Plex doesn't see it at all with this setup. So that's frustrating.

The latest code I'm running, now in a docker container, has the same situation as before though. I can watch TV, but not with the web interface's built in player. To be honest, this doesn't actually worry me too much given the ultimate goal is to watch using Plex once I've got it figured out.

Here is the Docker compose I'm using that seems to be doing the job of running TVHeadend with on the Pi3 with Hat nicely:

volumes:
  tvheadend:

services:
  tvheadend:
    image: ghcr.io/tvheadend/tvheadend:master-debian
    cap_drop:
      - all
    container_name: tvheadend
    devices:
      - /dev/dvb/
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - RUN_OPTS=
    volumes:
      - tvheadend:/var/lib/tvheadend:rw
      - /export/recordings:/var/lib/tvheadend/recordings:rw
    network_mode: host
    command: --config '/var/lib/tvheadend'
    restart: unless-stopped
    healthcheck:
      test: wget -O - -q 'http://localhost:9981/ping' | grep -q 'PONG'

Any suggestions for getting Plex side working would be appreciated muchly 🙂

apbarratt

I'm still having issues here. I decided to download the HDHomeRun app on my Mac and it is also saying it can't find anything on my network.

When I check what ports are open on the Pi, its listing 9982 and 9981 only, which makes me wonder if the HDHomeRun simulator is actually even doing anything :/

tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:9982            0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      415777/tvheadend    
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:9981            0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      415777/tvheadend    
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:22              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      581/sshd: /usr/sbin 
tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:46655         0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      411099/code-d78a74b 
tcp6       0      0 :::22                   :::*                    LISTEN      581/sshd: /usr/sbin 
apbarratt@tv:~ $ ```

apbarratt

Hi guys, I'm definitely making progress now.
I've had my setup working with Plex for several days now. I realised part of my mistake was using the more official Tvheadend Docker image from ghcr.io but with tutorial instructions from the more preconfigured LinuxServer image 😅

Anyway, here's my compose file as it stands right now:

services:
  tvheadend:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/tvheadend:latest
    container_name: tvheadend
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Etc/UTC
      - RUN_OPTS= #optional
    volumes:
      - /tvheadend/config:/config
      - /tvheadend/recordings:/recordings
      - /tvheadend/picons:/picons
    network_mode: host
    devices:
      - /dev/dvb/
    restart: unless-stopped
    healthcheck:
      test: wget -O - -q 'http://localhost:9981/ping' | grep -q 'PONG'

Right now however I seem to be struggling with these "picon" things. The LinuxServer docs seem to suggest I need only set their path to file:///picons/%C.png for channel icons and file:///picons/ for picons, but thus far I'm seeing nothing appearing and the paths being generated seem to just 404.

I'd very much like to write a blog post somewhere at some point documenting the whole process from start to finish, so any suggestions on what I should look at next would be most appreciated 🙂

apbarratt

Got Picons working. I'd been wanting to see the picons on my host machine so had added a volume line in my compose file for them. I'm not entirely sure why, but it seems the stuff inside LinuxServer's icon-builder package that is included with their container stops if they detect an existing picons folder. So the result was that it assumed the volume that appeared on startup (which of course was blank) was an existing picons folder. Ah well. Lesson learned.

So for anyone else arriving here, my compose file currently looks like this:

services:
  tvheadend:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/tvheadend:latest
    container_name: tvheadend
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Etc/UTC
      - RUN_OPTS= #optional
    volumes:
      - ~/tvheadend/config:/config
      - ~/tvheadend/recordings:/recordings
    network_mode: host #HDHomeRun requires this instead of exposing individual ports.
    devices:
      - /dev/dvb/ #This points the way to the Pi TV Hat.
    restart: unless-stopped
    healthcheck:
      test: wget -O - -q 'http://localhost:9981/ping' | grep -q 'PONG'

apbarratt

Quick aside, would anyone with the power mind changing the title of this thread from Pi TV Hat issues with web player and Plex to Setting up Pi TV Hat and Plex? Figured it might prove helpful for anyone else landing here.

I've given up on the idea of the built in web player ever working, but it was never my intention to use TVHeadEnd's web ui frequently anyway.

apbarratt

Aaaaand another update. Running docker ps showed my container as unhealthy.
I'm guessing that Tvheadend must have some listener defined somewhere stating that it'll listen on 127.0.0.1:9981 but not localhost:9981. As I say, it's just a guess, but the result was that my little health check there was trying to wget the /ping endpoint on localhost and failing. Changing it to the loop back IP has solved it and it now reports as healthy.

services:
  tvheadend:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/tvheadend:latest
    container_name: tvheadend
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Etc/UTC
      - RUN_OPTS= #optional
    volumes:
      - ~/tvheadend/config:/config
      - ~/tvheadend/recordings:/recordings
    network_mode: host #HDHomeRun requires this instead of exposing individual ports.
    devices:
      - /dev/dvb/ #This points the way to the Pi TV Hat.
    restart: unless-stopped
    healthcheck:
      test: wget -O - -q 'http://127.0.0.1:9981/ping' | grep -q 'PONG'