Signal corruption issue

art-101

Hey All,
I've been running TVHeadend for sometime from an old PC which ran Kodi with the TVHE add-on with 4 Xbox Tuners going into it.
That box recently died a horrible death (and it was using a lot of power for a box with a single job.) and I've replaced it with a VM running on Proxmox.
I'm running 4.3-2180 with the Libreelec TvH addon v12.0.0.3

I had a ballache getting TVHE running on it's own and decided to cheat and installed a LibreElec image and installed the TVHE addon and added the tuners as passthrough ports to the VM.

Libreelec can see the tuners fine, grabs the EPG and I can even show live TV and record relatively fine.

The only issue I get is what you can see in the attached image. As well as the image becoming corrupt, the audio also makes a high pitched squeal.

Recordings and timeshift get sent to an external M2 drive and the computer it all runs from has a 1Gb network port to itself.

Other VMs/Dockers running on Proxmox are an MQTT docker and Home Assistant VM with a Conbee II stick on it's own dedicated USB port.

I've tried all four tuners running on a single USB port through a 4 port unpowered hub and I've currently got them split across two ports using two hubs. I've even tried a single tuner won it's own USB port with the other removed and still get the same issue

Happy to share screenshots of various config pages to help diagnose this fault.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

DeltaMikeCharlie

art-101 I can even show live TV and record relatively fine.
art-101 the image becoming corrupt, the audio also makes a high pitched squeal.

A random thought: Is the TV signal not getting into TVH cleanly, or is TVH not streaming out to your playback device cleanly?

Try making a recording and then playing that recorded file directly (not streamed) from your file system with a tool like VLC. If the recording plays cleanly, then this points towards a streaming issue. If the recording has corruption, this points towards an antenna/tuner/USB issue.

art-101

Thanks for the ideas.

So I've tried playing a file locally and it still showed the errors in the image.

I'll try playing a live stream via VLC and see if it's dropped any frames and see what the signal strength shows in TVHE.

Failing that I've got an old TV I can directly connect to see what the signal comes through like.

Thanks for the suggestion and I'll report back here for others for future reference

DeltaMikeCharlie

art-101 So I've tried playing a file locally and it still showed the errors in the image.

This suggests a signal problem getting into TVH. Either the RF signal to your tuners or the USB path from your host to your VM/container.

DeltaMikeCharlie

I just remembered a similar issue that can occur with a Raspberry Pi if the power supply is inadequate. The Pi will run, but the tuner is flaky.

Try removing all of your USB tuners except 1 and plug that 1 directly into your server on a dedicated port, no hub.

If you have a powered hub, you could also try that.

art-101

So I've had some time to try things.

Primarily seeing if it's an issue with a tuner and it turns out it was.

One tuner was throwing loads of errors so it's now been removed.
Stupidly I never tried each tuner individually though I did try with just a single tuner and still had the errors so clearly I'd picked the one failed tuner for that test.

I wish I could pick lottery numbers like that.

Thanks for all of the suggestions everyone.
It was really appreciated.