I’m trying to get my head around how Tvheadend works and am having difficulty watching programs. I use mpv to watch and sometimes it opens the link downloaded and sometmes it doesn’t. Is there any way to work out why?
I notice that if I click on Status -> Stream the system seems to be receiving some sort of broadcast but I have no idea what channel it is and what has started it.
Unfortunately the Tvheadend forums are not very helpful.
Incidentally, I’m sure I came across a version of Tvheadend which had a builtin channel browser so you didn’t need to download links. Has anyone seen such a thing?
You might want to visit the tvheadend forums for more specific tvh issues. The forum here is best for issues with the tvh builds in CoreELEC.
The best way to think of tvh server is as an aggregator. It just allows you to collect and serve media from multiple sources (iptv streams, tuners, radio streams or even other tvh servers).
You have to supply all media for TVH (iptv links, tuners, etc). It won’t seek it out for you. So there’s no official build that will provide links for you. The closest you’ll get is tuner frequency maps for certain regions.
CoreELEC does a great job of integrating everything together into a media server - I’m amazed that the tuner managed to seek out 3500 services, but managing that many services (or knowing how to) is challenge in itself. Finding a good tutorial for it would be useful.
You can use ‘Map Services’ to add those channels you want to list/view to the Channels list.
You can even create a personal ‘bouquet’ which is a list of the channels you wish to map, or use one of the commercial bouquets if one would suit.
I am unsure from where you download the links you try.
Activity on the Status area is often due to scanning or EPG checking and downloading.
If you enter in your browser
(ip address of tvheadend server):9981/playlist
then it should offer to download your mapped channels which can be used by the likes of VLC etc.
EDIT: Reason I mention VLC is that you can select the channel to view from its playlist after opening the channels file that was downloaded.
I really am unsure what it is you are asking about so it is difficult to be more helpful
It’s difficult to explain the problem as I’m not really sure how the system works… When I click on Status it shows an active stream and the bandwidth, SNR and Signal Strength are moving around which suggests that the tuner is servicing something, but I have no idea what.
In the Tvheadend.log at the bottom of the tvheadend web page I get the following msgs every 5 secs:
2019-07-03 19:31:36.252 htsp: 127.0.0.1 [ Kodi Media Center ]: Disconnected
2019-07-03 19:31:36.253 htsp: Got connection from 127.0.0.1
2019-07-03 19:31:36.253 htsp: 127.0.0.1: Welcomed client software: Kodi Media Center (HTSPv34)
2019-07-03 19:31:36.254 htsp: 127.0.0.1 [ Kodi Media Center ]: Unauthorized access
Spend a little more of your time to understand tvheadend. I use three users: administrator (can modify all of all users), normal user (can play and record), and generic user called ‘*’ (without name and without password). The philosophy of tvheadend is simply great: Mux-> Services-> Channels and allows not only to integrate multiple services in a single channel, but also to establish priorities in the choice of the tuner, satellite, mux and service when the user requests a TV channel. It also allows to eliminate languages, teletext, subtitles, etc. in the output stream to save bandwidth. For the output streams I always use htsp and matroska. Transcoding in amlogic devices is always bad, you need a more powerful processor like Intel or AMD.
The lack of manuals is a general problem in all linux applications, you always have to spend some time to understand the philosophy with which the creator of the program has made the application.
I can see that Tvheadend is a powerful program and I intend to spend a lot of time familiarising myself with it. In fact Tvheadend is more important to me than Kodi. I mainly want a programmable DVB-S2 tuner and my Mecool KIII Pro with CoreELEC found around 3000 services. That many is too much to handle but that’s what I get when I select pre-defined muxes and a scan is inititated. This time I’ve open up the logging window at the bottom to see what is going on. Is this info saved in a log file? Maybe I should enable logging next time I install so I have a record of what the system is doing. Another problem is understanding what is being logged - don’t understand much of the Satellite terminology - muxes, services channels, Symbol Rate, modulation, htsp matroska etc etc. An introduction to these basic terms would help a lot. I’ll keep looking for something. A Satellite 101 Primer would be useful.
I think you do not need to open the log file unless you have problems or errors with the tuner. The first time it is good to do a search of predefined muxes to see what there is and get a correct configuration of reception parameters, but finally I recommend you to disable ‘Network discovery’ in the ‘Networks’ tab and delete all the muxes that do not they have an interest for you, this will erase all the services of the erased muxes. If you only have a single tuner, I recommend that you disable ‘Over-the-air EPG’, ‘Idle scan’, ‘EIT - skip TSID check’, and now you forget ‘epg’, tvheadend will respond better if this is not busy making things.
In case you find it useful I use three satellites and one dvb-t, 52 muxes, 1192 services but only 442 enabled that are finally mapped in only 271 TV channels in four tags groups (my country: 93, another country: 82, sports: 62 and adults: 34). I do not use bouquets.
My CoreELEC, in a single device, allows me to watch TV on all the receivers in my house, in my holiday home, and outside of my country.
I’ve just completed a scan which found 3200 services and 188 muxes (on Hotbird)…
I can’t see an easy way to match up providers with muxes. I’m only interested in a couple of providers. Maybe I should just keep a single mux for the purpose of learning how all this works.
For my usage I have no care who the provider is, I go through the list of services and select those channels I want to view and ‘Map’ those channels only.
That gives me only the channels I want to view in my channels list.
I’d like to use TVHeadend at some point with IPTV. Sounds like it’s going to be a pretty big project if balanga is having problems with it (@balanga, I know you’ve dug in pretty deep before from reading your posts in the FreeBSD forum). Amazing how complicated this stuff can get.
I’d also like to use Tvheadend with IPTV but don’t really know how it works. If/when I get Tvheadend working properly, I’d like to investigate Sat>IP as I see CoreELEC includes a Minisatip service and have no idea how that works… I’d like to think it is a way of routing between DVB-S2 and IP but am only guessing…
Keeping muxes unassigned or marking them “disable” doesn’t stop TVH from checking if there’s still a signal on that mux. Mark muxes you don’t want as “ignore” and they will be skipped in idle mux scans, updates and other routines involving muxes. It’ll speed up scans and keep unnecessary RAM usage down.
