TVHeadend minor annoyances

mrbubbles

Howdy folks,

Over the past year, I've built a system around TVHeadend that I'm pretty happy with. I have it running on a Synology NAS (in a Docker container) with a HDHomeRun Quattro supplying the DVB-T inputs and a Digibit R1 supplying the DVB-S inputs.

It's all working pretty well and, from what I've been reading, this is pretty similar to @Johnboy1951s earlier setup (apart from the Synology bit). The other difference in my setup is the front end; for that I'm running an NVidia shield and using the AndroidTV "Live Channels" app to connect to the TVH server, via a proxy app called "dream Player for TVHeadend".

I've found TVH itself to be frustrating and a steep learning curve, but satisfactory once you get your head around some core concepts and realise that many options and pages are actually just different ways of looking at the same thing.

But I do have a couple of issues/observations that I'd appreciate a second opinion on

1) I get continuity errors when I change channel. Not a huge amount... maybe 2-3 every time and maybe a higher number (say 50-100) every now and again. Has anyone else had this? It doesn't seem to affect the display itself in any way but I was wondering about it.

2) This one drives me mad! When I start clicking on a field and typing, it seems to try and auto-complete the field which wipes out whatever I was typing. See example here. I'm trying to type 'sky' but you'll see that every time I type a letter it starts searching and I can't continue. I'm on OSX and I've tried in Chrome and Firefox.

3) I have an issue on Channel 4 where it default to an "Audio Description" track so you have someone saying "Michael is sitting outside a bar", "Michael is eating a biscuit" all the way through the show. It's driving my wife nuts. I've read that you can create "audio stream filters" to filter out the NAR track but my version of TVH doesn't seem to have this option (it should be under Configuration > Stream). I can't find mention of this in any changelogs, has anyone else noticed it?

Anyway, look forward to chatting with some more TVH fans here in Ireland and, hopefully, getting some of these last glitches ironed out.

Also happy to share some of what I've learned, if anyone has questions.

Thanks,

Joe

Johnboy1951

1. Yes, I get a few continuity errors when switching. I believe this is to be expected as the new channel locks on.
If you have persistent large numbers of errors during channel play especially, then that requires attention.

2. I don't recall trying to edit that entry as you show. I *think* you can add to what is already there, but those present are already chosen by some other settings. Of course I might well be mistaken as it is some time since I did my set up and have forgotten most things!

3. I had a similar situation with an ITV channel and found that some had the NAR and Audio in reverse order. I changed the channel selection to the one I wanted and that appeared to fix it at the time.
I have never used a filter and have no idea how but will be interested in reading how should you do it

mrbubbles

Hey Johnboy1951,

Thanks for your reply.

Johnboy1951 wrote: »

I changed the channel selection to the one I wanted and that appeared to fix it at the time.

Was this just on the client? I'm able to switch audio streams and that solves it, but i'd like to find a way so that I don't have to do it every time I start watching the programme.

Have you ever got series recording working to a satisfactory standard? I was having some issues with EPG data (the OTA data had "New: " appended to some shows, so it was getting confused) but I've switched to Schedules Direct now so hopefully that will fix it.

Edit: I think I've finally sorted this; there was the issue above but also that an option ("Try re-scheduling recording if more errors than (0=off):") was causing recordings to be marked as failed if they had over 10 errors which, as per my post above, about half do. I've switched that off now so I think that will help things.

It's a great bit of software but there seem to be a lot of glitches (at least until you know what you're doing) and it can be quite hard to find the answers

Johnboy1951

Apparently nobody here bothers with series recording so I have no experience of difficulties, sorry.
Good to see you appear to have found the source of your difficulty.

Regarding the audio - nar/audio - I selected on the server the broadcast that provided the correct audio stream to the client.
I am not saying this is a good solution, just that it was a work-around for me in that instance.

The main difficulty with TVH is that not only is it extremely capable requiring a large learning curve, but because problems are rare their solutions are easily forgotten and no familiarity is built up so the next instance is a 'new' problem probably with vague memories of having seen something like this before.

In truth each time I approach TVH it is like new software to me because of time passing. (and failing memory I guess )

mrbubbles

The recording I had set up last night worked perfectly, so I'm happy on that front. I also found some software called PVR Live which integrates with the Live Channels app on Android TV and allows you to schedule recordings directly from there, so that will keep the OH happy as it's all pretty easy to use.

Re: the filters - if you can't see them it's because the view level is wrong. You need to change Configuration -> General -> Base -> Default View Level to "Expert" - just changing it to "Expert" on the page Stream page itself won't work.

Once that's done, it's easy enough to filter the NAR track.

Johnboy1951

mrbubbles wrote: »

The recording I had set up last night worked perfectly, so I'm happy on that front. I also found some software called PVR Live which integrates with the Live Channels app on Android TV and allows you to schedule recordings directly from there, so that will keep the OH happy as it's all pretty easy to use.

Re: the filters - if you can't see them it's because the view level is wrong. You need to change Configuration -> General -> Base -> Default View Level to "Expert" - just changing it to "Expert" on the page Stream page itself won't work.

Once that's done, it's easy enough to filter the NAR track.

Can you possibly show a pic of the NAR filter?
Is it per channel or for all channels?

mrbubbles

Sure thing; I just created a filter across all streams to ignore the 'nar' language and it seems to have done the trick. If the filter is enabled, the client only shows it as a "single audio (eng)" stream and so it defaults to this.

Johnboy1951

Thanks for that ..... appreciated

Johnboy1951

I got in minor trouble with SWMBO after I implemented the NAR filter

She sometimes follows a program (while doing something else) without watching the screen and follows the story line using NAR.

Ye just cannot please everybody all the time

mrbubbles

Haha yes unlucky, but that's always the risk with these overly-complicated systems that we love setting up. When they work, they work great! But when they break (admittedly usually when I'm overseas) there is hell to pay!