IPTV recording

[andrew_j_w]

Hi all,

I've had solar panels installed on my roof, which are great, apart from the fact that my TV aerial is in my loft and points right through them so reception is now terrible. I also have a satellite dish, but unfortunately my house is covered in scaffolding for the next week so it's blocked and isn't working either.

While waiting for the scaffolding to come down, and my aerial to be repositioned I'm looking for alternatives to keep recording the series we're watching. I've managed to set up the IPTV recorder to point to BBC streams (I'm in the UK), and am using the cross-eit.py and can record from them. However, the recordings are very odd. For a half hour program the recording was over two hours long, with the program towards the end of the recording. Is this something that is expected to work? I think maybe the stream contains quite a lot of history when the recording starts, and then MythTV downloads it all. Is there a way to configure MythTV to only record the stream from when it starts?

Thanks for any advice,
Andrew

[kmdewaal]

You can first verify that your URLs do actually point to live TV streams. This can be tested easily with vlc.
MythTV just records whatever is returned by the IPTV server, as far as I know there is no intelligence or configurability there.
For my curiosity, did you configure IPTV recording completely manual or by "channel scannning" an M3U file (or URL)?
In the last case, what was the M3U file, or the URL for the M3U file?

[andrew_j_w]

I used https://github.com/dp247/IPTV/blob/mast ... st_uk.m3u8 to create the channels. They're definitely live tv, I just think the return some history so you can scrub back in time, which MythTV downloads.

Andrew

[kmdewaal]

I did try that URL and also the URL for the Netherlands in mythtv-setup but both failed to parse. Some individual streams can be played by vlc but not all. Looks like the IPTV in MythTV does need a bit of maintenance...

[kmdewaal]

I can do a scan of the IPTV channel lists from that Wiki page by replacing the "blob" in the URL with "raw".
Most channels do not play here, probably geofencing is an issue here.
The channels that play are TJC, 4seven, Ideal World, Hobby Maker, France 24, Bloomberg TV, Arirang World, TRT World, Now 70s, Now 80s and Now Rock. BBC World News does show a test signal only.
As there is no guide data readily available I did test with live TV only. At least France 24 does really show live TV, the same as what is on satellite.
If recordings from France 24 do have issues I can have a look at that.

[kmdewaal]

Just curious.... copied the EPG from France 24 HD on Astra-2 / Freesat to France 24 on the UK IPTV and scheduled a News recording of 16 minutes.
This then creates a recording that, as far as I could quickly see, started at the correct moment but had a total recording time of more than 6 hours.

[kmdewaal]

There is something very wrong with the recordings that I can make of France 24 via UK IPTV.
When recording it can be observed that there is a massive amount of data downloaded, many times more than expected for one recording.
At playback it seems OK at first sight, but what happen is that the same fragment of about 30 seconds is repeated many times before continuing with the next fragment. Each time there is a jump back there is an error message from the audio processing:

Code: Select all

2024-04-27 23:33:10.253375 W [274190/274344] Decoder avformatdecoder.cpp:4861:GetFrame  AFD: Audio 24421 ms behind video but already 220 video frames queued. AV-Sync might be broken.
2024-04-27 23:33:10.254255 W [274190/274344] Decoder avformatdecoder.cpp:4861:GetFrame  AFD: Audio 24431 ms behind video but already 220 video frames queued. AV-Sync might be broken.

Looks like there is some synchronisation missing or going wrong.... To be continued.