Channel Unavailable

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andrewj720
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Channel Unavailable

Post by andrewj720 »

I've reinstalled MythTV (backend only), on Ubuntu Server 18.04.

I have a TBS 6285 DVB tuner connected via PCIe.

Live TV was working nicely for several days, except at reboot, so I was reconfiguring systemd files, and I seemed to have hosed live TV, as I now get Channel Unavailable when connecting from Kodi mythtvPVR over local network.

The sockets are showing at /dev/dvb/

Stopping and starting (using either mythbackend or systemctl start mythbackend.service) starts the backend but I still get 'channel unavailable'

Code: Select all

systemctl status mythbackend.service 
gives

Code: Select all

● mythbackend.service - MythTV backend service
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/mythbackend.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
  Drop-In: /etc/systemd/system/mythbackend.service.d
           └─environment.conf
   Active: active (running) since Tue 2019-05-21 14:00:56 BST; 1min 8s ago
 Main PID: 18533 (mythbackend)
   Status: "Master backend. Recordings: active 0, scheduled 6"
    Tasks: 44 (limit: 1416)
   CGroup: /system.slice/mythbackend.service
           └─18533 /usr/bin/mythbackend --syslog local7
Here is my kodi.log https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yAaL4g ... sp=sharing

Anyone have any ideas as to how I can get live TV back up and running?

Many thanks
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MikeB2013
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Joined: Mon Jul 25, 2016 4:16 pm
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Re: Channel Unavailable

Post by MikeB2013 »

Channel Unavailable is usually caused by tuning timeout (your log shows timeout of 5000ms) in pvr.mythtv of Kodi.
In pvr.mythtv addon change Tuning Delay (sec) from 5 to 10 in Advanced Tab.

If that does not work:
Check security pin in mythbackend is same as in pvr.mythtv addon (General tab), usually set to 0000
Check mythtv-setup General Primary IP address/DNS Name has a real ip address NOT 127.0.0.1

You could also enable "Include more debug information in the log file" in Advanced tab of pvr.mythtv addon

Mike
Revilo
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Joined: Sat May 21, 2022 2:38 am
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Re: Channel Unavailable

Post by Revilo »

I thought I would share my experience and maybe help others save some time.

I had to rebuild my system recently. Afterwards I was getting "Channel unavailable" on Kodi mythtv PVR.

Previously I had a USB drive connected to my router, (shared over the network with SMB) for the mythtv storage. For several reasons I physically moved the drive and connected it locally. Even though I had changed the external storage location in backend setup to point to the correct path mythtv was not able to access. And it turns out this was causing the channel unavailable in my case.

In order to fix the problem I had to mount the drive with permissions for group id "mythtv". It seems sometimes mythtv backend setup will alert the user when it is unable to write the specified external storage path and other times it does not.

tldr; verify that group mythtv has read-write permissions for the storage path.
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