DVR sources periodically merge upon guide refresh

Live TV & DVR
,
1

Server Version#: 1.41.7.9799 Windows 11 Pro
Player Version#: Any
Tuner Make/Model: HDHomeRun Flex Quatro, Various
Using XMLTV?: Yes

In general I’ve been pretty pleased with the Live TV and DVR features, but this one is a head-scratcher.
Short description: For about three weeks, most times when my guide refreshes, three disparate sources get merged into one. While it displays all three sources, it believes that they all provide the same three channels, corresponding to a specific feed.

I’m using three different sources to feed channels into the DVR; one is an HDHomeRun box attached to my network, one is tunarr (other virtual channel generators are available) and the last is threadfin. All are, to the best of my knowledge correctly configured, as they had been working for several months before this incident. It’s difficult to artificially trigger this problem (I’ve tried many different ways) but the best bet is to wait 24 hours for an automatic guide refresh, at which point it will change from this:

GuideProblemA
GuideProblemA814×614 59.6 KB

To this:
GuideProblemB
GuideProblemB814×614 48.6 KB

You cannot re-scan and add channels, it only sees tunarr’s guide (and it is always tunarr). The only solution is to delete the DVR and build it again, which is a real pain to do every morning.

I made sure everything was up to date, from threadfin to tunarr to ffmpeg to the firmware on the homreun box, there is no channel overlap and the guide isn’t… too bloated for the 115 or so channels I have enabled on it. Everything is formatted correctly and in a way plex could previously read. Obviously, each has its own XML source, the HDHomeRun being provided an XML from EPG123 (Unrelated note: why can’t we mix and match with online metadata sources?), tunarr provides its own XML, and so does threadfin. It just seems to… forget everything but the tunarr guide after a day or so.

Also as part of troubleshooting, I went off the beta branch and did a clean install which didn’t work, went back onto it which didn’t work, downloaded the 9799 hotfix which didn’t work, then out of desperation tried reverting to an older version of PMS.
That didn’t work either, so I completely wiped my database, did a clean re-install of PMS and re-built my indexes. That didn’t work.
At the end I decided to format Windows on the PC running it to start over clean. 24 hours later, it happened again.
No matter what I do, it keeps happening. I’ve dug through forums, read through the logs, tried to artificially induce the bug, and I’ve simply had no luck. I also haven’t seen anyone else discussing this issue, and in my case it’s definitely a recent development. Am I missing something basic here? I’m open to any and all suggestions. Thank you for your time.

2

It’s starting to seem as though Plex and the community have abandoned the DVR feature indefinitely. I’ll watch this space in case anyone else notices it’s broken. Incidentally in the two months since I’ve posted this, I re-installed windows, changed network cards, tried totally different hardware, built a new database, clean reinstalled, tried a legacy copy of plex media server, just tried it on a laptop running linux why not, every damned thing I could think of it’s the same problem, my TV sources with independent guides will (after about 3 days) get crushed down into a single broken DVR where all the data is wrong. I have spent almost 100 hours trying to figure out why, and I have seen other people mention similar problems, throwing a lot of time into trying to fix them. It doesn’t seem as though anyone has.

If it’s broken for good please tell us so we can find alternatives.

3

It isn’t a Plex Problem.

As soon as you mentioned not one but two 3rd party apps it became a you problem. One of the two and most likely where you are merging the xml is overwriting the channel information or Plex is scheduled to read the XML while it is being updated. My guess would be a setting in tunarr since threadfin doesn’t interact with the Plex database. Since tunarr is derived from dizquetv and dizquetv would do this all the time unless you unchecked “Send Channel Updates” I would start there.

4

It’s a place to start! I didn’t know much about DizsqueTV aside from seeing some of their old dormant repos, I think it lived and died before I started doing this so I missed out on its foibles. I really do appreciate any help I can get. I am glad you said something because I was investigating EPG123 out of desperation instead.

In my defense, I did try permutations of the DVR setup that did not involve tunarr, and it does still happen, in those cases everything merges into the HDHomeRun guide. However I never did a delete DVRs / clean install featuring no virtual tuners in the loop. It’s something to try.

I wish this hadn’t cropped up just as other people were reporting other, vaguely similar guide problems. So many blind alleys.