OTA Tuner channels keep unmapping

[ProfessorBrianOblivion]

Server Version#: 1.31.2.6810
Player Version#: N/A
Tuner Make/Model: Happaugue Win Quad
Guide/Lineup name:
Using XMLTV?: Yes
Channel number/Name:

I’m running an Ubuntu server (v20) with plex using a quad OTA tuner card. Additionally, I’m using dizqueTV to add my own custom channels I’ve created.

The OTA tuners use a locally updated XMLTV file located on the server’s disk and the dizqueTV “tuner” uses a URL to retrieve the XMLTV file from XTeVe.

I’ve been running this setup for well over a year now and the channel guide worked fine. I’d see my custom channels along with my OTA channels in the LiveTV guide without issue.

Apparently in a recent Plex server update this broke.

I’ve deleted all my tuners, “optimized” the database and readded them several times now with the results being the same.

When I 1st add all the tuners, with their associated XMLTV files, the channels and the guide are just fine…and it stays that way for a little while (like less than 1 hour). I have about 50 OTA channels + 5 custom dizque created channels.

As some point soon after, all the OTA channels disappear from my players only showing my custom channels (with XMLTV guide info coming from XTeVe). When I look in plex, all the OTA channels are unmapped, with the OTA tuners showing the 5 custom channels from the other tuner.

Manually remapping the OTA channels is pointless because soon after the same thing will happen again.

It seems to me that some automated Plex liveTV guide update process is running at some point after initial configuration and removing all the OTA mappings.

Specifically, it seems to have difficulty with differing XMLTV guide sources for the 2 different types of tuners. The XMLTV guide source for my custom channels ONLY contains guide data for those 5 channels. The other guide source (xml file on disk) ONLY contains guide info for the OTA channels.

I would gladly put everything in XTeVe as a single source for XMLTV guide data but my OTA tuner doesn’t support M3U.

Any suggestions? Like I said, I’ve been running like this for like a year+ now without issue until a recent update to Plex.

[ProfessorBrianOblivion]

Just an update. I removed the disquetv tuner completely and optimized the DB.

Then just added the 2 hardware OTA tuners as I have in the past.

Set up fine. At some point after and hour or something, it unmaps my channels and there is a list of “blank” channels in the list at the top… presumably from the old iptv channels I had that wasn’t cleaned up or something.

So now I’m completely broken with just OTA. Keeps unmapping.

How do I fix this bug recently introduced? Can someone at Plex look at this?

[ProfessorBrianOblivion]

I figured out what was causing the problem. I’m not sure what changed in plex but apparently dizquetv was setup to send channel updates to plex via the API… as it has been for me for a very long time without issue.

Apparently, something about a recent update causes plex to unmap all the OTA channels from the hardware tuners and map ONLY the channels dizque sends via “channel updates”… regardless if a “spoof” tuner is enabled/configured/present in plex or not. Everytime this update happens, all the OTA channels in plex are unmapped.

I “unchecked” that channel update from happening and the problem went away. My channels map and stay mapped now.

I don’t know who is to “blame” for the problem occurring (perhaps dizque needs to make changes etc…) but that resolved the problem for me.

Hope someone else find this helpful.