I have two HDHR tuners (one Quatro, one Extend) and can receive quite a few channels OTA. On one of the HDHR’s, I have a set of local stations that show up when I do a channel scan and these same channels show up on the second unit. There is a ‘duplicate’ set of channels that carry the same content, but these channels are only picked up on ONE of the two HDHR’s even though they are fed by the exact same antenna setup.
If I attempt to something from one of these local stations, the recording fails. If I look at the Live TV & DVR screen, the recording symbol shows for BOTH sets of stations, but Plex is stating that the there is a problem with the tuner.
What may be interested is to know that the sub-channels are reversed between the two sets. One set of channels has Network A on .1, B on .2, and C on .3 while the other set has A on .3, B on .2, and C on .1.
If I disable the channels that are available on only one of the two HDHR devices, it will record fine. Thoughts?
I am no expert by any means but to me it sounds like Plex is not handling the duplicate channels correctly. You could use DVBLogic’s software to combine both tuners. There is instructions on how to do this for the HDHometun. I used this software to combine 4 tuners all having the same channels. DVBLogic’s software is a supported tuner for Plex. xTeVe may also work so you could try that as well and is free.
Why would I want to ‘combine’ the tuners? Plex should be handling this correctly on its own and I’ve never had an issue getting a channel to record in the past whether it was only on one of the HDHR’s or on both… It’s this specific block of channels that gives problems.
Yes, did those as part of the ‘forced’ rebuild of the DVR (due to EPG being invalidated on 1/1/21 and needing to build again). Didn’t help.
From what I can tell, this is a Plex issue not a problem with the tuners. The logs indicate that it was unable to tune the channel even though I could actively watch that channel in Plex.
Removing the secondary (reversed) set of channels on the one tuner that could access them corrected the issue.
Do you have debug logs from the server showing a failed recording which you can share (perhaps those you mention in your post)? They may show the reason for the failure; without them all anyone here can do is speculate. The logs will show which device it tried to use to record. Your HDHomeRun logs may show the tuning request as well, and why it failed. My assumption is that Plex attempted to record from the duplicate channels, using the tuner which doesn’t tune them. Why it would do that I can’t say.
In addition to the workaround you’ve already found, another potential workaround would be to limit the recording to a specific channel, for programs which appear on the duplicates. This can be done in the recording schedule’s advanced settings. If you limit it to only the channels which are common to the two tuners it likely wouldn’t fail.
I don’t have debug logs, and since I’ve already implemented a workaround, I won’t be able to get them without putting the system back into a non-ideal state.
Channel limiting is not something that I generally do because I frequently want to capture more than just the most recent episode of something and those are sometimes shown on alternate stations (especially for older seasons).
TBH, Plex should be ‘smart enough’ to be able to intelligently select the station and the tuner device to access it. And, if one fails, it should be able to change to a different one in near-real-time - this would be a major benefit of NOT using channel limiting.
The logs from Plex don’t seem to show the specific tuner it tried to access, or at least I’m not finding an easy way to correlate the info in the logs to a particular tuner. Given that I could directly select the channel in Plex’s Live TV & DVR to watch it, I would expect it to use the same sort of logic to select and tune that channel for recording purposes since ALL channel watching is a form of recording (at least, it seems it is according to the status info on the server when someone is watching a live channel combined with the fact that you can opt to start recording at any time and will get the entire show).
I don’t disagree. However, it’s challenging to reproduce the issue since your situation is a bit atypical. I used to have two OTA HDHomeRuns configured and they did have different available channels, but with some overlaps, due to the way their antennas were pointed. However, I don’t have duplicated channels (let alone with differing sub-channel mappings). Plex never tried to record from channels not configured/available on a particular HDHomeRun. It’s not exactly the same as your configuration, that’s the closest experience I have (I ran with this config for about roughly two months ago).
If you do at some point attempt to troubleshoot this again in the future, look for debug messages from “Grabber” in the logs to find the tuner it is choosing. They’ll look something like this:
Grabber: HDHomerun starting a media grab on device device://tv.plex.grabbers.hdhomerun/NNNNNNNN (Silicondust HDHomeRun CONNECT 4K, supported) tuner 2.
That NNNNNNNN represents the device ID of the chosen HDHomeRun. If for some reason you don’t get the descriptive name of the device in the logs, you can use that to differentiate the tuners.
I waded through the logs to find the URL that was being attempted for recording. While it does point to the correct IP and port for the HDHR, and is attempting to open a valid channel, it causes a 503 error when trying to connect via web browser. Trying to browse other channels yields an attempt at a download, so there is definitely different behavior.
The channel does not want to open via Plex or the HDHR app, and that makes me wonder why the tuner claims it’s a viable channel in the first place.
The other issue is that the channel it is attempting to load for recording is NOT the channel that I originated the recording request off of.
I think that Plex needs to offer an option to VALIDATE channels, it should attempt to load a channel prior to recording start time to ensure that the chosen channel can tune the program, and it should also have a fallback option to be able to select a different channel if the first attempted one doesn’t work,
In my specific situation, the channel really should never have been imported into the configuration in the first place. While I would like to see Plex have the option to validate channels, it’s also a problem starting with Silicon Dust as the devices shouldn’t report the channel as available in the first place.
Still, there are definitely things that Plex could do much more intelligently that would offset these issues in a variety of situations (this one included).
