[SOLVED] No channels found :-( WinTV-DualHD on Ubuntu

General Discussions Plex Features
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Hi all - long time Plex fan but first time poster! Be nice.

Following the announcement of WinTV-DualHD support in Plex, I purchased one. I run my Plex media server on a headless Ubuntu server.

I followed the Hauppage instructions for Plex here: http://www.hauppauge.com/site/support/linux.html

This worked well and Plex found my new WinTV. Hooray! However, when I ran a channel scan for my location (Melbourne, Australia), no channels were found. I also tried just “Australia” and even “Europe (full frequency scan)” but had the same result. I have used the same antenna and cable as we use for our regular digital TV which works fine; the TV shows channels fine.

I have attached screenshots of the setup process in Plex as I experienced it, and my Plex server logs.

Do you have any suggestions on how to troubleshoot this issue? I saw there is a utility called w_scan which I installed and ran, but it doesn’t detect the WinTV tuner (Error is “NO USEABLE TERRESTRIAL CARD FOUND.”). I tried stopping Plex server before running it just in case Plex was using the device, but it didn’t make any difference. A quick look online suggests I may need to install different and/or additional drivers to use the card with w_scan but I’m reluctant to do this after installing the recommended ones from Hauppage. (If someone can advise that it’s simple and safe to set up w_scan properly I’ll give it another go).

Ubuntu version
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS
Release: 16.04
Codename: xenial

Plex version
1.7.3.3937

Unfortunately I have no Windows machines available immediately to test using the WinTV software to see if it can find any channels. (I do have OS X machines but I am not sure there is any software on OS X that can use this tuner). I can see it would be useful to have some way to check if the tuner is indeed receiving signal from the antenna but there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to do this with my setup.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions you can offer! I will continue to investigate myself and report back here if I make any progress, in case anybody runs into a similar issue & my ramblings are of any use!

cheers

Paul

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I just noticed I have in fact posted before! My memory is failing me! :slight_smile:

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Update:
I also sent these details to Hauppage and they promptly replied. They say PPA support for the DualHD is not working on Ubuntu server. Another user has reported this already, and has already started a Plex thread for it here (with a more thorough and technical investigation, thanks user stgarf):

(I didn’t find that thread originally as I was searching for “no channels found”.)

Hauppage also said in their reply to me that the Linux engineer who built the relevant packages is on vacation, but they hope he will be back “soon”. I’ll post here and in stgarf’s thread if I hear anything more. Thanks all.

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Hauppage got back to me and said:

Our engineer saw that the default user created on server did not have permissions for the video group.

sudo adduser (your default user) video

reboot

If this works it should work in Plex.

Sadly, this helped only slightly :frowning: My reply is below:

Thanks for the followup, appreciated. I have added both the user “paul” (my personal user on this installation) and the user “plex” which I believe is the user that Plex uses.

After adding the user paul, w_scan now successfully finds the device. But after scanning for several minutes, it concludes with “ERROR: Sorry - i couldn’t get any working frequency/transponder Nothing to scan!!”. I’ve attached the full output from w_scan. The results in Plex are unfortunately the same as my initial report - Plex sees the device fine, but no channels are found (presumably it encounters the same problem(s) as w_scan).

I’ve also now connected the device to a Mac running Windows 7 using Parallels. Here, everything works perfectly. The device installs fine and the WinTV software detects & plays channels just fine using the same antenna and cables as I was using with Ubuntu. This confirms the problem is with the Ubuntu setup and not with the WinTV device or cables.

Can your engineer advise what I can do next? I am afraid I am not a Linux expert. If there are any utilities he/she would like to see the output of just let me know and I can send them on.

I hope it’s something that’s not too much trouble for you and can be easily corrected.

I’ve since done a few “sudo apt-get dist-upgrade” to get updated versions of the hauppage kernel, and updated Plex to the latest release but the situation is unchanged.

If anyone else is experiencing this issue I would encourage them to get in contact with Hauppage to bump it up their priority queue .

If anyone else has ideas on how to debug this it would be much appreciated! I’m a relative Linux novice but am not averse to getting under the hood.

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OP i have the exact same issue as you. I live in Melbourne and have the exact same setup. I do get reception in my other tuners but the Hauppage. I have written to them and quoted you on my email today. I’m actually looking forward to get this tuner going cause it worked marvellously on my Win PC

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If you have an Nvidia SHIELD, the Win-TV will work (if you’re using the SHIELD as your Plex server). That’s what I use, works fine.

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@“Bufis Family” said:
If you have an Nvidia SHIELD, the Win-TV will work (if you’re using the SHIELD as your Plex server). That’s what I use, works fine.

Hmm, that’s curious.

Well, for now, i updated to Ubuntu 17.04 but the same issue.

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@srkarpyn thanks very much for your response. I’m happy to report that I have this week found a solution that works for me! I can only hope it also works for you. I noticed this other thread with a similar issue and it contained an extra step I hadn’t seen mentioned anywhere else.

Adding those two firmware files made everything immediately work for me. w_scan finds channels, Plex finds channels and I can now use the DVR functionality as expected. I’ve made a number of successful recordings. I am going to report this information back to Hauppauge and suggest they include it on their Linux setup pages.

Note I am running Ubuntu Server, and the poster of that solution suggests adding the firmware files is only necessary on the Server edition. (Are you running Server…?)

I hope that helps you. Just let me know if I can give you any further information about my setup that may help you. Good luck!