I have Media Portal installed as a PVR backend at the moment and it's working fine.
My only problem is that when beginning a recording from a channel who's frequency already has a tuner attached to it recording a sister channel, rather than recognising that and sharing that tuner to extract both channels from the frequency Media Portal will instead enlist a new separate tuner, limiting the number of channels I can record to the number of tuners I have installed.
WinTV 8 however when faced with the same problem WILL use the already available tuner to extract multiple channels, so I know it's possible, however WinTV 8 can't be used as a backend for Kodi.
So the question is, so that I don't have to install each one and test them, are any of the Kodi PVR backends capable of recording multiple channels from a single tuner when they share a frequency?
NextPVR will do this. I've had about 20 different channels streaming simultaneously from a dual tuner capture device.
I installed next PVR, activated it in Kodi, then set up a timer to record Dr. Phil.
Midday came and it failed to record anything.
I've gone into NextPVRs "plugins" options and checked the "recordings" checkbox but don't know if that will fix anything.
My next scheduled recording is a 7pm tonight...
Is there anything I need to do to make sure this thing works?
Nextpvr is the best I have used,
Make sure everything works as expected in the native pvr client first, then move on to kodi.
So do recordings work in nextpvr itself?
If you schedule something in kodi can you see it in scheduled recordings in the nextpvr gui?
Does the epg in both match up?
It recorded this time, apparently I needed to activate recording in NextPVR itself and Kodi didn't realise I hadn't done that.
For some reason the "recordings" checkmark on the NextPVR plugins menu refuses to stay checked but it's working anyway, that seems to be a minor bug somewhere.
(2017-02-25, 05:59)ndjamena Wrote: [ -> ]It recorded this time, apparently I needed to activate recording in NextPVR itself and Kodi didn't realise I hadn't done that.
No - you don't need to do that. That won't have any effect on whether Kodi can record or not. These tick boxes just determine which menu options are shown in the NextPVR menu.
If you're having any ongoing problems with this, post the message over at the NextPVR forums and we'll look into it for you.
DVBLink also handles multiple recordings from shared channel groups nicely. Just made a quick stress test for our TV-server, which has 4 HD-tuners and I selected channels from Kodi-client on living room for instant recording from different channel groups to occupy all 4 tuners. As a result server was quickly recording 12 different TV-shows and at the same time I was watching 13th on TV-screen.
I don`t know are there any restrictions on client/server side, if there is just enough tuners.
It looks as though NextPVR doesn't recognise channels from the same frequency if they're not in sequential order.
I think there are duplicate channels that do fit the right order but I deleted them (or NextPVR did after I told it to delete duplicates).
I'll rescan the channels to get them back then manually delete to non-sequential channels to see if that helps.
-edit- for some reason my channels were a mess, I deleted them all and rescanned and now they're all in order... I'm assuming it recovered some channel information from the last time I tried to install NextPVR, or from somewhere...
(2017-02-26, 14:36)ndjamena Wrote: [ -> ]It looks as though NextPVR doesn't recognise channels from the same frequency if they're not in sequential order.
No, that's not correct. The order doesn't matter. It looks at the tuning information to determine which channels are on the same frequency.
Quote:I think there are duplicate channels that do fit the right order but I deleted them (or NextPVR did after I told it to delete duplicates).
I'll rescan the channels to get them back then manually delete to non-sequential channels to see if that helps.
When setting up multiple tuners in NextPVR it's important to scan on one tuner, then when you go to setup the other tuners accept it's offer to copy the channels from the existing channel. This way you end up with single channels, available from multiple tuners (instead of multiple channels each available from a single tuner). Because you've mentioned duplicate channels, it sounds like you've not done this. I'd suggest cleaning it up by deleting all the channels (or deleting the npvr.db3 file), then scanning on the one device, then copying the channels to the others.
FYI, here was a screenshot of NextPVR doing 16 live tv channels simultaneously from three tuners (of a quad tuner device):
*sigh*
Well, Dr. Phil failed to record yesterday. I figured I'd done something wrong so I opened up NextPVR, noticed all the "pending recordings" were gone and simply updating the "recurring recordings" didn't bring them back. Ultimately I deleted everything and started again. I recreated the "recurring recordings" rules and the "pending recordings" repopulated. I checked and everything I'd want recorded was listed there so I figured it was done and I was happy.
So, this morning I start up NextPVR just to look at it and all the "pending recordings" are gone again.
And by the way, I had exported all the channels to channels-DVBT.xml and then copied them to each of the tuners, so that wasn't the problem. I don't know how my channels got into the mess they were in, but I do know when I first tried to install NextPVR some of the channels that are around now didn't exist back then so I had to rescan this time.
And the duplicate channels I removed can be seen here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_di..._Australia
Seven is 7 and 71, Nine is 9 and 91, One is 1 and 12 etc, basically each provider is allocated one number below 10 and one group of 10 two digit numbers starting with that same digit, the channel they allocate to the single digit number is generally duplicated in the 2 digit cluster and THOSE are the duplicate channels I was talking about. Anyway, whatever happened isn't relevant anymore since after deleting everything and rescanning I seem to be able to record everything properly, but I notice as NextPVR scans, the first set of channels it finds are provided by Seven, it correctly allocates the first channel as 7, then correctly allocates the rest of the channels on that frequency to their 7x numbers, but after that as it switches to the next frequency it seems to feel the need to allocate the channels to numbers AFTER the last channel detected on the Seven frequency, so channel nine is allocated 101 and all the other channels are given numbers sequentially after that, so what I'm left with is channels 7,70,71,72,73,76 and 78 then after that all the other channels on all the other frequencies are simply allocated numbers 101-132. It doesn't make sense that it should do that, it's obviously trying to allocate the Seven channels to the same numbers they're given over the air, but then just gives up after that and assigns all the other channels whatever. If it's going to do that it might as well not bother.
I suppose I could edit the channels manually, but considering the problems I was having with multiple recordings I'm kind of afraid to touch them.
Do we have any theories on why it's deleting all the pending recordings overnight?
(2017-03-02, 06:05)ndjamena Wrote: [ -> ]*sigh*
Well, Dr. Phil failed to record yesterday. I figured I'd done something wrong so I opened up NextPVR, noticed all the "pending recordings" were gone and simply updating the "recurring recordings" didn't bring them back. Ultimately I deleted everything and started again. I recreated the "recurring recordings" rules and the "pending recordings" repopulated. I checked and everything I'd want recorded was listed there so I figured it was done and I was happy.
So, this morning I start up NextPVR just to look at it and all the "pending recordings" are gone again.
The pending recordings get recreated each night when the overnight EPG update happens. If you want to supply your logs, I can check what happened at that time. (It's probably easier if we take this discussion over to
http://forums.nextpvr.com, where you can post attachments etc)
Quote:And by the way, I had exported all the channels to channels-DVBT.xml and then copied them to each of the tuners, so that wasn't the problem.
I wouldn't do it that way (it might work the same, but I'm not 100% sure). Do it the way I suggested - ie, setup one tuner, then when you start the setup process on all the other tuners, accept it's offer to copy the channel configuration from the first channel.
Quote:Seven is 7 and 71, Nine is 9 and 91, One is 1 and 12 etc, basically each provider is allocated one number below 10 and one group of 10 two digit numbers starting with that same digit, the channel they allocate to the single digit number is generally duplicated in the 2 digit cluster and THOSE are the duplicate channels I was talking about. Anyway, whatever happened isn't relevant anymore since after deleting everything and rescanning I seem to be able to record everything properly, but I notice as NextPVR scans, the first set of channels it finds are provided by Seven, it correctly allocates the first channel as 7, then correctly allocates the rest of the channels on that frequency to their 7x numbers, but after that as it switches to the next frequency it seems to feel the need to allocate the channels to numbers AFTER the last channel detected on the Seven frequency, so channel nine is allocated 101 and all the other channels are given numbers sequentially after that, so what I'm left with is channels 7,70,71,72,73,76 and 78 then after that all the other channels on all the other frequencies are simply allocated numbers 101-132. It doesn't make sense that it should do that, it's obviously trying to allocate the Seven channels to the same numbers they're given over the air, but then just gives up after that and assigns all the other channels whatever. If it's going to do that it might as well not bother.
If it finds the "LCN" data in the streams, then you should get the correct channel numbers. I'm not 100% if Australia broadcasts this info or not. If you want to do a scan (you don't have to save the results, just hit 'cancel' at the end), then post the npvr.log, I can check if it's receiving the LCN info. Again....probably better if we take this dicussion over to the NextPVR forums.
You can end up with odd channel numbers if there is a clash, like multiple channels requesting the same number, or you've already got channels with the specified number.
Quote:I suppose I could edit the channels manually, but considering the problems I was having with multiple recordings I'm kind of afraid to touch them.
FYI, NextPVR it doesn't depend on channel numbers at all, so you can quite happily change the channel numbers.
Quote:Do we have any theories on why it's deleting all the pending recordings overnight?
Post those logs and I'll tell you why.
Can you post the question over at the NextPVR forums, and include a download link for you npvr.db3? With this fine I'll be able to reproduce your problem here.
I suspect it's something to do with keyword recordings scheduled from Kodi. I suspect regular season recordings wouldn't have this problem. With your npvr.db3 file I'll be able to tell more definitively.
I noticed something yesterday but had to wait til today to see if it happened again.
Somehow NextPVR is wiping the guide.
The Kodi TV guide is still fully populated, but other than a few random entries the NextPVR guide is pretty much empty.
That would be what the problem is.
I'm thinking of deleting everything and starting again, or moving on to something else. MediaPortal wasn't this much trouble but I can't guarantee the next backend I try won't be just as frustrating to get working.