[mythtv-users] No live tv and not recording

[Stephen Worthington]

On Sat, 17 Mar 2018 13:40:52 +0100, you wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I use v29.1 under Debian unstable now.
>
>Mythfrontend now only shows 1 tuner.
>
>Scan and mythfilldatabase ran correctly, but there is still no live tv and I 
>cannot record.
>
>When I try to record an episode in Programme Guide, it tells me 
>"Single Record +0 Recorder Failed."
>
>Frontend says:
>LiveTV not successfully started
>
>Mythfilldatabase:
>Source 1 configured to use only the broadcasted guide data.

When you are using EIT EPG data only, there is no need to run
mythfilldatabase.  It is only needed for other types of EPG data.

>However in "Input Connections", I see:
>Desired Services: TV
>
>I also tried with "TV and radio", without success, and this choice seems not 
>to be kept. I choose "TV and radio", then "Save and exit", but the next time I 
>start mythtv-setup, I find only "TV" in this field.

That setting only affects the scanning process, and I believe it is
not stored in the database, so you need to select it each time you
scan.  Once scanning is complete, it does not affect the operation of
channels stored in the database.

>I have a lot of entries in Programme Guide.
>
>But ~/.xmltv is empty.

Since you are using EIT EPG at present, you do not need to bother with
any XMLTV configuration.


So, to summarise, scanning worked, and created many channels.  Those
channels show in the program guide as having EPG data, so EIT is
working.  Both of those mean that the tuner is working.  But live TV
fails and recording fails.

You may still have an invalid channel number as the default live TV
channel left over from previous attempts.  So if you tried to start
live TV directly from its menu or a remote key, it would fail.  It
would be best to try starting live TV from the pop up menu in the
program guide.

Make sure you choose a channel to test with that is free to air -
encrypted channels will fail.  Encrypted channels will show up in a
scan, and the EIT data for them is normally available unencrypted.
Only the data needed to watch or record an encrypted channel is
encrypted.  So when MythTV is told to play or record an encrypted
channel, it will attempt to do that, and then fail.  If that happens
to me, there is normally a message logged that mentions the problem,
but that may only be present if mythbackend was run using the "-v
record" option.  In only happens to me rarely, so I do not currently
have a log to look at to tell you exactly what to look for.

There is an "Unencrypted only" option in the scanning process which
gets mythtv-setup to only install channels that do not have the
encrypted bit set in their headers, but sometimes channels do not have
that bit set when they should, and vice versus.  What satellite and
channel are you trying to receive?

To find out for sure which channels are encrypted and which ones are
free to air, you should be able to find your satellites on this site:

http://www.lyngsat.com

Here is the page for the New Zealand satellite (Optus D1, 160E):

https://www.lyngsat.com/Optus-D1.html

On it you can see that the channels are colour coded (with a key at
the bottom) to tell you which ones are encrypted and which ones are
free to air.  I expect that the pages for your satellites will have
the same sort of information.

Once you have verified that the channel you are attempting to watch or
record is unencrypted, if it still fails, please post a full log from
mythbackend covering the entire tuning operation, with the "--loglevel
debug -v record" options.