TVHeadEnd install was working, then getting "PVR manager is starting up" stuck at 0% "forever"

  • Hey all, Glad this board is here for me to post this situation.

    I had an install that I hadn't powered-on in years (but it did have auto updates 'on'). When I turned it on for the first time in "forever", I got the "PVR Manager is starting up" that didn't advance past 0% for many, many hours. I figured I'd just rebuild from scratch. Especially since I added another tuner in the interim.

    So I grabbed the latest version of LibreELEC for the Pi3, installed the TVHeadEnd server and client, all on the Pi. I got 212 channels defined on eight HDHR tuners - four HDHR-US (the original original hardware), four on HDFX-4K (newer hardware). So far so good.

    Everything showed up on the 'channels' and it was pulling EPG information over the air.

    I tuned into some known-good station/antenna combos. Oh, did I mention it's all OTA and I have 5 antennas? Well, yeah, signal strength goes from great to complete crap.

    My plan was to tune into the same station on various antennas and make notes to eliminate the glitchy ones.

    But, the VERY FIRST "bad station" I tuned to hung the system. Okay, maybe plan "B" would be to disable crummy signals in a way other than tuning in on KODI and viewing.

    But when I restarted KODI, it went to the dreaded PVR Manager is starting up 0% thing. And disabling/enabling the TVHeadEnd client didn't help. The TVHeadEnd server seems to be fine. Well, at least it continued to serve the web app flawlessly, allowing me to save changes.

    So, Question 1: How do I get past the starting up 0% thing? I presume if I delete the TVHeadEnd client and re-add it back, it would resolve, but that seems a bit extreme. More importantly, Question 2: Is there something I can do to prevent this system crash when there's a weak station?

    Here's an observation that might be related. I tried the HDHR PVR client. Not the one from SiDust, but from some guy who has a really cool last name (but I don't think he's done anything with his add-on in a long time). Anyway, when I tuned to a weak station with that add-on, it also reduced KODI to a useless state. IOW, whenever it came up, it seemed to be trying to go for the bad station, never getting it, and never giving up. Thus required removal of the add-on. This seems similar in that it was instigated by tuning to an horrible signal.

    Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance if you have any hints for me.