TVHeadEnd - BBC 4 has vanished

Quote from LybsterKodi

Its been a while since I wanted to record anything from BBC 4 but I did today and its vanished from TVHeadEnd on both my Dell Optiplex i5 with Haupage and my RPi4 with TV hat, but its still showing on my TV.

Other channels coming in on the same mux (Rumster Forest 522MHz) are still there. I can't find anything indicating that BBC4 is off the air or something has happened to it.

I'm in the process of trying to reinstall TVHeadEnd on the RPi4 to see if that cures it. Its stuck at 91% mapping the services at present.

Any suggestions as to other actions to try?

Something's wrong if it's stuck at 91% doing a regular Freeview SD/HD map.

Is it BBC Four SD or BBC Four HD that has gone ? (I didn't see if you were DVB-T or DVB-T/T2 capable)

You were scanning after 7pm weren't you? (CBeebies uses the same space as BBC Four during the day and TV Headend will ignore it I think) I usually do a scan during the daytime and then another one at night to get both BBC Three/CBBC and BBC Four/CBeebies - which are the main time-ex(clusive) services on Freeview SD and HD.

Quote from LybsterKodi

It was BBC4 SD (old eyes not good enough for HD ) but is was during the day not after 7pm. This "CBeebies uses the same space as BBC Four during the day " may well be the problem since, not having kids, I've removed CBeebies. I'll reenable and see what happens.

You probably need to re-scan during BBC Four's transmission hours (it starts at 1900 every night). During the pre-1900 hours it doesn't have any video or audio PIDs associated with it - so TV Headend kind of ignores it as it's not a radio or TV channel at that time of day.

I doubt re-enabling CBeebies will do much for you - they are separate services that switch from being placeholders to channels at opposite times of the day - sharing the same audio and video PIDs (I think)

(PIDs are kind of labels for discrete streams in the MPEG2 transport stream carried by each RF multiplex)

Quote from LybsterKodi

You're probably right and I'll get round to checking at some point (probably the next time I spot something I want to record). I tested on my sichbopvr setup on a PC using an august adapter which Kodi doesn't recognise and its scan turned up CBeedbies and BBC 4 just with BBC 4 not active

If you want to use the August USB tuner in TV Headend on Libreleec, a lot of adaptors will just require you to download the right firmware and copy it over for them to be seen by Linux - and thus appear in TV Headend (as not all DVB tuner firmware is distributed in the core LibreElec system - I think for rights reasons).

If you go to the Linux TV wiki page for your adaptor you may find a download link for the firmware.

https://wiki.libreelec.tv/how-to/add-firmware has details of where to copy the firmware too.

I've had success with some August DVB-T2 tuners using this method - though it does depend on Linux support for the tuner's chipset in the kernel as well.

If you're comfortable SSHing into your LE box with Putty etc. then you can check dmesg for DVB stuff (plug the adaptor in just before you type dmesg and you'll see an error if it's recognised the tuner but not been able to load the firmware)

There used to be an optional repo that also downloaded firmware (CrazyCat?) but I have a feeling it's no longer active.