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MediaPortal TV Plugin not working since update to emby 3.4


nanuk

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nanuk

Hi,

I don't know if this issue is already known, but since the update to emby server 3.4 the MediaPortal TV Plugin is not working anymore (no channels shown, no epg data shown...)

 

The only thing still working are the schedules and the recordings :/

Restoring emby version 3.3 all is working fine again.

 

It would be nice if someone could confirm this.

 

thx

 

PS: i'm not running emby premium but via chrome browser live tv was possible even with the free version of emby. had there been changes in 3.4?

Edited by nanuk
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nanuk

Hi,

after going back to emby 3.3.1 and doing the upgrade to 3.4.1 again now all is working fine.

 

thx

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pünktchen

Hi,

after going back to emby 3.3.1 and doing the upgrade to 3.4.1 again now all is working fine.

 

thx

It was the plugin update [emoji6]

Thank you @@Luke

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  • 7 months later...

Hi,

I don't know if this issue is already known, but since the update to emby server 3.4 the MediaPortal TV Plugin is not working anymore (no channels shown, no epg data shown...)

 

The only thing still working are the schedules and the recordings :/

Restoring emby version 3.3 all is working fine again.

 

I have run into a similar problem as I upgraded from 3.3.1.0 to 3.5.3.0; along the way I upgraded from MP TV plugin 1.6.0.3 to 1.8.6.  As in the post above, I no longer have any channels or EPG data shown.  Recordings still work.  However, reinstalling 3.3.1.0 didn't bring back my channels or EPG, and going back to the earlier plugin didn't help either.

 

Is there a way to recover from this condition without getting rid of all my Emby config/data?

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Hi, if you need to use the media portal live tv plugin then you are probably best off using the 3.6 beta server, which will soon be moved to stable anyway. Thanks.

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Did you update the media portal plugin and refresh the guide in emby server? If after doing that you're still having a problem, then please attach the emby server log. thanks.

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Thanks!  It looks like I'm heading in the right direction, though I am still running into some issues.  I clicked on "Refresh Guide Data" and got both my channels and some EPG data.  As a welcome surprise, I also got all but one of my channel logos from MP too; channel logos never synced properly from MP in the past, and even got corrupted from time to time when entered manually in Emby.  However, the EPG data seems to be behind by about 5 hours or so (I'm in CST, for what it's worth).  The EPG as displayed by the native MediaPortal client is correct.

All of this made me wonder though... where is the EPG data even coming from?  Is this being pulled from MediaPortal?  I didn't have an EPG source set up under live TV.  Do I need to set this up?  Should I set it to also use SchedulesDirect like MP TV-Server does?  As an experiment, I tried setting up "Emby Guide Data" as an EPG source, but not much came of that.  I didn't notice any obvious changes in my EPG in Emby, and the "Map Channels" dialog was empty.  This seems like a challenging direction to go since the channel name mapping will be nontrivial since the SD client in MP is currently naming channels by concatenating the channel number with the callsign, though I could change the channel naming scheme in MP if necessary.

BTW, on a more general level, there's just something unintuitive about the disparate handling of native live TV and plugin-based live TV.

I also tried the RTSP option briefly out of hope that it would allow me to avoid the additional overhead of MPExtended, albeit with relatively poor results: upon starting, most streams ended up stalling pretty quickly.  Is this a known issue?

Another area that has been historically problematic is starting a stream when tuning to a new channel is necessary.  In previous versions of Emby, the most common outcome was video but no audio, even with "Stream Delay" settings ranging from 1000 to 10000.  In my new installation, I typically get just one frame of video and no audio.  Under both the old and new versions, restarting the stream after the tuner has already tuned to it works, although this is a pretty unpleasant workaround.  How can I fix this?

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Is this being pulled from MediaPortal? 

 

Yes it's coming from media portal.

 

 

 

disparate handling of native live TV and plugin-based live TV.

 

agreed. what i would like to do is turn the plugins into separate tuner sources and guide sources so that they'll work with the native handling.

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Another area that has been historically problematic is starting a stream when tuning to a new channel is necessary.  In previous versions of Emby, the most common outcome was video but no audio, even with "Stream Delay" settings ranging from 1000 to 10000.  In my new installation, I typically get just one frame of video and no audio.  Under both the old and new versions, restarting the stream after the tuner has already tuned to it works, although this is a pretty unpleasant workaround.  How can I fix this?

We'd have to look at an example. Please see how to report a media playback issue. thanks !

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Is [EPG data] being pulled from MediaPortal?

Yes it's coming from media portal.

 

Any thoughts on what is going on here?  It seems an odd coincidence that my EPG data is offset by a period that corresponds to my time zone's current offset from UTC.  In Emby 3.3.1, this used to work.

 

agreed. what i would like to do is turn the plugins into separate tuner sources and guide sources so that they'll work with the native handling.

 

I think that would make a lot of sense.

 

We'd have to look at an example. Please see how to report a media playback issue. thanks !

 

Here's the result of trying to tune Fox News Channel this morning in Chrome 7.0.3538.110:

 

5c17c5e83a21c_initial_frame.png

 

I have attached correlated logs from Emby, MP TvServer, and MPExtended: 201801217-01-emby-livetv-failure.zip

 

I started all three services immediately before running this scenario and stopped them immediately after.  I then trimmed the logs to remove lines that were not from the current run, and redacted paths with names of content on the server.  In this case, Stream Delay was set to 0.

 

Incidentally though, in casual testing last night I found that Chrome on Windows works better with larger values of Stream Delay, while Emby for Android 3.0.21 works better with smaller values.

 

I also tried the RTSP option briefly out of hope that it would allow me to avoid the additional overhead of MPExtended, albeit with relatively poor results: upon starting, most streams ended up stalling pretty quickly.  Is this a known issue?

 

Any thoughts on this?  Accessing MP TVServer's RTSP streams seems to always be a thorny topic, but again, if I can avoid MPExtended, at least for actually delivering the streams to Emby, that would almost certainly be a win.  Even direct file access might not be so bad.  MP's small core and overly modular paradigm has really come to bite it in the butt: it has become insanely hard to get everything to function as a single, well-integrated cohesive unit.

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pünktchen

Thanks! It looks like I'm heading in the right direction, though I am still running into some issues. I clicked on "Refresh Guide Data" and got both my channels and some EPG data. As a welcome surprise, I also got all but one of my channel logos from MP too; channel logos never synced properly from MP in the past, and even got corrupted from time to time when entered manually in Emby. However, the EPG data seems to be behind by about 5 hours or so (I'm in CST, for what it's worth). The EPG as displayed by the native MediaPortal client is correct.

I will look at this next week.

 

I also tried the RTSP option briefly out of hope that it would allow me to avoid the additional overhead of MPExtended, albeit with relatively poor results: upon starting, most streams ended up stalling pretty quickly. Is this a known issue?

Yes, it's mostly an ffmpeg issue.

 

Another area that has been historically problematic is starting a stream when tuning to a new channel is necessary. In previous versions of Emby, the most common outcome was video but no audio, even with "Stream Delay" settings ranging from 1000 to 10000. In my new installation, I typically get just one frame of video and no audio. Under both the old and new versions, restarting the stream after the tuner has already tuned to it works, although this is a pretty unpleasant workaround. How can I fix this?

Please do not use regezster's MPExtended version from the MediaPortal forum. It will lead exactly to those issues.

Take this one instead: https://github.com/puenktchen/MediaPortalTVPlugin/blob/master/sources/MPExtended-Service-0.6.0.4-Emby.zip

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pünktchen

what i would like to do is turn the plugins into separate tuner sources and guide sources so that they'll work with the native handling.

This will not work for several reasons. To name a few:

No recording conflict management in Emby.

No tuner sharing for different channels on the same mux.

Limited timer options (no keyword based schedules, no weekly schedules, no timeframe based schedules)

Not every tv backend provides a static channel stream.

No Kodi pvr addon.

 

And if i look at the posts here in the forum, it's not even reliable. Sorry!

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However, the EPG data seems to be behind by about 5 hours or so (I'm in CST, for what it's worth). The EPG as displayed by the native MediaPortal client is correct.

I will look at this next week.

 

Thanks.

 

Please do not use regezster's MPExtended version from the MediaPortal forum. It will lead exactly to those issues.

Take this one instead: https://github.com/puenktchen/MediaPortalTVPlugin/blob/master/sources/MPExtended-Service-0.6.0.4-Emby.zip

 

I just installed this.  There is no discernible improvement; it might be even worse in that I had noticed a stream being interrupted when I tried to start another one.

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pünktchen

Thanks.

 

 

I just installed this. There is no discernible improvement; it might be even worse in that I had noticed a stream being interrupted when I tried to start another one.

Really? I've never experienced this.

Anyway i can only guess that your streaming problems come from your analog Colossus card. If i read your tvserver log correctly, it already takes 7 second to "tune" a channel. Then another second for MPExtended to start a stream. Maybe there's some timing problem?

Does it make any difference if you disallow the stream probing inside the Emby MP plugin?

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Thanks.

 

 

I just installed this.  There is no discernible improvement; it might be even worse in that I had noticed a stream being interrupted when I tried to start another one.

 

Did you try refreshing the guide in Emby after doing this?

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Did you try refreshing the guide in Emby after doing this?

 

I just tried this now.  My EPG still thinks the WGN morning news starts at noon. :(

 

I will look at this next week.

 

Yes, it's mostly an ffmpeg issue.

 

Please do not use regezster's MPExtended version from the MediaPortal forum. It will lead exactly to those issues.

Take this one instead: https://github.com/puenktchen/MediaPortalTVPlugin/blob/master/sources/MPExtended-Service-0.6.0.4-Emby.zip

 

Elaborating on an earlier theme, the multiple forks of MPExtended are part of what is wrong with with the MediaPortal ecosystem.  I don't even know where the source is maintained these days.  With this and other nonsense, MP is slowly digging its own grave.  And in fact, Emby's relative completeness is a big part of its attraction.  Live TV backend functionality is the last frontier.

 

Really? I've never experienced this.

Anyway i can only guess that your streaming problems come from your analog Colossus card. If i read your tvserver log correctly, it already takes 7 second to "tune" a channel. Then another second for MPExtended to start a stream. Maybe there's some timing problem?

Does it make any difference if you disallow the stream probing inside the Emby MP plugin?

 

And speaking of the last frontier, yes, my TV Server setup is rather ridiculous: DirecTV STB's run HDMI out into splitters, which in turn is fed into Colossus cards with timeshift buffers on RAM disk.  There are 3 of these.  TV Server tunes the STBs using the DirecTV SHEF plugin to control the STBs via IP/Ethernet in lieu of IRSS or something similar.  EPG data comes from the TV Server Schedules Direct plugin.  To your point, DirecTV STBs are pretty slow in changing channels to begin with, and of course that gets added to the time required for the Colossus to start a stream.  While the native TV player in MediaPortal (and even Kodi) works terrific with this scheme, the time required to change a channel is upwards of 10s, and frequently involves a resolution change--something that has historically caused quite a few challenges.  It seems as if Emby and FFmpeg are trying to start streaming before the video stream has stabilized.

 

Despite all this complexity, my TV Server setup has become increasingly reliable over the last couple years, which I attribute largely to the stability (read: lack of introduction of new features) in TV Server (i.e., TVE3) as well as the maturity of the once problem-laden Colossus drivers.  And what it accomplishes is pretty remarkable: thanks to the Colossus' hardware encoders, 3 TV streams can be running concurrently with only minimal CPU usage.  I'm not married to MP TV Server by any means, and am open to other live TV backends that would perform better with Emby.  A quick survey of the market seems to suggest that NextPVR, Argus, and SageTV might be able to handle such configurations but it looks like only NextPVR is supported as a TV backend for Emby.  But before heading down a new long path like this I would definitely like to understand if there is anything that can be done to get Emby to work properly with my convoluted TV Server configuration.

 

Stream probing was off for the log I shared yesterday; I haven't noticed much difference in the results I get when it is set either way.

 

Thank you both for all of your help.

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pünktchen

 

 

Elaborating on an earlier theme, the multiple forks of MPExtended are part of what is wrong with with the MediaPortal ecosystem. I don't even know where the source is maintained these days.

With this and other nonsense, MP is slowly digging its own grave.

There's no maintained source of MPExtended. Despite the few changes that regezster has made, it's dead since years already.

The same has become true to TVServer 3.5 of MediaPortal. Unfinished state. Not usable. No developer anymore. It's dead.

 

It seems as if Emby and FFmpeg are trying to start streaming before the video stream has stabilized.

That was also my thinking. @@Luke is there some kind of timeout in Emby?
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