Leveraging the native HDHomeRun ScanInProgress flag for channel lineup syncs

[PowerCC 10]

Hi Luke and the Emby development team,

First off, thank you for all the continued work on the Live TV infrastructure. The way Emby handles standard, physical HDHomeRun tuners is incredibly stable, and the fast loading times for the guide data are much appreciated.

I’ve been diving into some custom tuner management lately and noticed a great opportunity to make Emby’s channel synchronization even more seamless, particularly for users whose channel lineups evolve over time (which is becoming a lot more common).

Currently, because Emby does such a great job optimizing and caching the /lineup.json data for fast performance, adding new channels to a tuner often requires users to do a full remove-and-re-add cycle in the dashboard to force a fresh sync.

A Native Protocol Opportunity While reviewing the official SiliconDust documentation, I noticed there is actually a native signaling mechanism designed for this exact scenario that we might be able to tap into.

When an HDHR device is updating its lineup or running a background scan, it broadcasts a state change via the /lineup_status.json endpoint using the ScanInProgress field.

The normal transition looks like this:

1. Standard idle state: "ScanInProgress": 0

2. Lineup actively updating: "ScanInProgress": 1

3. Update complete: "ScanInProgress": 0

Here is an example of the payload during an active update:

JSON

{
    "ScanInProgress": 1,
    "ScanPossible": 1,
    "Source": "Cable",
    "Lock": "qam256"
}

The Proposed Enhancement If Emby's tuner logic could monitor this endpoint and watch for that 0 -> 1 -> 0 transition, it could use the final drop back to 0 as a native trigger to silently re-fetch /lineup.json in the background.

Implementing this small protocol handshake would allow Emby to gracefully append new channels without requiring users to rebuild their tuner configurations. It’s a subtle change, but it would be a massive win for power users and likely cut down on forum support questions regarding missing channels.

I’d be more than happy to provide logs or payload captures of these state transitions if it helps the team test this out.