Certain channels showing no signal - HDHR Prime / OpenDCT

[CSCO_TECH]

All,

I've had an issue crop up where tuning a few channels through OpenDCT on my HDHR Prime show "No Signal" in SageTV. From what I can see in the logs, it appears that SageTV is expecting the media stream from OpenDCT but does not get any data. I'm looking for any details on how to troubleshoot further. The tuner appears to be 100%, as I can watch the channels in question directly through VLC or the HDHR app. Only when tuning through SageTV/OpenDCT do I get the error.

Discovery on channel 620 and E! on 696 exhibit the no signal issue. There may be others but I have not gone through every channel. I have also confirmed that it is not related to a particular tuner on the Prime. I can get a failure for Discovery on tuners that work on other channels.

There are no copy restriction flags on the channels in question.

SageTV and OpenDCT are installed as dockers on my unraid server. These have been in place for about 5 months with no issues. I did recently upgrade OpenDCT to the latest version and updated SageTV to the latest version tonight as part of troubleshooting. HDHR Prime is at the latest release of firmware.

I access my OTA tuner directly with no issues.

Channels I grabbed logs for:

<Program>
<GuideNumber>620</GuideNumber>
<GuideName>Discovery HD</GuideName>
<VideoCodec>MPEG2</VideoCodec>
<AudioCodec>AC3</AudioCodec>
<HD>1</HD>
<URL>http://10.0.0.24:5004/auto/v620</URL>
</Program>
<Program>

<Program>
<GuideNumber>628</GuideNumber>
<GuideName>History HD</GuideName>
<VideoCodec>MPEG2</VideoCodec>
<AudioCodec>AC3</AudioCodec>
<HD>1</HD>
<URL>http://10.0.0.24:5004/auto/v628</URL>
</Program>

Any help is appreciated.

Mark

[EnterNoEscape]

The majority of these issues stem from the OpenDCT docker being configured to use the SageTV remuxer via the media server by default. A normal installation of OpenDCT uses FFmpeg and streams over the media server because the built in remuxer in SageTV can't deal with some of the ways Comcast and others sometimes format their content.

[CSCO_TECH]

Thanks for the good information. Curiously, both channels work this morning. If it is related to specific content being broadcast (Discovery was airing the same show during my testing), I guess I can fire up my old WHS box, where I ran SageDCT, and load that in as a source to test.

If that works, it sounds like the best solution would be to just install OpenDCT on a Linux VM that is always running on my unraid server and leverage that for tuning instead of the docker.

Any other thoughts?

For reference, this is FiOS in Richmond VA.

[EnterNoEscape]

There's no reason why you can't just change the Docker configuration to use FFmpeg instead. You just need to change all of the lines that read opendct.consumer.DynamicConsumerImpl to opendct.consumer.FFmpegTransSageTVConsumerImpl to get around the fact that every time you start OpenDCT, the Docker script overwrites the property consumer.dynamic.default= with opendct.consumer.MediaServerConsumerImpl which really is unfortunate because that would be the much easier way to fix this.

[wit713]

I had the same problem and made the change suggested. I have not had a problem since.

[KarylFStein]

I'm having this issue and the change to FFmpeg fixed it but caused problems with all channels. Before the change there are maybe three channels that get a No Signal trying to tune. After the change any channel just sits there for a couple minutes (roughly 130 seconds) before starting to play. Logs from both cases are attached.

EDIT: The channels stream find tuning them from VLC.