Blank guide data...(so no recorded NFL) what happened?

Channels DVR Server
#1

Once again, Channels failed me when I really expected it to work: on the first day of NFL Football.

This time, the failure seemed kind of "catastrophic" in that when I launched the channels app, the guide data, channel logos, etc. was all blank. Of course, this means the Thursday night NFL game didn't record. The channels DVR settings page says that the guide data was last downloaded 12 hours ago.

How can I troubleshoot to see what went wrong? Shouldn't it self-repair by redownloading the guide when the guide data is clearly hoarked?

After redownloading the guide, all is working, but I need to trust it's going to work on its own.

#2

Look at the dvr log, or submit diagnostics so we can take a look.

Under Support > Troubleshooting

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#3

I’ll look. Figured that would be for a scenario where something continues to not work, but when I manually triggered a guide download everything cams back.

#4

Typically if guide download failed it would still have kept the old data from the previous days download.

It could be a bg scan on the PRIME cleared out all the channels. Are you using a tuning adapter?

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#5

I have two HDHD Primes with cablecard.

What I saw was all guide items and all channel icons were gone. As far as I can tell, it may have been missing for almost a week, which is odd because settings said the guide had been updated 12 hours prior.

All the channels were still present, though.

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#6

Let me know when you've submitted diagnostics

#7

Thanks @tmm1 I've submitted the logs and sent you a DM with the GUID identifier.

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#8

Seems like a bit of bad luck.

9/5 at 9am, guide data loaded like normal for 161 channels:

2022/09/05 09:25:12.242965 [DVR] Fetching guide data for 161 stations in USA-WA62449-X @ 2022-09-05 9:00AM

Later, around 6pm, both cable and internet went out:

2022/09/05 18:04:08.437212 [ERR] Failed to fetch station 111871: dial tcp: lookup data.tmsapi.com: i/o timeout
2022/09/05 18:04:11.995285 [TNR] Cancelling stream 13244C67/0 ch1005 after no data was received for 6s

The next morning, guide data loaded for only one channel:

2022/09/06 09:15:12.334979 [DVR] Fetching guide data for 1 stations in USA-WA62449-X @ 2022-09-06 9:00AM

Since that one channel didn't air NFL, the job was deleted:

2022/09/06 09:16:29.799303 [IDX] Pruned 4600 expired airings from USA-WA62449-X in 1.144465773s.
2022/09/06 09:16:29.817172 [DVR] Deleting job with expired serial: 1662682500-8 NFL Football (EP000031283322)

Same thing the next two days, only one channel of data loaded in the mornings:

2022/09/07 09:50:00.001923 [DVR] Fetching guide data for 1 stations in USA-WA62449-X @ 2022-09-07 9:30AM


2022/09/08 09:39:00.003881 [DVR] Fetching guide data for 1 stations in USA-WA62449-X @ 2022-09-08 9:30AM

Then you forced a guide refresh on 9/8 in the evening, and guide data loaded for 161 channels again:

2022/09/08 21:37:19.591422 [DVR] Fetching guide data for 161 stations in USA-WA62449-X @ 2022-09-08 9:30PM

The number of channels is reported to us by the HDHomeRun. My best guess here is that the HDHR did a background scan during the outage, and decided to remove all the channels from its list. Then three days later it did another bg scan and found them again.

This every-three-day background scan is something that's built into the HDHR firmware. See some discussion here: Ability to disable auto update - Silicondust

#9

Thanks for investigating. Question: It's weird that the HDHR deleted channels, though, right? It sounds like the scan shouldn't do this. I assume if the guide fetch failed and the channels didn't disappear it would still have a couple weeks of data to fall back on?

#10

Yea it must be a bug in the HDHR firmware somewhere. If the channels hadn't disappeared, then yes the guide data would have remained around from the previous day.

I added some logging in the latest DVR build whenever it detects the number of channels has changed. So next time we'd be able to see when it happened and when exactly it switched back. Perhaps in the future we can also detect it dropping significantly and do something about it.

#11

It sounds like this is with a Prime? If so, let me confirm that SD's background scans are HORRIBLE in the context of cable tuners. This is doubly true if you need a tuning adapter for SDV channels.

If a channel fails to scan quickly enough, then it is removed from the lineup. If their scan would have waiting an extra 2-3 seconds, the tuning would have worked, but the timeouts on their cable scans is so short, it often results in tens of channels being removed. To make matters worse, there is no way to manually enable channels present in the CableCARD's channel map.

I have been asking for ways to adjust or disable this ever since background scans were added. To me this was especially important because the TAs issues by my provider often failed.

Contrary to what Aman stated, I don't believe this is a "bug" in the firmware. Rather, this is a shortcoming that they fail to address. It is a known issue, but one they have never felt the need to address. (It was only within the month that they even acknowledged it was an issue.)

#12

OP stated he does not have TAs.

SD's position on the thread above was that bg scan should not remove channels. I think that's what their aiming for, and the fact that channels get removed is a bug in their code. But I can only guess..

#13

I have not seen channels removed but they do become unavailable if the channel is being scanned... Which can take a few seconds.

#14

Sorry, I thought I had scanned far enough up and not seen any mention of TAs. Mea culpa.

I'm not sure we're using the same vocabulary as SD, and that's where the disconnect is. My personal experience has been that when a BG scan occurs and a channel in the CableCARD's channel map cannot be successfully tuned within their timeout, that channel is no longer in the lineup. (If that channel was picked up again in a subsequent scan, its favorite/disabled status would remain what it was when it was last available; I believe this is what they mean by "not removed".)

In either case, and irrespective of the presence of a TA, having a channel go missing from the lineup when it cannot be tuned during a BG scan is "removed"; and according to SD, this is the expected behavior.

(They have essentially labeled anything to do with BG scans as WONTFIX.)

#15

I have an HDHR Prime (no TA) and that's exactly what happens.
If the BG scan can't "tune" the channel fast enough, it gets marked as unsubscribed.
I gave up trying to convince SD that their product shouldn't be marking my subscribed channels as unsubscribed.

#16

So in your case you're saying lineup.json?show=all shows all the channels, but most are marked unsubscribed?

I wonder in that scenario if you tune into one of those channels anyway (i.e. via http://x:5004/auto/v1045) does it play even though the lineup thinks it shouldn't?

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#17

Thanks Aman, really appreciate it. The one remaining question I have is why did it not self heal even though the outage was on Monday, which was 4 days before the game. When I elected to do a full guide download it was fine. Wouldn’t it have had the opportunity to rescan and redownload at least once before the game?

#18

We don't do cablecard rescans on your device. It took three days for it to do that itself and repair its list of "subscribed channels". Every morning the DVR fetches the list of subscribed channels and downloads guide data for them.

#19

It would be great if you could do a fetch in the evening also.... say 4:00pm

#20

@tmm1 - ah - let me make sure I understand the order of events then:

  • Monday morning, all 161 channels existed and the guide was successfully downloaded
  • Monday evening, there was an outage and we believe that's the time that a cableCARD channel rescan dumped my whole channels list. The outage was restored and did not recur.
  • Tuesday morning, the guide downloaded for 1 channel instead of 161 because of the Monday evening outage.
  • Thursday morning, the guide data had not been restored
  • Thursday evening, the channel scan restored the channels, but the game failed to record because the guide data had not been loaded for 160 of the 161 channels.
  • Thursday evening, I initiated a full guide redownload which restored me back to full function

Is that correct? So if I had done nothing, everything would have been back to normal Friday morning.