Try the m3u used with Channels in VLC and see how it plays.
I. think the capture stuff uses mpeg-ts.
Inspect the list in VLC and you will get the complete story.
Well I restarted everything and suddenly, magic!
I discovered the cause. I had enabled "Check Station Status" in SLM, and had the hdhomerun source with that check disabled, but it went to check those anyway, and that hosed the tuners. They never released, so I did a power down/up, and it was back to checking those channels, and hosed again. I had to disable the "Check Station Status", reset, and now all is good. Took a while to figure that one out lol
@babsonnexus Consider this a bug report 
All of my YouTube custom channels only play for a minute or so before dropping. Is this possibly due to an out-of-date yt_dlp or is something else going on? I don't see anything in the logs other than the stream starting.
Hard disagree on SLM being the root cause.
If you disable checking station status on a source, SLM will not check it, except in the situation with fallback feeds (and it will do that test whether or not you have check station status selected on). And even then, all it does is ping the source for a picosecond, make sure something responds without error/DRM, and then hands it off to whatever player is making the request. SLM does not hold onto any connections, period.
More so, I know this for a fact because what you describe is my exact setup.
If a HDHR is not releasing tuners and there are no requests, this screams of a HDHR problem. If SLM is making constant requests, especially on the same station, that may be a factor if your settings and/or network. Like I said, SLM should only try for a moment, even if it is set for multiple attempts. If you set it for something like a thousand attempts with no delay, and there is some reason SLM can't see your HDHR but HDHR can see SLM, then sure, it will keep trying over and over and over again, taking up all the tuners. Even then, though, that's not a bug.
Just for fun, I tested a single HDHR OTA station manually and I couldn't even get the the HDHR web interface to register the connection in time to see it; that's how fast everything happens.
All I know is what I've witnessed. And I didn't mention, that I ordered/received a new HDHomerun yesterday, thinking it WAS the tuner, plugged the new one in, and IT hosed in the same manner.
I also, after finding/fixing the issue, went back, and enabled the checking again, and the issue happened again. Reproducable, at least here. My config was identical to yours above (except for the source name) except I have an epg: https://api.hdhomerun.com/api/xmltv?DeviceAuth=mykey
Running v2026.10.21.1113, by the way, and LOVE it!
Please force it to happen again and PM me SLM logs and screen shots of everything as it is ongoing, or open up an issue on the repo with the same. None of the details thus far make any sense as this is not how SLM acts, nor can I replicate no matter how much I try to break things.
@KineticMan, I noticed the client list...
Based upon my current testing, for YouTube live streams, I've found that only mweb is getting consistently good results without a PO Token, and visionos with a PO Token. The most recent yt_dlp put samsung_tv in the default first position, but my unit testing ended up very negative, so don't recommend going with that.
bummer..
PSA to everyone -- YouTube doesn't love us doing this so it's a cat and mouse game. Babsonnexus has been chasing this for a long time on his project, so it's nothing new. I'll give it my best effort though!
I recommend implementing Streamlink (no relation) for YouTube live streams only. This has been much more stable for me over the long term. Feel free to steal the code from SLM, it's the least I can do after all I've put you through 
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I’ll be glad to, but it will be a day or so. With a busy house, it’s hard to find a time when the TV and tuner aren’t in active demand lol
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I'm using StreamLINK manager as a go between all my projects. While everyone else is messing with EPG and wondering why stuff disappears, i'm enjoying the experience.
Channel goes away or goes down or source change, simply replace the source.
fastchannels is simply one of the many ways i get content to channels.
tnx - for now, I'm putting in a fix to auto-rotate different clients-- starting with Android. If it detects a 403, it'll rotate different device types. Seems to work for now, but I'm looking into your technique as well. end goal would have a few backup options coded in so bases will be covered.
May have been covered before but just got this setup with ah4c. Works great for a day then anything that seems to have a drm bridge needs reauthorized seem like daily. I get http 400 error then if I resign in it works fine. ESPN in specific. Had to do it with FOX yesterday. Using Xfinity sign in if that matters. Let me know if you need to me upload anything. Thank you.
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good feedback... xfinity token is supposed to last 14 days. curious why yours timed out so soon... to confirm, are you signing in with Xfinity creds, or ESPN+ creds?
Now that samsung tizen tvs can be rooted, it should be easy to pull the api to get entire TV Plus Country based channel line-ups.
I’m running FastChannels 5.7.2, feeding Pluto TV into Channels DVR. On Beverly Hillbillies, I Love Lucy and others, audio and video became approximately 15 seconds out of sync during commercial insertion. The program remains broken after the insertion and only clears after stop/restart of the stream. This behavior is not visible with the Pluto App.
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Xfinity creds. I have used phone and auto sign in on some of them. As soon as I click sign in, it goes through immediately then everything works again.
ok i've been running a automated test since your original note hourly to watch for the Xfinity signon to drop and so far, it hasn't. will let it run for a few days to see if I can figure out what's dropping it.
If you see any 400 errors in your logs, that'd be really helpful. feel free to DM me as much as u find (even surrounding logs)
All-
Looks like Pluto injecting some "silent bumpers" during ads that is throwing off CDVR live stream. Trying to come up with a fix on my end.
fwiw - looks like recordings aren't affected.
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