HACK: Use Channels DVR as a Plex tuner

Sorry My Test Machine is updated was on wrong machine.... My main is recording will update in a few minutes.

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Hmm, I have about 40 Channel Collections and after updating to the latest pre-release I see this menu available on all of them.

I've tested copying the M3U url to 3rd party multiview clients apps and after changing "https" to "http" and changing the CDVR address to the internal LAN IP of the server, it works nicely.

However, I noticed that the EPG URL is the same, for every export. Should they be different per each Collection, or is this intended behavior?

https://xxxxxxxxxxx.u.channelsdvr.net:8089/devices/ANY/guide/xmltv?duration=1209600

Yeah I switched tabs on my browser to my server that is still not updated all ok now.

Does this give you the Whole EPG including those not in Collection ?

Yes, and it's quite large too because 1209600 seconds is 2 weeks of guide data. I just downloaded the XML file to my Mac and see it's 407.4 MB. Since I'm only using this URL for an assortment of multiview clients, watching live and not using DVR, I edited the XML's URL to fetch 3 hours of guide data instead:

https://xxxxxxxxxxx.u.channelsdvr.net:8089/devices/ANY/guide/xmltv?duration=10800

…and the resulting file is 9.3 MB. It includes all channels, not just those in the Collection.

Okay checked it out -

Still has the multiple shows at once issue on x.x channels - some sort of renumbering would be awesome

And its passing through virtual channels on plex unlike the full list version - they just fail to play

That is not good I thought it would only pull EPG of Channels in the Collection.

Yeah, one of the things I noticed when trying to import M3U into Plex is how long it takes for it to sync up the guide. Would hope that a smaller XML file would help.

The issue is that EPGs are per Source (right now), and your Channel Collections can have channels across multiple sources, so the only real way to guarantee guide data, is to use the EPG URL for all channels.

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OK, that makes sense.

At least for those who still want to limit the download size, every bit helps, so they should consider setting the EPG duration for one week instead of two weeks, to cut the size in half:

https://xxxxxxxxxxx.u.channelsdvr.net:8089/devices/ANY/guide/xmltv?duration=604800

...or even less, like 6 hours (21600 seconds) if they're just using it to surf live TV.

I've followed the steps in post 2 to install the codec on my mac and I'm still getting S1001 error. Note that the folder that is shown was not present, but /e613bce-3d5ad59c62e771ae9cb5738e-darwin-x86_64 was. i downloaded it there, no luck. I created the folder in the post and put it there as well. No luck. Non-TVE plays fine, but TVE gives the error. This is an Intel mac if it makes a difference. Perhaps a different codec file is needed for Intel mac?

You have to go into the folder that is present and then make a url that has the same code as that folder.

Did that, same outcome

The file you downloaded is only 472 bytes, so its not correct.

The url doesn't match the pattern I provided earlier.

curl -O https://downloads.plex.tv/codecs/e613bce-38cf5cd1fd57f37d2412c608/darwin-aarch64-standard/libaac_decoder.dylib

vs

curl -O https://downloads.plex.tv/codecs/e613bce-3d5ad59c62e771ae9cb5738e-darwin-x86_64/libaac_decoder.dylib

What you need to use is:

curl -O https://downloads.plex.tv/codecs/e613bce-3d5ad59c62e771ae9cb5738e/darwin-x86_64-standard/libaac_decoder.dylib

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Looking back at my terminal history, I did try that format, but with the same result. However, removing the 472 byte version and running your code fixed the issue. Thanks.

@maddox Just wanted to make sure you saw this before - virtual channels are getting passed through on custom channels to plex

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In the M3U or the EPG?
It's supposed to be filtered out of the "ALL" M3U, but probably not each individual one.

m3u

Has anyone figured out how to add Channels DVR as multiple tuners to Plex? From my testing it really only sees it one time and you can’t add another one from the same IP address.

I’d like to have separate channels collections show as separate tuners over on Plex but it doesn’t seem to work.

That didn't work for me either. I considered creating one combined Channel Collection that I would use specifically with Plex, but I was so turned off by the rest of the user interface that I just abandoned ship.

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