HDHomeRun connectivity issues over IPv6

Channels DVR Server Troubleshooting
#1

Hi there, while trying to troubleshoot an IPv4 connectivity issue (unrelated to Channels) on my server PC, I temporarily switched the HDHR connection on Channels to be over local IPv6 instead of IPv4. This mostly works (discovery, guide, etc) but when actually trying to stream, Channels doesn't correctly add the port and so streaming doesn't work:

2024/03/17 11:41:09.236084 [ERR] Failed to start stream for ch2.1: GET: http://[fe80::218:ddff:fe0a:430e]/auto/v2.1: 404 Not Found
2024/03/17 11:41:09.321230 [HLS] Couldn't generate stream playlist for ch2.1-dANY-ip--1: GET: http://[fe80::218:ddff:fe0a:430e]/auto/v2.1: 404 Not Found
2024/03/17 11:41:09.321230 [HLS] Stopping transcoder session ch2.1-dANY-ip--1

At least on my device, the address should include port 5004 (i.e. http://[fe80::218:ddff:fe0a:430e]:5004/auto/v2.1) to correctly load the stream.

For context, my device is an HDFX-4K with firmware version 20231214. Channels DVR Server is running on Windows 10 Pro x64, with Channels pre-release version 2024.03.16.2324 (though I had the same issue on the latest stable; I just tried updating to pre-release to see if this happened to be fixed).

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#2

Please go to Support -> Troubleshooting -> Submit Diagnostic Logs from the web interface of the DVR and let us know when it's been submitted so we can have a better idea of what was going on.

Edit: I've spotted the problem. Looking into a fix.

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#3

This should resolve it. Thanks for reporting the issue!

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#4

Thanks for pushing that fix so quickly! I updated, but now the entire Channels DVR Server application crashes whenever trying to open an IPv6 stream on any device (including web player). I don't see anything in the logs (not even logs for starting the stream) as it seems the crash is happening before the logs have a chance to update (at least in the online log viewer). Setting the HDHR back to IPv4, everything works as expected, and swapping back to IPv6 consistently causes a crash immediately when trying to open any IPv6 stream.

Submitted diagnostic logs for this issue with ID 0839038d-fdaa-41de-88fe-768e58a69159 after starting the server up again following this crash; let me know if there's any way to view or submit crash logs separately.

#5

From the HDHR logs below, you can see the stream opening and immediately closing within the same second, so it does seem Channels is correctly fetching the stream now but some other issue is causing an immediate crash. For reference, IPv6 streaming directly from the HDHR works for me in VLC without any issue.

I figured out my LAN IPv4 issue so I've just switched back to that for now which works perfectly fine, but happy to swap back and provide any additional details to help debug and fix the IPv6 issues.

20240317-21:27:28 Tuner: tuner2 tuning 2.1 KCBS-HD (8vsb:575MHz-1)
20240317-21:27:28 Tuner: tuner2 streaming http to [fe80::8e1c:81c9:b92d:a6ec]:65182
20240317-21:27:28 Tuner: tuner2 http stream ended (remote closed)
#6

Thanks for the report! Looks like there are some other thing that need to be updated to support IPv6. Looking into that now.

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#7

This fixes the crash. Unfortunately it looks like we still don't fully support these IPv6-based HDHomeRuns yet. There are some internal updates that we will need to make for them to work as well as the IPv4-based ones.

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#8

@sanil did you have to do anything special to get Channels to be able to add the HDHomeRun via IPv6? Whenever I try to add source and provide the IPv6 address, it just ignores me - no errors, but doesn't add the HDHomeRun via IPv6. I can't seem to remove the existing HDHomeRun source that's configured via IPv4, so I don't know if that's blocking it somehow?

My Channels DVR is running in a Docker container on my Synology NAS. The Synology NAS has IPv6 enabled and the Docker container is running with host networking ... running ping6 ipv6.google.com from within the container appears to work, which would seem to indicate that Channels would have IPv6 access?

I'm kinda lost, 'cause it doesn't seem like a lot of folks are trying to get IPv6 stuff working on their home LAN.

#9

I do not see any benefit to enable IPV6 on the HDHR units. If there is what is the advantage.

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#10

Trying to move to IPv6 where I can for greater consistency and retraining my brain to work with IPv6 rather than IPv4. I'm a software engineer and so many things are moving to IPv6 (AWS announced significant price penalties for continuing to use IPv4, for example) - and the more reps I get thinking about IPv6, dealing with networking issues in IPv6, configuring IPv6, etc. - the better off I am in my day-to-day.

#11

Right now you’ll have a worse experience using IPv6 with your HDHomeRun. We need to update the internal HDHomeRun library we use to support IPv6, so at this time there will be diagnostics, troubleshooting, and functionality that is lacking if the DVR does not connect over IPv4.

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