IPTV glitch causes recording to fail

Playground Custom Channels
#1

I'm struggling to get reliable IPTV recordings in Channels DVR. I have Dispatcharr managing the IPTV streams from the provider. Channels is connected to Dispatcharr. Channels client is Android TV app.

I can see from the logs in Dispatcharr (the first hop in the chain) that disruptions occasionally occur in the IPTV connections that will force it to reconnect. When that happens, the Channels DVR will completely bomb out. The recordings will be interrupted and stop. If I'm watching that recording while it is being recorded, the client then bombs trying to even play what should have recorded correctly, but the existing recorded portion of the program doesn't seem to work after the interruption.

Is Channels able to handle momentary interruptions in IPTV? Is there anything else I can insert into my setup that would make the stream more friendly for Channels?

Please help.

1 Like
#2

Unfortunately that is par for the course with illegal iptv providers. You likely won't be able to solve this issue with Channels.

#3

Whoa, who said anything about illegal IPTV providers?! I'm experiencing this on public, free IPTV providers. The issue of unstable IPTV is not unique to illegal IPTV.

Are you saying that Channels cannot handle unstable IPTV connections?

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#4

Unfortunately, when you choose to use illegal iptv services, you get what you get.
If it works, great!!! if it doesn't work, you are out of business.
I personally at one point wanted to go with questionible sources but found it to be too annoying.
I now have Fuboand DTV Stream and my experience is uch better.
you get what you pay for.

#5

I'm using feeds from kptv-fast (GitHub - kpirnie/kptv-fast: A high-performance streaming service aggregator that combines multiple free streaming platforms into a single M3U playlist and EPG. Perfect for use with Channels DVR, Plex, or any IPTV client.), which AFAIK are free feeds.... dang, for an honest paying customer, hard not to feel a little attacked here....

My question is technical. Channels developers say they designed the system to handle intermittent stream interruptions (see Channels DVR has a higher IPTV recordings success rate), but that is not my experience and so I'm asking if there is something I can do to address the issue? i.e. Would Channels handle the stream better if I emulated an HDHomeRun instead of using direct IPTV integration?

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#6

HDHR emulation isnt supported.

Apologies for my illegal assumption. 99.99999% of the time when someone asks about IPTV issues, they are using an illegal provider. Most illegal providers cant provide a reliable connection.

If i remember correctly it takes a rather large timeout for channels to abandon the connection. Can you post logs of this happening? (From the Channels server)

On another note, if all you are interested in are the FAST channels you could check out some of the docker projects we have on here thay may work more reliably and provide you with the same content.

1 Like
#7

Best case is feeding Channels DVR an HLS stream (instead of MPEG-TS) from the source.
In any case, no matter which source (even HDHR tuners and Channels DVR TVE feeds), when the stream is interrupted, Channels DVR will disconnect and reconnect automatically when making a recording. You will see the recording was Interrupted and the recording will be missing parts where it was interrupted (sometime for longer than the interruption duration).

With Channels DVR, recording streaming sources is tuned for HLS streams and then MPEG-TS streams coming from an HDHR tuner. If watching them live instead of recording, the recovery isn't as good as when recording.

#8

@slampman no worries. I've gone through the logs and these are the only relevant lines I see:

2025/12/27 12:31:27.828739 [HLS] Starting live stream for channel 7 from 172.18.0.7
2025/12/27 12:31:33.916973 [HLS] ffmpeg: ch7-dANY-308764457e3a-remux:  [mpegts @ 0x38a5ba40] Could not find codec parameters for stream 0 (Video: h264 ([27][0][0][0] / 0x001B), none): unspecified size
2025/12/27 12:31:33.916991 [HLS] ffmpeg: ch7-dANY-308764457e3a-remux:  Consider increasing the value for the 'analyzeduration' (0) and 'probesize' (8000000) options
2025/12/27 12:31:37.953613 [ERR] Probe failed for live stream after 10.124619668s and 4603904 bytes

Assuming the timeout is configured for 10s, any way to increase that?

Dispatcharr has the ability to emulate an HDHR tuner so I'm going to try and use that as a source for Channels and see if it handles that better.

#9

What shows in the DVR log when you try to record that channel.

#10

I doubt it will work. Channels DVR will know it's not an HDHR tuner.

#11

When I have something similar I get the Connection Lost message, pressing the OK button restarts the stream,
and if i do it quickly it doesn't miss any frames in fact it may replay the last few.
I have requested a number of times for there to be an Automatic OK button press when Channels is about to send the Connection Lost message, so it would keep going automatically as tho I had pressed the OK button.
Why is this not an option, is there a good reason this is not practical??
And if necessary, have Channels try the Auto OK a fixed number of times, like 5 times,
so if it has simply lost the stream it does not get caught in an Auto OK loop.