You could try overriding the dns for hls. to point to the lax. IP, maybe that will work.
I can try reaching out to their engineers tomorrow.
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that's a great thought, but unfortunately i already tried it. didn't work.
at least, i tried putting it in the hosts file. if there's another way to do it, let me know and i'll give it a shot...
further confirmation that the CDN is the problem: i have fhdhr running w/ modified code as an input to channels as a fake hdhr. i modified the code to replace hls. with lax. in any stream url.
it works flawlessly (aside from the fact the tuner keeps disconnecting every 5 minutes or so)...so it's not a valid solution, but it is proof of concept that using the lax domain (and corresponding CDN) fixes the buffering issue.
Do you have a Pi-hole on network or can you install one? It is my understanding that you can change the Blacklist mode to basically a redirect instead.
used to, now I have Adguard home. have been trying to get that to work but so far unsuccessful.
i don't think there is a way to do this via dns. i can do a dns cname rewrite but when the request gets to the other cdn, it's still not going to accept a request for hls.locastnet.org, which is why it's failing. i need to be able to actually request lax.locastnet.org instead.
trying to get fhdhr running, but i can't get these streams to run. i can load them all in VLC (either via direct or ffmpeg), but channels just sits there and spins and then goes "playback failed" every single time.
i'm using custom channels m3u trying to load them, NOT the emulated hdhr.
So I just saw this topic from my weekly digest and I read the first 25 or so comments and then the last few. I'm not sure if it helps, but I'm experiencing the same issue the last week or so. LA market
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I'm in Denver and have similar issues with locast. Gonna try the pi-hole blacklist hack. Anyone have more info on that just to make sure I get it right?
what pi hole blacklist hack?
I'm not following. what would this do exactly?
Well, just as another data point, I'm a Locast subscriber in LA market as well (I use it specifically for KCAL and KTLA) and have NOT experienced this buffering issue with Channels DVR. At least not yet...?
Dunno what's up. It's a new issue for me from the last week. I've been on KNBC watching the Olympics.
Scrap that, it looks like PiHole changed their tech so that method does not work anymore. However, there appears to be a way that is much simpler. The idea is just to make sure that HLS resolves to LAX's IP address. If we take a look, HLS is like this:
And LAX is this:
So in PiHole we have the option of Local DNS | DNS Records:
As you can see, I added an entry to make HLS resolve to LAX's IP Adress. This is working as expected:
Try making a HTTPS connection to the hls address and see if the lax server will accept it. This is effectively a man-in-the-middle attack and certificate validation would typically block it (unless locast uses very broad wildcard certificates). (The wrong Host: will also get passed and some servers will reject for that reason.)
I have no idea how I would do or test that. And I don't have Locast and am not in a market that has Locast. All I can do is PING and CURL and I get responses. Proof of concept is all I can offer.
Except you only offered a concept/suggestion. You haven't shown proof that your idea would work as indicated.
Fine, bad semantics on my part. Tried to help with a concept, hope it works for those affected by the issue. If not, lesson learned. Goodnight.
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it doesn't work when you try to watch the streams, though. at least it didn't for me.