Pretty much spells the end for Channels.(at least for me) If all the providers go to captioning then the only use I would have for Channels would be OTA and stuff I already recorded. OTA I can do right off the TV tuner and I have YTTV to record everything. I guess the providers want everyone to use their apps so they can gather usage data and feed more commercials.
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Same here, I switched to Xfinity from YTTV last week.
Hulu is way better than YTTV. I've been on Hulu now for months with no captcha or login issues. I was never able to get YTTV to authenticate, so I gave up and moved on.
I suggest moving to Hulu until YTTV login issues are figured out.
Unfortunately that is not an option for me since Xfinity is not in my area and it looks like they require Xfinity Internet to use their streaming service.
Someone further up this thread said Hulu is also starting to do captchas and is failing now too. My YTTV worked for a couple of weeks after others said theirs had died. I think its just a game of waiting for the authorization to run out and then you lose it.
I would much rather be on Hulu Live TV.
So I had Hulu Live TV for about 6 months without issue. Then about 3 weeks ago I went through hell with resetting passwords and working around the captcha issue. It then worked for about a week. At that point I tried for a day to get Hulu readded to channels and I was unsuccessful.
There are at least two threads on Hulu TVE and authorization:
Maybe Hulu has fixed the the issue, but I can tell at this point.
Has anyone with a Nvidia Shield lost TVE access? Mine still works even after I did a full re-scan.
these are the kinds of moments where I wish Channels DVR was an open source project. would be a lot easier to experiment around this if we didn't have to depend on a team of devs that seemingly have given up on this (since there are several ways to get around captchas through headless chrome, especially when you do have a user conducting the actual sign-in).
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I’m really hoping that the devs are working quietly in the background on a potential fix and haven’t said anything because they don’t want to over promise and under deliver. They really do seem to care and it would be somewhat uncharacteristic to go silent, especially on such a big issue as this unless there’s more to the story. Time will tell, but I’m hopeful…
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I'm new to the TVE part of Channels, got it set up just last month and then all the channels stopped. In reading through this thread it seems to be halting on NBC stations authorization, I get the same NBC Captcha screen when trying setup with YTTV login (new family account, no 2FA). Those are not stations I'm interested in, is there a way to bypass those but authorize other TVE stations like TCM and Hallmarks?
Nope. YTTV no longer works with Channels.
This isn’t really true, but there is clearly a wide-ranging TVE issue, at present, across most providers.
I would expect the devs are working on this, and some response will come soon.
What is true is that more providers are instituting captcha to verify subscriptions and Channels can't handle that. My YTTV kept working just fine for a few weeks after others reported losing stations. Then one morning I lost them all, so I think it's fair to say that once your authorization runs out you will not be able to use YTTV. Some people still can because they have not needed to reauthenticate recently. Seems that HULU has the same problem. So far Xfinity still works for me because they don't seem to use the captcha system.
To me, the most likely scenario is that the content providers are turning the screws to have the TV providers like YoutubeTV, Hulu, Direct TV, etc. clamp down on automated authentication by requiring captchas/human interaction for all auth requests. I'm sure they see allowing 3rd party services like Channels to piggyback off the TV providers' auth services as abuse of their TVE business agreements and as facilitating piracy. I cancelled my Channels subscription yesterday because, unfortunately, I believe their TVE implementation is ultimately doomed (and the emphasis they seem to be placing on streamlink kludges to launch vendors' apps and hardware solutions to basically hijack the HDMI signal tells me they think it is too. They just don't want to come out and say it).
Overall, Google has made a major push for account security over the past few years. And to be real it's for a very good reason as most of these accounts are linked to Gmail with which a compromised account could be devastating for the user.
Forced two-factor authentication and passwordless logins are the future and as you said they will not work with Channel's existing, non-interactive TVE authentication system.
The end seems to be near for unencrypted TVE and I can't imagine the Channels team is going to take on the legal risk of providing a paid-for, native solution for stripping DRM from TVE content so I wouldn't blame them for bailing on the TVE idea entirely.
CableCARD support is ending and DRM protected OTA content is on the way. It's sad, but a clunky HDMI device might end up being the last remaining way to get premium content into a personal DVR.
And of course at the end of the day none of this will do anything to prevent piracy lol.
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It’s working again. No idea how the devs worked around the captcha issue but so cool. Thx devs.
Confirmed, working for me as well. Thanks!
Nope. Still getting the captcha
You have to update your dvr to prerelease
I updated to the pre-release.