[RELEASE] Playlist Manager for Channels [Streaming Library Manager Extension]

I am in the beta playlist settings, and it does not work, that is being able to mass update. So is there another location I should be looking in, please let me know thanks.

There's no such place as "beta playlist settings", so I'm afraid you'll have to be a lot more specific. This is where you do it:

And it works, just as described:

Of course, you should put in actual links, like https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/WCVB-TV_Logo.png. Also be sure you have read the Troubleshooting / FAQ when it comes to logos:

Unless you are saying you are literally trying to upload image files here:

In which case, that is not currently supported. As the title and instructions say, this is only for uploading m3u and XML files, nothing else. You'd also get a warning if you tried:

image

If you need a place to store images, I recommend using Channel's own image upload and storage location:

Or are you requesting to have somewhere to upload and store images in PLM? Without screen shots and full descriptions, I'm afraid I'm just guessing at what you are talking about. Are you even on the most recent version?

@babsonnexus yes those are the correct steps as you mention in your comments and screenshots, but when I input a url for a .png image file into [OPTIONAL]
Guide Logo (tvg-logo) Override, to mass update the logos, it does not save and also has no confirmation that it did save. Your program is excellent but trying to understand why the mass update logos dont work?

Well, once again, you need to provide details. You are having an issue that no one else has reported and that I can't replicate, thus I can't help you without a lot more. Let's start with some basics:

  1. What version of SLM are you using?

  2. Which installation method did you use?

  3. If you are using Docker, what is your host machine?

  4. Can you save any single item anywhere in SLM/PLM? What is working?

  5. Can you give some examples of your entries that are not saving? Is there something common between them, like a certain character?

  6. After you click save in Parents, what shows in the Logs? Are there any error messages, warnings, crashes, anything?

  7. Could security be an issue? SLM/PLM write to csv files in the program_files directory. Has security to those files been changed so they can't be written to, notably PlaylistManager_Parents.csv.

1 Like

@babsonnexus With your current setup of sending TVE from one channels server instance to SLM to another channels server instance have you experienced any noticable lag while tunning?

I want to set this up to power both my home and my vacation house over tailscale. My thinking is to use one server instance for TVE and ADBTuner to feed into SLM with my other sources.

Then put the result from SLM into a second channels instance. I would then feed the the into a local server instance at my vacation home over tailscale.

Seems a bit conveluted, but I think it should work.

Maybe half a second or so? I don't do a lot of live TV, so it hasn't been noticeable.

I'd think if you want to go down that path, just go TVE Channels Instance, ADBTuner, and other stuff to SLM, SLM into your main Channels instance, Tailscale on your main Channels instance to vacation home. Now reading that, maybe I'm saying the same thing? I guess I just don't see the need to have a local instance at your vacation home, but perhaps there's some benefit for you that I'm not aware of.

Thanks for the inspiration! I've been working on my Playlist consolidation, cleanup and curation for a couple of weeks now. I'm matching the recipe you've outlined pretty similarly, but I'm only using my FAST sources, no TVE or OTA in the mix. Unfortunately I've hit a snag in the past couple of days that I can't sort out, hoping you can help.

I am running the latest version: v2024.11.18.1135. The problem is, I can't get my final XML to update anymore, the alert stays on screen and doesn't go away:

I've left it sitting there for over 90 minutes and it never finishes anymore. I've tried using Chrome as well as Safari, the same issue happens with both browsers. And when I do manually refresh the page, the numbers for "Assigned" and "Ignored" don't change, even though I've certainly modified a bunch of those assignments since the last successful update.

"Updating Station List" works properly. It's only "Update M3U(S) & XML EPG(S)" that hangs and fails for me now, and this wasn't always the case.

Here are some other screenshots of my setup, if there's anything I'm missing, or other information I can share that will help, please let me know:

Because it's not updating, only the Gracenote channels (which start at channel 2500) are showing Guide Data:

And the EPG for the non-Gracenote channels (which start at channel 3000) is not populating anymore, the channel assignments are lost:

Thanks for any pointers or advice, I'd appreciate it!

Yes that would work as well. However, adding in the local server was more a convenience since I can enable tailscale on the server and give all the clients at the vacation home access instead of setting up a subnet router or adding each client individually.

Can you check in the program_files directory and see if there is a temp.txt file? If there is, first delete that. Next, run Update m3u(s) and XML EPG(s). If it is still going after 6-7 minutes, get me the latest logs in this range:

2024-11-19 11:30:00.181504:  Starting generation of final m3u(s) and XML EPG(s)...

    Deleted: plm_epg_hls_m3u_01.m3u
    Deleted: plm_gracenote_hls_m3u_01.m3u
    Deleted: plm_gracenote_mpeg_ts_m3u_01.m3u
    Created: plm_gracenote_hls_m3u_01.m3u
    Created: plm_gracenote_mpeg_ts_m3u_01.m3u
    Created: plm_epg_hls_m3u_01.m3u
[DEBUG | 2024-11-19 11:30:03,648] - Starting new HTTP connection (1): localhost:7971
[DEBUG | 2024-11-19 11:30:03,973] - http://localhost:7971 "GET /plex/epg/local/epg-local.xml HTTP/1.1" 200 44467404
[DEBUG | 2024-11-19 11:30:05,996] - Starting new HTTP connection (1): localhost:7972
[DEBUG | 2024-11-19 11:30:06,261] - http://localhost:7972 "GET /pluto/epg/local/epg-local.xml HTTP/1.1" 200 12794658
[DEBUG | 2024-11-19 11:30:06,777] - Starting new HTTP connection (1): localhost:7977
[DEBUG | 2024-11-19 11:30:07,622] - http://localhost:7977 "GET /epg.xml?regions=us HTTP/1.1" 200 None
[DEBUG | 2024-11-19 11:30:07,988] - Encoding detection: utf_8 is most likely the one.
[DEBUG | 2024-11-19 11:30:08,004] - Starting new HTTP connection (1): localhost:7970
[DEBUG | 2024-11-19 11:30:48,440] - http://localhost:7970 "GET /tubi/epg.xml HTTP/1.1" 200 3311346
[DEBUG | 2024-11-19 11:30:48,512] - Starting new HTTP connection (1): localhost:7973
[DEBUG | 2024-11-19 11:30:52,021] - http://localhost:7973 "GET /distrotv/epg.xml HTTP/1.1" 200 889012
    Deleted: plm_epg_hls_m3u_01.xml
    Created: plm_epg_hls_m3u_01.xml

2024-11-19 11:32:19.907704:  Finished generation of final m3u(s) and XML EPG(s).

It it completes this time, check to see if that temp.txt file is there. It it is, it looks like there might be some Mac security issue I need to attend to.

My thought is this: the way PLM works with the XML is it reads all the XML guides and copies their contents into a new temp.txt files. Then it reads that file and matches up against the stations in the EPG m3u(s), creating the corresponding XML files. After that, it deletes the temp.txt file. If security is not allowing the temp.txt to be deleted, then the file will just keep getting bigger and bigger, meaning it will take even longer to read it. By my calculation (182 stations in 87 seconds from the log above), mine is taking about a bit less than half a second per station to read the temp.txt file and write it the output XML file, so your 666 stations should take about five and half minutes, hence why I asked you to check in after 6-7 minutes total.

Yes, this is the answer. My temp.txt file was a whopping 11.7 GB! Three similarly-sized copies were in the backups directory, so I deleted them, too. Now it makes sense why docker's "virtual disk" was almost full...!

Once deleted, PLM's Update m3u(s) and XML EPG(s) command ran successfully, and I'm back in business. Thanks :+1:t2:

Did the temp.txt successfully automatically delete after you ran that?

Yes, this time it did. I ran the command again, saw a new temp.txt get created, watched as it grew to 57.9 MB, when the process completed, and then, saw it disappear.

Now I'm able to avoid landing on 666 channels :flushed: Phew. Thanks again!

Just wanted to say, I'm loving the tvg-logo override functionality. I just used that to personalize some non-Gracenote adbTuner channels we've enjoyed for awhile, and it works perfectly. Slowly but surely our personalized Guide keeps getting better and better.

Sometimes Channels DVR feels like my version of a digital bonsai tree :smiling_face: I'm not sure why this hobby's so satisfying โ€” but SLM and PLM are a big part of that now. Thanks again.

3 Likes

Unfortunately this happened again :sleepy: I haven't added or changed much on the PLM side in the past 10 days, just been using the Channels clients on our AppleTV's and surfing through our supercharged Channel Collections daily. This morning however I saw that guide data for some FAST channels was missing so I went into PLM to run a manual update. After 15 minutes passed without that dialog going away, I realized it must have hung again, like last time. So I went to my server where Docker Desktop is running and checked the program_files directory and see that the temp.txt file has grown to 10 GB this time, and there are three copies of it in the backips folders too. So I deleted those, and did a manual update again. And yes, just like last time, this allowed the update to succeed.

Then I tried to redownload guide data for the two PLM Custom Channels but that didn't seem to help, ultimately the last step of Deleting and Recreating the database is what got everything working and displaying properly in the Guide again. So hopefully this issue can get resolved, of the temp.txt file ballooning and not auto-deleting. What else can I do to test, or report?

I have 9 playlists incorporated into PLM, we're whittling down the combined channels slowly but surely but right now PLM is outputting about 1000 channels, ~350 of which are using Gracenote data and ~650 using the EPGs generated by Dockers. Is that just too many?

That's not having an impact here; it's that temp file refusing to delete. In the latest release...

... I added a function that might help with this. If the temp file fails to delete, you will now get a notification and there will be even more details in the logs. If/when this happens to you, please post your logs so I can take a look and see if I can do something about it.


Also in this version, you can now disable the Stream Link/File Manager portion of the program. Enjoy!

Thanks! I've updated, and will keep an eye out.

Sorry if it's been asked before but search didn't yield anything useful. How are you guys using this with TVE?

I discussed my use case above:

3 Likes

Hi, sorry to report that 17 days later, it happened again. Manually deleting the temp.txt file fixed it again too. It was 3GB this time. Here are the relevant logs, hopefully this helps:

2024-12-18 17:02:09.597278:  Finished generation of final m3u(s) and XML EPG(s).
      Deleted: plm_epg_hls_m3u_01.xml
  2024-12-18 17:02:09.564583:  ERROR: Failed to delete file '/app/program_files/temp.txt' after 5 attempts. Please manually delete and report this error along with other warnings and info in the logs.
  
2024-12-18 17:01:17.581343:  Finished generation of final m3u(s) and XML EPG(s).
      Created: plm_epg_hls_m3u_01.xml
      Deleted: plm_epg_hls_m3u_01.xml
      Created: plm_epg_hls_m3u_01.m3u
      Created: plm_gracenote_hls_m3u_01.m3u
      Deleted: plm_gracenote_hls_m3u_01.m3u
      Deleted: plm_epg_hls_m3u_01.m3u
2024-12-18 17:01:19.527674:  WARNING: After 1 attempt, failed to remove /app/program_files/temp.txt due to: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/app/program_files/temp.txt'
2024-12-18 17:01:19.527728:  INFO: Waiting for 10 seconds before next attempt...

2024-12-18 17:01:29.539017:  WARNING: After 2 attempt, failed to remove /app/program_files/temp.txt due to: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/app/program_files/temp.txt'
2024-12-18 17:01:29.540495:  INFO: Waiting for 10 seconds before next attempt...

2024-12-18 17:01:39.549115:  WARNING: After 3 attempt, failed to remove /app/program_files/temp.txt due to: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/app/program_files/temp.txt'
2024-12-18 17:01:39.549617:  INFO: Waiting for 10 seconds before next attempt...

2024-12-18 17:01:49.556193:  WARNING: After 4 attempt, failed to remove /app/program_files/temp.txt due to: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/app/program_files/temp.txt'
2024-12-18 17:01:49.557336:  INFO: Waiting for 10 seconds before next attempt...
[INFO | 2024-12-18 17:01:58,646] - 172.24.0.1 - - [18/Dec/2024 17:01:58] "GET /playlists/files/plm_gracenote_hls_m3u_01.m3u HTTP/1.1" 200 -

2024-12-18 17:01:59.564363:  WARNING: After 5 attempt, failed to remove /app/program_files/temp.txt due to: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/app/program_files/temp.txt'
2024-12-18 17:01:59.564736:  INFO: Waiting for 10 seconds before next attempt...
2024-12-18 17:02:09.564583:  ERROR: Failed to delete file '/app/program_files/temp.txt' after 5 attempts. Please manually delete and report this error along with other warnings and info in the logs.
    Deleted: plm_epg_hls_m3u_01.xml

2024-12-18 17:02:09.597278:  Finished generation of final m3u(s) and XML EPG(s).

Hmmmm... could I get the log back to the Starting generation of final m3u(s) and XML EPG(s)... part? Also, perhaps the same sequence in some prior run, maybe just some random one from a few hours earlier and something from a couple of days earlier? If you can find the last successful run, that might be helpful to see, too.