TV Everywhere Experiences (Internal Beta)

@tmm1 - I just sent in a form after signing up and testing the Beta with the Spectrum Choice login. I reported that no channels came through but actually that isn't correct.

I just noticed I had to change the Guide from "Favorite Channels" to "All Channels" and they now show up. I will keep testing.

So I just did some testing of the playback and it actually looks really good! I have setup some recordings for tonight and will check those out as they are done recording.

Issue: On the Nvidia Shield, all of the channels show up under the "On Now" tab but the new channels aren't showing up in the Grid guide tab. The only channels showing up there are my usual OTA channels.

By the way - I am not sure why this would be, but I signed up for the Spectrum TV Choice package which gives you your locals live and 10 cable only channels of your choice, which I did select. However, I am getting a ton of other channels that are actually working! Where I thought I should only be seeing the 10 I selected I am seeing all the other channels as well. I hope that keeps up!

Really great idea you guys have here.

I’m interested in joinin the beta and would love to get tveverywhere but curious how the crash rate is for the beta versions. I just got my wife sold on Channels dvr because it’s so reliable. Don’t want to screw that up. And if it does crash a lot, is it easy to go back to the Normal releases?

Ok maybe dumb question, but on Mac, does Chrome need to be installed and also set as the default browser, or just installed?

Just installed. I use a Safari as a default on my DVR server and TVE channels work just fine.

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I tried to install the beta version and it wouldn’t start the dvr back up. I had to uninstall and reinstall non beta version... guess I can’t try something new :frowning:

Please email [email protected] with the log file from Library/Application Support/ChannelsDVR in your user directory after you do the upgrade.

Just installed.

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Does this mean that on my headless Linux box running Channels for my DVR server that I must have Chrome installed?

(If so, that explains why I was receiving crashes while trying to test over the weekend, because I don't have a browser installed on that machine. Also, is Chromium sufficient, or is Chrome necessary? Is this Widevine related, and if so can I use Chromium with the Widevine extension installed?)

On Linux you don't need anything as Chrome will be installed automatically in the dvr directory. Please email support with the log messages and screenshot so we can figure out what's going on.

Was having the same problem...as @Edwin_Perez. The fix you posted solved my problem, too.

Thank you for sharing.

Ah, I see it now. I figured the binaries would be installed with the others, rather than in the data dir.

(I have my Channels DVR installed into /usr/lib/channels-dvr, and data/ is a symlink into /var/lib/channels-dvr. Call me crazy, but I don't like executables in /var, especially since some systems mark /var as noexec.)

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Beta releases are generally very stable but bugs do occur. Usually not crashes though.

You can uninstall/reinstall to switch back, and use http://127.0.0.1:8089/restore to restore the latest backup.

This new feature is amazing, and works so well with my initial testing. It’s something I didn’t know could be done (third parties accessing the TVE streams), so it makes it even better to be surprised. Keep up the good work @tmm1 and @maddox.

One question, is there any expectation that the audio may be improved from stereo?

Nope, that's what they're using across the board and it's unlikely to change.

Working great so far. Issues/Questions:

  1. Will Passes record from TVE if channel is available in both HDHRPrime and TVE?
  2. Should Closed Captioning be working (does not seem to work)?
  3. Why are some TVE Channels missing? (in my case, Tennis Channel in Fios)

Great question about passes. Would love to understand how that will work. Especially when combining such different sources (PRIME + TVE).

Edit: sounds like priority works the same as when using multiple HDHRs. Looking forward to trying it. If Channels ever gets idle time to install beta. Too many recording! :joy:

Depends on the priority you set and your favorited channels.

Yes CC works.

Not all channels have been imported into our system yet. In particular many sports channels are missing.

Just realized it works only when Software Transcoder is selected. Hardware Transcoder somehow skips CC.

Is that something you guys need to do manually, like one by one? If so, can we help create a list of missing channels? Will we have to re-scan when you add them? Thanks!

This is a known limitation of hardware transcoding. CC data has never been preserved when using hardware transcoding. Whether this is supported in the future or not is most likely dependent upon whether ffmpeg's h264_vaapi encoder can preserve the CC data in the future.