Kodi dumping out while loading channels from client

[NND]

Hi. I have been using NextPVR for nearly two years now, and am very happy with it. I have NextPVR 4.2.4 installed on a laptop as a 'server', and initially used Kodi on an Android box attached to my TV as the client. Generally it worked very well. About six months ago I replaced the Android box with an Amazon Firestick 4K, and took the opportunity to upgrade my Kodi client from 17.6 to 18.1. That too worked well with NPVR. Then a few days ago, I started to experience problems loading Kodi on the Firestick. When I click on the Kodi icon to launch it, the Leia splash screen appears as normal, then the usual Kodi home screen, and in the top right corner the 'Loading channels from clients' process starts. But, about 25% of the way through that, after just a few seconds, the process momentarily freezes, and then Kodi closes and dumps me back out to the Firestick home screen.

I wondered if there was now a more current version of Kodi, and found there was. So, today I upgraded it from 18.1 to 18.3, but exactly the same thing is still happening. The upgrade hasn't fixed it. I can't get Kodi to stay loaded for more than about 10 seconds until it gets part way through the loading channels from client process. I saw in another forum that there might be a problem in Kodi, where under Settings / PVR & Live TV / General / Channel Manager there could be a channel marked as 'not active', but where the 'Activate guide' flag is not set to 'false'. However, I can't get Kodi to stay loaded for long enough for me to investigate that, and I don't know how to stop the Kodi NPVR add-on from trying to load the guide while I check.

Do you have any ideas how I can troubleshoot this? I know you normally ask for logs, but I don't know how to obtain a log file from a Firestick. Hoping you can help!

(Incidentally, I am not seeing any problems with the NextPVR back-end on my laptop - that is working just fine, the same as it always has.)

[mvallevand]

Can you access NextPVR web from your browser at http://localhost:8866 on the server?

Martin

[NND]

Yes, Martin. It took maybe 20 seconds or so, but then came up fine. I've never used that before. How can it help?

Ray.

[mvallevand]

Since you didnt post logs the easy question is to confirm the web server is up it sometimes breaks after window updates. Nex thing is debug kodi logs with the kodi log uploader addon and nextpvr log.

Martin

[NND]

OK, I'll check into the Kodi log uploader addon - I wasn't aware of that before. However, I think I may have seen a pattern to the problem. At the point where Kodi crashes and dumps back out to the Firestick home screen, it always seems to be trying to load the guide for the same channel. It's a new one from my IPTV provider I added a couple of weeks ago, and initially it was fine, but then Kodi started failing a few days ago. I say "I think" because the 'Loading channels from clients' message is sometimes covered up by the 'Scanning TV Shows from TheTVDB' message, so I can't always see which channel's guide is being loaded. The particular channel in question is suspect because in NextPVR, there is no channel mapping for it. In NextPVR, when I go to Settings / Channels and open the Details for that channel, then click the Mapping drop down list at the bottom, there is no entry in the list for that channel. I have 99 channels in my m3u file, and all the other 98 appear in the mapping list, but not this one. Is there a way to update or regenerate the channel mapping list?

[NND]

By the way, how can I install the Kodi log uploader addon, when Kodi won't stay open? If I close down my NextPVR laptop, Kodi then objects that the NextPVR addon failed to load and won't let me continue.

[pkscout]

If you have your library set to scan at startup and are using theTVDB as your scraper, there is a know problem with theTVDB right now causing Kodi to crash when scanning your library. There was an update to theTVDB scraper this morning that should address that. If you don't have your addons set to auto update then you need to initiate a manual update of your addons. I mention it only because the updating library message can be hidden by the updating channels dialog at startup, which could lead one to (rightfully) believe it's a probably loading the channels.

The trick is that you need to disable the library update at startup just to be able to do any of that. There are a couple of suggestions in the first post of this thread on the Kodi forum on how to get around the library update at startup.

https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=345935

[NND]

SUCCESS!!! I managed to get into Settings / Media and disable the library update at startup just before Kodi crashed. On the next attempt at launching Kodi, it ran to completion with the guide loading all channels from client as normal. So, it apparently had nothing to do with the unmapped channel, and instead had everything to do with the revamp of the TheTVDB website and API. And, that makes perfect sense since the problem just started a few days ago. I hope they get that fixed soon, but I really appreciate you pointing me to that other forum post. Their workaround of turning off internet access to the Android device in order to load Kodi would not have worked, because then the NPVR addon would have failed to load. But, by getting to the necessary setting in just a few seconds, I was able to prevent the problem. I will keep an eye on that other forum thread to see when the TheTVDB problem gets resolved. Thank you, pkscout, for your help.