Unable to Discover SiliconDust Flex 4K

[pkscout]

I swear there was a thread on this issue somewhere, but I can't find it.  I've got a new SiliconDust Flex 4K which is up and running on my network.  I can connect to it and view the channels in VLC, but when I scan for devices in NextPVR, the device never shows up.  I have two other SD devices (cable card devices) that are fine, but I scanned them quite awhile ago.  All of them are running firmware 20221031.  I'm running in Docker on a Synology NAS.

I wonder if SD finally fully depreciated the old method of scanning for devices.  When I use the SD discovery URL at:

http://ipv4-api.hdhomerun.com/discover

I get my two card card devices but not the Flex 4K.  If I use:

http://ipv6-api.hdhomerun.com/discover

that shows the Flex 4K.

Anyway, attached are some logs.

I even tried manually inserting the device into the database.  That got the device to show up in the list, but it shows as unavailable.  My next thing is to try and write an extra that will just pass the URL for the channel to NextPVR.

[mvallevand]

I posted an announcement on this https://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php?tid=64220 but I wasn't sure when it would impact us. Seems it does now I also discussed it with SD https://forum.silicondust.com/forum/view...hp?t=77340 but no real discovery solution without sub using the ipv6 URL too.

My suggestion would be to add the device as IPTV I worked with sub so that the recent versions of v6 handle the channel-number etc for SD auto mapping for this scenario that I speculated we might need on Docker.

Use the URL http://ipv4-ip/lineup.m3u and allow 4 max-connections with the previous notes on channels > 100 only allowing 2. This is a little safer then creating two IPTV lists but you can do that too.

Martin

[pkscout]

Thanks, that did it. I don't have to worry about the ATSC 3.0 channels, as we don't have any in Philadelphia. So doing this with max 4 connections seems to work fine.

[pkscout]

Dragging this back up just to see if there is any other option besides the IPTV route. Using the Flex 4K as an IPTV device seems to mean that NextPVR doesn't know it's already recording on a channel when another recording starts on that channel. I have 2 minute pre and post padding, so there is an overlap when I record back to back. With my old HDHR NextPVR would record the stream from the same tuner to two files. With the IPTV setup, it starts another tuner. So if I have two channels doing back to back at the same time, there is a brief time where NextPVR is using all four tuners. So far that hasn't been a problem, but I can see how this could cause recordings not to happen because I don't have any tuners available.

[mvallevand]

With 4 simultaneous connections there are issues, but really only post padding being truncated, or those odd shows that end 1 or 2 minutes past the hour. You are right IPTV doesn't support multi-rec though which I was hoping sub could implement one day.

We could also do this as an extra and it would not have this risk. I did create a python script to generate the Extras file, but you might need to create the Extra on a real network. I can guide you through this if you want.

Martin

[pkscout]

With 4 simultaneous connections there are issues, but really only post padding being truncated, or those odd shows that end 1 or 2 minutes past the hour. You are right IPTV doesn't support multi-rec though which I was hoping sub could implement one day.

We could also do this as an extra and it would not have this risk.  I did create a python script to generate the Extras file, but you might need to create the Extra on a real network.  I can guide you through this if you want.

Martin

I'd love to give that python script a try.  I did an Extras for a network encoder awhile back, so I'm familiar.  I actually tried to use that as the basis for a new Extras for the Flex 4K, but I was missing something obvious, and it didn't work.  Maybe with your python script to generate the Extras file I can get it working.

Thanks.

[mvallevand]

Ok this code was quick and dirty experiment for ac-4 more than anything else so I wouldn't base any code on it.  It also uses http://ipv4-api.hdhomerun.com/discover which is why you need to run it on local host, not sure how long SiliconDust will support that.

Looking at it now for URL echo mode it wouldn't need the script file, for now To just run it change on another platform change base = '' to base = '/config/scripts/' or wherever you want to have the sh file (which you will need to chmod +x)  Don't use the install option, just manually install it.

Martin

[pkscout]

Thanks. I was able to use the script (with a small modification) to generate the extra files. I tweaked them a bit for my Docker setup and then rebooted NextPVR to get it to see the new Extras. When I logged in, for the first time the HRHR Flex showed up natively in NextPVR. Go figure. I have no idea if something I did triggered the SD ip4 API to finally return results or if this happened awhile ago and I just never noticed.

Anyway, I now have the HDHR Flex running as a native HDHR in NextPVR and have the Extras archived in case I ever need them for some reason. I also never deleted the two HDHR Prime's I had - I just disabled them. So if I ever starting using them again, I just have to assign them the right IP and I should be good to go.

So strange.

[mvallevand]

Ok, good. You might want to disable the scan for tuners on startup since that would disable the tuners if the problem re-occurs. Additionally, as noted by sub even if the scan is disabled you won't be able to scan for new channels if the API is not available should that need arise.

Martin