'Failed to start requested stream'

[three6zerocool]

Bit of a mad science experiment happening here.

Attempting to run NextPVR on a Proxmox hosted Windows-11 VM.
(maybe impossible?)

Have a fast new machine I got for a Homelab.
Wondered if I could run NextPVR on it virtualized.

First did true bare metal install of Windows 11, along with a Colossus 2 card. and a USB Dual DVB-T dongle on the new machine.
Got everythihg up and running, IR Blasting.. all working good with both tuners.

I migrated the user configuration to a Windows 11 VM under Proxmox.
I nuked all the devices, and rescanned, and it found the Colossus 2 card, and the USB DVB-T tuners.

I can scan and find the DVB-T channels, and import and configure my STB channels, and IR blasting is working.
However, I get error 'Failed to start requested stream'  when trying to watch TV channels in the Web Interface of NextPVR.

Wondering if this is a 'mission impossible' type error thru running in a virtual environment?
Just thought I'd check in, before coming to the ' nah, don't work verdict, back to bare metal'

Inquiring minds wonder.
Logs attached to this post.

..Dean..

[mvallevand]

Start first with making the simple fix

Code:

2023-07-26 23:02:38.765    [ERROR][1]    LiveTV directory does not exist: C:\TIMESHIFT\

Martin

[three6zerocool]

*duh*

I think I did pick up on that, and changed it in the settings, but it must not have stuck for some reason.
Thanks Martin, will look into it.

On the primary rig, I have an SSD which is E drive for time shift.
My recording directory is a NAS, which you also sorted out for me, as NextPVR would not show correct space available, so you told me to enter in my user credentials in the login tab of the NextPVR recording service.
(and that worked really well)

Would be kinda cool to get it working under Windows 11 VM.
I had some doubts about it tho, as I discovered PCI-e tuner cards would not passthru to the Windows VM.

But I discovered that the Colossus card actually registers on the system as a USB device, so I just passed thru the USB controller, and it instantly was recognized.
(so that was really surprising)

Could not get my HVR2200 tuner passed thru either, but had a USB Dual HD twin tuner, so tried that, and the VM seemed to like it.

..Dean..

[three6zerocool]

Update:

*solved*

heh heh,   I did create a folder, but I made the folder C:\Timeshifting instead of c:\Timeshift.

What a difference, both the Colossus 2 and the Dual USB DVB-T devices now working.

Thankyou kindly good sir.   Something so simple.
(I came close tho!....  just missed by  an 'ing')

..Dean..

[IndyUser]

three6zerocool,
I'm just curious whether you are still using this configuration one year later? Has it been stable? I'm asking because I tried a similar setup years ago using a VM running under ESXI with two USB tuners. It "sort of" worked and it would stream TV for a time, but it was unstable. Both tuners would eventually stop working or they would begin to distort the video. Several times the whole ESXI host purple screened and had to be power cycled which was really bad. I tried it with individual USB device passthrough and also tried passing through a USB host controller as a PCI device. The results were more or less the same. I've since migrated the home lab to proxmox, so I'm considering revisiting this now.

[mvallevand]

USB and PCI virtualization will always be a potential for troule but if you are going to run proxmox don't limit yourself to testing Windows, NextPVR runs very well on Linux.

Martin

[three6zerocool]

>three6zerocool,
>I'm just curious whether you are still using this configuration one year later?

Yes, actually I am.
Am running Proxmox VE host environment, and have a virtualized Windows 11 Pro installation, which of course has NextPVR running.
I have 2 WinTV Dual HD USB tuners,  WinTV Nova 461e USB satellite tuner, and a Hauppauge Colossus 2.

> Has it been stable? I'm asking because I tried a similar setup years ago using a VM running under ESXI with two USB tuners. It "sort of" worked and >it would stream TV for a time, but it was unstable. Both tuners would >eventually stop working or they would begin to distort the video. Several times the whole ESXI host purple screened and had to be power cycled which was >really bad. I tried it with individual USB device passthrough and also >tried passing through a USB host controller as a PCI device. The results were more or less the same. I've since migrated the home lab to proxmox, so I'm >considering revisiting this now.

Yes, it is very stable, and been running since I made this original posting.
I have refined it of course, as was new to Proxmox at the time, and did not really know what I was doing.
My Proxmox server is very modern tho, and running on Asus Prime Z790 chipset and Intel i9 13900k

The mistake I made was following various guides for passthru, blacklisting drivers etc.
It caused a lot of issues, and in particular I could not passthru some of my PCI tuner devices, so instead I went the USB route. 

For my motherboard, it handles the virtual stuff at BIOS level, and uses SR-IOV.
What this merans, is that one does not have to configure any of the passthru stuff in Proxmox itself, as it just works without 'any' configuration of the proxmox host configuration files.
ie. I just add the hardware I want to each VM, and it just works.

I also run Truenas Scale virtualized in Proxmox, so that allows me to use various VM's and containers, and share SR-IOV devices like GPU's without configuration in Proxmost host.
eg. Can assign the built in GPU or Nvidia card, to be used by multiple VM's at the same time.

You can passthru an entire bus, like the entire USB controller/s , but I found out you can take the host configs hardware, and assign it to each VM.
eg. Assign a single port to one VM, and a different port to another VM.

Doing it this way seems very stable, and I can not really tell the difference running VM VS bare metal Windows install.
The other advantage, as that you can create snapshots of running VM's and restore at any time, without affecting other running processes.

As Martin says, you can run NextPVR well under Linux, but as I use Hauppauge Colossus card with STB,  I think that is something that only Windows Version supports?.
I setup NextPVR within Truenas Scale, and after configuring properly, it discovered all my systems tuners 'except' Colossus.

At the time I was trying to resolve a micro-stutter issue I have when using Fire TV Cube 3rd gen clients.
Turned out to be  firmware bug issue with these devices when using STB interlaced output.
On these clients my STB livetv/recording just are smegged up.  THo clients like NVidia Shield or AppleTV have no issues playing the content.

I have a used Colossus1 card coming soon from ebay, so am going to see if a true 1080i interlaced device makes any difference on the Fire TV Cube 3rd gen's.

As far as Virtualized goes tho on Proxmox, it works great on my system.

[three6zerocool]

I should add that I had issues with USB, and specifically USB-C hubs.

Tried a few, and had some stability issues, then tried a Belkin USB-C Hub, and used USB-C to USB 3 adapters for the 3 USB Tuner devices.
The motherboard has internal USB-C connector on motherboard, so connected that to the Belkin USB-C 4 port hub, and the tuners connect to that hub.

The Colossus2 card is recognized as a USB device, so in proxmox I simply had to choose add usb device from the VM's hardware tab, and choose the hardware such as mouse, keyboard, tuners.
Previously, I passed the the entire USB controller, which did work, but seemed to cause some issues when hot swapping devices, and when devices were entering sleep mode etc.

The only thing I have yet to resolve, is that originally I used IRSS and an MCE Blaster to change channels.
Don't know why, but my Microsoft eHome IR blaster/receiver will not work unless the entire USB controller is passed thru.
So, I now I use the IR blaster built into the Colossus 2 card, and HaupBlast.exe to change channels on my STB.

Apart from that, I much prefer the virtualized environment.

As Martin mentions, one does not have to limit themselves to Windows, and Linux does indeed run NextPVR well, and I have managed to run NextPVR as an app inside TrueNAS Scale, and it worked really well, but no Colossus2 support.

If there is a way to get that working, would have no problems running it under Linux, but pretty sure it cannot easily be done, as the support does not exist for that OS.

They only thing I experience is bit of time shifting issues, where things just seem to lockup for a time when time shifting with Kodi addon.
I think it is something to do with recording to my NAS, as I have a 6 drive array in RaidZ2 configuration, which gives the capacity of 4 drives, and 2 drives for redundancy.
(under this config, I believe the array is only as fast as one single drive, so it is kinda similar to using a large USB hard drive in terms of performance, so time shifting does not seem that great)

I am thinking of using an 8TB NVME Raid, and recording all content to it, as it would be ridiculously fast, but being a stripe set, essentially would be zero redundancy, so would need to back that data up to NAS.
Then if the NVME array gets any errors, could reformat it and copy all it's data back on.

[IndyUser]

It sounds promising.  I'll try it under Debian, assuming there is driver support for the tuners. I have NextPVR running on an old NUC right now, and it is underpowered for the job. Among other annoyances, the video will freeze briefly anytime you are watching a recording and the system tries to start recording something else. If I can solve the passthrough problem, I think a virtualized setup would work a lot better. It would certainly have access to a lot more storage. Worst case I guess I could buy a network tuner, but I hate to spend a ton of money on this setup since I really only use it occasionally when the Internet goes down and I can't stream. Thanks for the feedback! 

[mvallevand]

As Martin mentions, one does not have to limit themselves to Windows, and Linux does indeed run NextPVR well, and I have managed to run NextPVR as an app inside TrueNAS Scale, and it worked really well, but no Colossus2 support.

If there is a way to get that working, would have no problems running it under Linux, but pretty sure it cannot easily be done, as the support does not exist for that OS.

That would depend on the PCI support in the VM.  You are correct there is no kernel support for the HD-PVR2 and Colossus, but you might find this works.  https://github.com/jpoet/HauppaugeUSB  if you can compile on Debian or Ubuntu it should be a problem, you just need this patch https://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.ph...#pid590745

Here it is in my tuning script (with AC3 support)

Code:

/opt/Hauppauge/bin/hauppauge2 -a 1 -d 2 -s E515-00-00AE3EB8 | ffmpeg -v panic -i pipe: -codec copy -f mpegts - &

 

I pipe mine through ffmpeg since I found a few device didn't like the native ts file create.

In the linked post, I mentioned MythTV like control.  I have played with controlling the device with named pipes in my script which does work but I haven't come up with a stable enough solution for everyday use. It does save seconds on load but it will never be a fast capture so I use an HDMI network device for most Live TV.  Network devices will always be better with VM anyway.

Martin