Getting Pluto extra to work

[ballfam]

My wife has decided that she really likes the PBR (Pro bull riding), and most shows are covered exclusively by Pluto Ride pass, so I'm trying to get the Pluto extra working so I can record with NextPVR. I followed Martin's/Sub's instructions here:

https://github.com/sub3/NextPVR/wiki/Extra-PlutoTV

Everything seems to install OK and I have the EPG up and running, but when I try to stream anything, I get the dreaded "Steaming failed (transcoder exited)". A quick debug of streamlink gives me this:


$ streamlink https://pluto.tv/live-tv/cnn best
error: No plugin can handle URL: https://pluto.tv/live-tv/cnn

I seem to be missing a plugin of some kind, or has Pluto changed up their streams? Anyone have any ideas how to solve this issue?

I should note that both streamlink and Python3 were already installed on my system, it could be that I have the wrong version

Thanks

[mvallevand]

I don't think anything is missing that just means your sample name for CNN isn't valid or is geoblocked. A related post was here https://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.ph...#pid572639 maybe try that test.

Of course the API could have changed but I am on vacation and can't test anything. Any support for streamlink is on their GitHub issue page

[ballfam]

Thanks Martin, actually it seems like a combination of things. streamlink --version shows 1.3.1, which is really old. I did a manual update in my own .local and now it gets further but says:

$ ./streamlink https://pluto.tv/live-tv/cars-1 best
[cli][info] Found matching plugin pluto for URL https://pluto.tv/live-tv/cars-1
error: No playable streams found on this URL: https://pluto.tv/live-tv/cars-1

Pasting the address in a browser on my local laptop works, but in a browser on my server it doesn't stream anything. I think the smart DNS I have enabled to stream TV from Australia might be affecting the Pluto streams.

I think I'm going to run up a VM with a clean install of the latest Ubuntu and start from an unpolluted machine. I'll repost when I'm done to update the status.

[ballfam]

OK, I got it working on a new VM. I threw a minimal version of Ubuntu Server on a new VM, installed NextPVR, and then followed the instructions from the start. It took about 30 mins from running up the VM to watching Pluto. NextPVR is remarkably memory friendly, and doesn't appear to have any memory leaks (good job Sub and Martin); with a minimal kernel the whole system runs easily in 2 Gig of memory, and KVM runs almost at native speed on the latest kernels.

I think a combination of an old kernel and software, and the fact that I'm using a smart DNS on my server was causing issues. My server is still back on Debian 9 because I can never get a downtime window to upgrade and reboot.

If anyone is interested, this worked right out-of-the box first try with:

• Ubuntu server minimal install with 20.04.3 LTS (no desktop required). I ran it in a VM with 2 Gig
  
• The standard install of NextPVR from the deb (instructions on the forum)
  
• The standard streamlink 3.1.1 that comes with Ubuntu (simple apt install)
  
• The Python3 that comes Ubuntu (requires additional apt install python3-pip)
  
• Following the instruction as shown in the Pluto guide on github
  

As always, thanks Martin for the help.

[Prsa01]

You'll likely find recording on Pluto is very hit/miss. Some channels play back well, others not so much. I've had everything from no problems viewing a recording to audio sync issues to broken streams. I seem to have the best luck viewing with vlc but sometimes trying to reposition in the stream (skip commercials) will completely crash. Had some luck remuxing the stream with ffmpeg but that suddenly is giving me some audio sync issues as well.

If you come up with something that works across multiple channels please share.

[ballfam]

@Prsa01. Yup, I'm seeing much the same issue. Sometimes it seems to work, other times skipping forward will cause audio/video to go out-of-sync, other times it just hangs. I use Plex as my universal player so I can watch on smart TVs and other platforms, and it can't handle the .ts files well, it sees most of them as less than 5 mins long. I have tried to use the plex automatic recode function to transcode it into am mp4 container; that helps a little, and now it sees the whole video length, but it still gets issues with audio sync and hanging. When I get the hangs, Plex server tells me I'm pulling data at a rate of over 200 Mbps, which is enough to stream 10 times that video file; I think the timecodes are somehow screwed up, and it is looping around the data and and not playing anything.

My next attempt at a fix was going to be to add a post processing script on the NextPVR end to run it through ffmpeg, but it sounds like you tried that. I also noticed that the extra was using streamlink, and was wondring if there are any streamlink parameters I could add that might help keep the stream in a workable state. Ultimately, I could resort to a complete recode with correction using ffmpeg in post processing, but I don't want to do that because I don't have the CPU bandwidth to recode everything.

If I find anything that works reliably, I'll post back.

[mvallevand]

There is no reliable way to make a skippable file without stripping the PMT and then adding audio and video streams.

[ballfam]

Martin. I'm getting trouble making the automatic EPG update work. Updating the EPG manually using the "Update EPG" button works fine and repopulates the EPG with around 3 hours of programming. This command also works for a while:

nohup python3 /var/opt/nextpvr/scripts/plutotv/pluto.py xmltv-update 180 &

but eventually it seems to shut down.

Can you explain in more details exactly how to use the xmltv_update parameter to force an automatic update every 3 hours. I assume it goes into config.xml in the general section with something like:

<xmltv_update>180</xmltv_update>

But just want to be sure that's the right format and location

Thanks

[mvallevand]

There is an another post on managing the lock file that is probably causing issues if you ever restart the server. Given the quality of the streams I won't be spending any more time on looking at making this more robust

There is no xmltv only update in NextPVR but there are other posts on how to do timed updates. The difference with this mode is it only updates Pluto TV saving potentially time and tuners

[ballfam]

ok, thanks. I'm thinking I can probably come up with something that will run in a cron job to do the work. Let's say I have cron run:

python3 /var/opt/nextpvr/scripts/plutotv/pluto.py xmltv

I assume that just populates a new copy of pluto-xmltv.xml. Is there any way to force NextPVR to pick up the information in there more than once per day?

What does the following do?

python3 /var/opt/nextpvr/scripts/plutotv/pluto.py xmltv-update

will itcause NextPVR to pick up the update? If so, I can cron something like this to run every 2-3 hours:

python3 /var/opt/nextpvr/scripts/plutotv/pluto.py xmltv && python3 /var/opt/nextpvr/scripts/plutotv/pluto.py xmltv-update