Kaffeine and Hauppauge 950q: Channels not playing (but ok in VLC)

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1

I have a Linux Mint system and recently picked up an unused Hauppauge 950q tuner. From my research, the 950q on Linux is typically a turnkey match: attach the tuner, load Kaffeine (Flatpack version) and scan for channels.

I followed Hauppauge’s youtube (watch?v=yXYGzp9sx0k) except I am using the tuner for OTA (ATSC) rather than QAM so used the ATSC setting in config. Things looked like they were working at first: installed Kaffeine, plugged in the tuner and antenna, adjusted the config in Kaffeine, had it scan for channels which popped up on the scan list and added/saved them to my channel list. However:

  • When I click on a channel all I get is a black/blank screen and no audio. I tried selecting a few different channels w/ same result
  • The program guide is also blank.
  • Note: when Kaffeine scanned channels the Scan Result showed 0% SNR for every channel

I tried a few different antennas to rule out reception issues then tried to look at my Linux Mint system to see if something else was causing the issue. Please see: Hauppauge 950q TV Tuner Help (with Kaffeine) on forums dot linuxmint dot com/viewtopic.php?t=427438 for details on the troubleshooting in Mint.

Ultimately, using w_scan I pulled the channels into VLC and they work fine in VLC (audio and video). So it appears to be an issue isolated to Kaffeine.

Edit: Here are the Kaffeine Diagnostics (under Settings > Configure Kaffeine):

15-08-24 20:05:35.575 [Warning ] Qt: Session management error: Could not open network socket
15-08-24 20:05:35.594 [Warning ] QCommandLineParser: already having an option named "h"
15-08-24 20:05:35.594 [Warning ] QCommandLineParser: already having an option named "help-all"
15-08-24 20:05:35.594 [Warning ] QCommandLineParser: already having an option named "v"
15-08-24 20:05:35.941 [Info ] kaffeine.dvb: Using built-in dvb device manager
15-08-24 20:05:37.692 [Info ] kaffeine.dev: Found dvb device U07f81c20: Auvitek AU8522 QAM/8VSB Frontend

If anyone can shed light on what the issue may be (Kaffeine missing a codec? libVLC plugin issue??..) or maybe something I’ve done wrong, I would very much appreciate it!

Edit: Today I also tried editing the libVLC plugin in the settings as suggested on the Kaffeine GitHub page (see “Changing the libVLC output plugin” section on the ReadMe) but neither option worked (not surprising as I’m not using remote access):

--no-video-title-show -V xcb_glx
OR
--no-video-title-show -V xcb_xv

As an additional favor, if someone can point to where Kaffeine stores its channel list file (scanfile.dvb) I would like to compare it to the VLC xpsf file I created with w_scan. I know they won’t match, but I want to see the differences to see if maybe something sticks out the VLC has that Kaffeine is missing and needs to play the channels. I did find a couple scanfile.dvb files with a search in Linux Mint but one was blank as I recall and the other appeared to have scan parameters (e.g. frequencies to scan) and did not list any of the channels I had scanned and saved in Kaffeine.

2

This has been solved. I posted this issue on the LinuxMint forums: forums[dot]linuxmint[dot]com/viewtopic.php?p=2517724 " [SOLVED] Kaffeine and Hauppauge 950q: Channels not playing (but ok in VLC).

I turned on Kaffeine today and…it worked (so does the EPG).

Why? I am baffled. I can’t think of anything I changed. I know my kernel went from 5.15.0-118-generic x86_64 to 119 (among other Update Manager updates) recently but it didn’t work on 119 when I tried yesterday (maybe another reboot fully applied something in 119?). Besides that, these are the only things I can think of that were ‘different’:

  1. I watched about an hour of TV using VLC yesterday and noticed the Hauppauge tuner got pretty hot (but that is normal for the tuner).
  2. When I gave Kaffeine another try today, I accidentally right clicked on the channel and then double clicked on it.
  3. I had the tuner in a different USB port (but I also put it back in the first/original USB and it still worked (besides, VLC worked with the tuner plugged into that port).
  4. I even rescanned and added channels to see if that would stop it from working. SNR is still 0% for all channels so that has nothing to do with the issue and Kaffeine still worked perfectly.

No exact ‘fix’ but if someone has the same issue, this may give the some things to try.

For the channel list location: I really am not sure where the Flatpak version of Kaffeine stores the config files. But the repository version of Kaffeine stores them in the ~/.local/share/kaffeine folder. Additionally, it’s the sqlite.db file that contains your scanned channel list (NOT the scanfile.dvb file).

For now I switched to the repository Kaffeine (which is the same 2.0.18 version as the Flatpak right now anyway) because of its more intuitive config file storage location.

For further details on the above, go to the forum post I placed at the top of this reply.