Usage ‐ PLM ‐ Processes ‐ Check Station Status - babsonnexus/stream-link-manager-for-channels GitHub Wiki

While there are many sources for playlists, not all of the resulting stations are valid or working for any number of reasons. Or, similarly, a source playlist might have a mix of HLS and MPEG-TS streams and it is not clear which ones are which. As such, it can be frustrating to launch a station and find that it is not available only after the fact. To alleviate this issue, users can turn on the Check Station Status option in the Final Playlists area.

This is off by default for reasons that will be outlined below. However, just turning it on here is not enough; you must also activate it for each source playlist in the Manage Playlists area.

There are some playlists that you would most likely not want to run this process for. For instance, HDHR might not be a good choice because the rapid nature of the checks might result in filling all the available tuners and ending up with a false negative. For similar reasons, PLM Internal Playlists should most likely not be checked off because of the circular references and slower start-up time for some stations. Also, things tied to other tools like Chrome Capture for Channels, HDMI encoder capture, and similar situations would not be best.

Further, on the Assigned and Unassigned pages, you can choose to disable this feature for each unique child station, especially if one is being particularly troublesome.

By default, each existing and newly added source playlist is set to be off, so you must "opt in" to run the test against these child stations (although new and existing child stations are individually set to "on" when they get added). When you do so, you may see in the logs the results being parsed.

2025-05-13 13:26:58.729844:  Starting check of child stations...
2025-05-13 13:27:01.607982:  INFO: ESPN on EPlusTV (Linear) [ESPN] responded 'HLS'.
2025-05-13 13:27:02.670048:  INFO: ESPN2 on EPlusTV (Linear) [ESPN2] responded 'HLS'.

There will also be additional lines if there is some difficulty connecting for any reason. The process will make several attempts with a short spacer between each one. Eventually, though, the process will have to move on and the ones that cannot be connected to will look something like this:

2025-05-13 13:28:44.093295:  INFO: Cooking Panda on VLC Bridge - Distro TV [cooking-panda] responded 'fail'.

After some time, the process will complete. Although source playlists that are inactive, source playlists that are not set to check, and child stations with a parent of Ignore are skipped during these tests, it can still take a significant amount of time based upon the literal number of final child stations that the program needs to look through.

2025-05-13 13:37:36.718312:  Finished check of child stations.

After the process is complete, you can run the report Linear: Stations - Parents and Children and filter to see which child stations are now disabled or have been detected as either HLS or MPEG-TS.

You can see similar results in the Unassigned and Assigned stations pages, too:

Or, to get a quick glance, visit the Final Playlists summary area:

Do note that the "Disabled" bar is only visible if the Check Station Status feature is enabled.

Should the station respond but its streaming format be unclear, or if the station is skipped entirely, there will be no value in the station status field. These activities will happen whenever you run the Update Station List process, so make sure you have enough buffer space in your automation settings. Afterwards, when the Update m3u(s) & XML EPG(s) process is run, any child station that is Disabled will not be assigned to a Parent. In the end, you may see a significant change in total station counts and distribution.

Of note, a child station that is "Disabled" (of which there are several types, such as failure to respond, skipped, had DRM, etc...) will not be able to be assigned to a Parent. Further, if a child station is detected as a different stream format than its source playlist, it will be reassigned appropriately. However, Stream Format Override still takes precedent.

Additional details, controls, functionality, information, and more can be found on the Settings and More page.

Example

Here we have a single HLS Source Playlist:

After all the child stations are loaded and assigned, we can see that none have an override of MPEG-TS:

However, when we create the final playlists, we do end up with both HLS and MPEG-TS ones (as well as non-working stations not getting assigned to either) based upon the Check Station Status scan:

Now, if we go to a known MPEG-TS station and force it to be HLS, we can see that impact: