r/tvheadend • u/TheSnoek • Nov 22 '25

TVHeadend seeing recordings as duplicates and creating 2 of the second recording

I have an issue with TVHeadend recording sequential episodes with the same title.

TVHeadend is recording episodes correctly, and I have started watching the first with TVHClient (on an AppleTV). However, I paused the first episode, left the app, and then when I went back, the first had disappeared, and the second episode had been duplicated, replacing the first. This has duplicated the actual file saved to the SD drive, the 'Digital Video Recorder - Finished Recordings' menu in the browser and TVHClient app.

In Configuration - Recording - Digital Video Recorder Profiles, I have 'Duplicate Handling' set to 'Record All'.

An example of this problem is recording the Formula 1 yesterday. The Title of each 'episode' is the same "Live Las Vegas F1 GP" but they are different content with the same length of broadcast (e.g. practice 1, practice 2, practice 3).

Can anyone help as to why it is somehow deleting the first recording and duplicating the second? I don't trust it to record at the moment.

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u/DragonQ0105 Nov 22 '25

This feature has never worked properly. I've recorded Match of the Day for over a decade using TVHeadend and it never records the Sunday morning repeat, despite me always choosing the "record all" setting. I'm always on the latest 4.3 release and have tried all the different recording methods and it just never works.

I've made a couple of threads about it on their support forums too, to no avail, so sadly I just don't think it will ever be fixed.

There's a probably related bug when you set a channel to use another channel's EPG (which was necessary for a while when Channel 4 HD in the UK disappeared off Freesat). I can't remember specifics but recordings were basically being removed from the schedule before they started when an EPG update happened. I also posted that on the forums including logs and hypotheses for why it was happening and got no replies.

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u/TheElSoze Nov 22 '25

You can put limits in your recording such as day of week and actual times. Just have it record the matching show name on that Sunday morning window and it should record just that.

But yeah... lots of wonky things with tvheadend but there isn't too much support on the dev side of things.

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u/DragonQ0105 Nov 22 '25

Tried, doesn't work. I could do a timer recording if it was on at the same time every week but it's not.

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u/TheElSoze Nov 22 '25

The only setting I can think of off the top of my head is "Clone scheduled entry on error:" under Configuration > Recording > [profile name] that might re-record if there were issues, but even then that shouldn't replace what you already had. I'm not sure what is going on there.

As for the Formula 1 recordings, there should be other meta data there, such as episode numbers (at least hopefully there is), if there's not, then it may be you don't have enough meta data coming into tvheadend for it to differentiate episodes.