Troubleshooting¶

Symptoms, causes, and fixes. If your problem is that a plugin destroyed something, go to Backup and recovery instead.

Nothing seems to happen when I click a button¶

The job is running in the background. The button re-enabling does not mean the job finished, and on a large catalogue a run can take 5 to 15 minutes or more.

In Stream-Mapparr, watch 📊 View Check Progress, then read 📋 View Last Results when it is done.
In the other plugins, use their status or results action.
From the shell: docker logs -f dispatcharr | grep "Stream-Mapparr" and wait for ✅ COMPLETED.

Do not queue another action while one is running. Only one long-running job runs at a time.

The plugin says an operation is already running, but nothing is¶

A previous run crashed and left its lock behind. The lock clears itself after 10 minutes. To clear it now, use 🔓 Clear Operation Lock (Stream-Mapparr) or the equivalent action on the plugin.

If scheduled runs stopped firing, use 🧹 Cleanup Orphaned Tasks to remove stale scheduler entries.

My scheduled run never fires¶

Check the time format. Stream-Mapparr and Event Channel Managarr accept HHMM only (0400), not 04:00. A value containing a colon is silently ignored, with no error to tell you why.

Check the time zone too. Both plugins follow Dispatcharr's global Time Zone (Settings, then General). Neither has a Timezone setting of its own any more. See Scheduling and run order.

Note that EPG-Janitor and Channel Mapparr have no scheduler at all. Their actions must be triggered by hand.

The plugin refuses to run against my profile¶

Stream-Mapparr will not run against the default "All" profile, and several plugins require a profile name to be set. Create a real Channel Profile first, as described in Prerequisites.

My hidden event channels keep coming back¶

Dispatcharr's Auto Channel Sync re-enables every channel in a synced group on each M3U refresh, silently undoing Event Channel Managarr's work.

Turn on Auto-rescan after M3U refresh in Event Channel Managarr so it re-hides them immediately after each refresh.

My channels keep un-hiding, and I use two plugins¶

Stream-Mapparr's Manage Channel Visibility and Event Channel Managarr both toggle channel visibility, using different criteria, and they will undo each other.

Run Stream-Mapparr first, then Event Channel Managarr. See Scheduling and run order.

Auto-Match matched nothing against a brand-new EPG source¶

This is expected, and it is not a bug. Dispatcharr only imports program data for EPG entries that are already mapped to a channel, so a freshly added EPG source starts with zero programs. Every candidate is then rejected for having no program data.

The fix, in order:

Turn Allow EPG Without Program Data on.
Run Auto-Match to assign the EPG IDs.
Refresh the EPG source so Dispatcharr backfills the program data.
Turn Allow EPG Without Program Data back off.

Leaving it on permanently is what re-introduces "No Program Information Available".

Too many channels are being skipped or unmatched¶

Lower the Match Sensitivity. It means the same thing in every plugin: the minimum similarity a name must reach. Relaxed is 70, Normal is 80, Strict is 90, Exact is 95.

If a specific channel simply will not match at any sensitivity, use that plugin's Custom Aliases setting to force it. Do not confuse aliases with Ignore Tags, which strips noise such as [FHD] from names before comparing them.

I am getting false matches¶

Raise Match Sensitivity to Strict.

On a multi-country M3U, also turn on Restrict Matching To Same Country (Stream-Mapparr). Remember that matching reads the stream name only and never its group, so putting streams in tidy groups does not prevent a Spanish channel matching a UK one.

If an over-the-air channel is grabbing odd streams, note that callsigns which are also ordinary English words (KING, WHO, WOLF, WAVE, WOOD) are deliberately guarded and require corroboration, so 24/7 KING OF THE HILL will not be attached to the Seattle NBC station.

Dispatcharr starts returning errors during a long run¶

Raise Rate Limiting from None to Low or Medium. This paces the plugin's writes. It is the right response to 429 or 5xx errors during bulk operations.

A stream probe interrupted somebody's viewing¶

Probing opens a real connection to your provider. If your provider caps concurrent connections, a probe can knock a viewer off.

Probe when nobody is watching, and be aware that IPTV Checker's full scan is slow enough (many hours on a large catalogue) that it should be windowed overnight.

The whole web UI hangs after a plugin run¶

Update Stream-Mapparr. A long matching job could run inside the web request and block the server, which made the UI stop responding and eventually return a 504, even though streams kept playing. This is fixed in 1.26.1931038 and later.

My provider names have invisible characters and nothing matches¶

Some providers pad stream names with invisible Unicode characters around a decorative glyph. These used to survive name normalization and destroy the match rate for everything from that provider.

Update to the current release of the plugin. Stream-Mapparr, Lineuparr, EPG-Janitor and Channel Mapparr all strip these characters now.

Still stuck¶

Check the plugin's own repository for open issues, and the Discord for discussion. Links to every plugin are in Plugin Links.