[mythtv] Extracting EPG from sat feed

[Stuart Auchterlonie]

On Fri, Nov 04, 2005 at 02:12:03PM +1300, Robin Gilks wrote:
> Greetings all
> 
> Most of my TV viewing is done through the NZ Sky sat system and its
> difficult to get a reliable EPG feed due to a variety of reasons (TV
> company greed mostly!!).
> 
> I'm using a set-top-box for the sat feed due to its proprietory encryption
> but was wondering if anyone knows if the EPG data is 'in the clear' and
> could be pulled for folding back into mythtv (I can see a LOT of perl etc
> happening here) if I were to put a card into my server PC that took the
> LNB downlink in parallel with the STB, would I be able to scrape this
> data?

The perl solution would be messy but it's cheap. As long as you
have some sort of interface you can plug into at the back of the
box, you may well be able to retrieve guide data from it.

Look into what others have done with controlling their stb from
myth and that should give you a starting point.

In THEORY the provider should only encrypt the video / audio stream.
So it might be possible to get EPG direct off the sat.

You would also need a dual LNB  AFAIK.


> 
> I guess the most work lately has been for terrestrial DVB transmissions
> but I'm sure I saw somewhere that the basic protocols were the same for
> most sat systems as well.

That's why they are named
DVB-T (DVB over Terrestrial)
DVB-S (DVB over Satellite)
DVB-C (DVB over Cable)

The protocol (DVB) stays the same, just the transport medium changes.


Stuart