[mythtv-users] Per-channel time offsets

[chris at cpr.homelinux.net]

On Tue, Nov 08, 2005 at 03:09:40PM -0800, Joe Votour wrote:
> My situaton is that the cable provider for the
> apartment complex that I live in uses DirecTV for
> their cable system, and most of the channels (except
> the local ones) are on Eastern feeds.  Most of the
> listings in Zap2It are correct, but there are about 10
> channels or so that are incorrect - the listings are
> three hours ahead of the programming (so, for example,
> something that the listings show will be on at 9PM is
> actually on at 6PM).

I don't think you can do per-channel recording offsets within MythTV 
itself, and even if you could it's not really the solution you want 
because the listings would still be lying to you and *who knows* what 
would happen if you tried to manually schedule a recording.

You could always hack something up.... :-)

The easiest solution would be to change the cron.daily/mythbackend 
script so that once the listings were downloaded you would run an SQL 
update query to update all of the times for the affected channels.  You 
would then have to signal MythTV to re-optimize the scheduling.  
There's probably a signal handler to do that already so you'd just need 
to "killall -s SIGUSR1 mythbackend" or something similar.

A similar solution would be to subscribe to a second listing in the 
eastern timezone and deselect all of the eastern channels from your 
pacific listings.  That way the times would be correct, but the eastern 
listings would not be attached to any tuner.  Again, a post-download 
SQL script to copy the listings from source 2 to source 1 and trigger 
an schedule evaluation would do the trick.

The best solution, of course, would be to write a patch for MythTV that 
allows it to apply a time delta and reassign the channel number on a 
per-station basis as the data is initially downloaded.  Changes would 
be required in the SQL tables, mythfilldatabase and mythtv-setup, at 
the very least.  Aside from cases where zap2it is just plain wrong, 
this would also help in situations where channels have been shuffled to 
insert local feeds (such as a condo inserting a lobby camera feed and 
putting the original channel elsewhere).