[mythtv-users] UK DVB-S Channel Numbering

Nick Morrott knowledgejunkie at gmail.com
Mon Apr 9 17:30:29 UTC 2012


On 9 April 2012 17:30, Richard Morton <richard.e.morton at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 9 April 2012 16:57, Chris Lewis <chrislewis915 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi
>>
>> After another channel scan of 28.2E after the latest shuffle of channels i
>> find myself again in the position where i have multiple copies of some
>> channels (some don't seem to work, some are regional etc) and I have spenyy
>> hours yet again getting the channel numbers correct.
>>
>> What do other UK users out there do?  It would seem to me some king of sql
>> script to update the channel name and number (including call sign and
>> XMLTVID where required) is the best way to go.
>>
>> Now I've seen http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/UK_Channel_Assignments and the
>> scripts there but they dont cover the entire range of FTA channels from what
>> i can see.  What i was thinking is that after a full scan a script could
>> scrape the required SID and channel data from lyngsat or somewhere and
>> produce an update script that would rename and number the channels based on
>> this. I'm not suggesting this be implemented in Myth but a script n the wiki
>> would be great.
>>
>> I e-mailed the lyngsat webmaster address a while ago but never got a
>> reply.
>>
>> I would consider trying to do this properly myself but my skills a just
>> not up to it.  I'd obviously be prepared to test any script and would shout
>> at all if it trashed my channel listings as its basically trashed already
>> IMO.
>>
>> So, what do other UK DVB-S/S2 users use?  As currently my recording
>> schedules are not working correctly.  For instance if i set 'Eastenders' to
>> be recorded at any time on any channel for SWMBO then it tries to record one
>> copy of each of the BBC one channels despite the name and subtext looking
>> identical to me.
>
> I believe that this sort of things has been considered before however there
> are no simple solutions.
>
> You need to tie the radio times feed to the lyngsat/kingofsat information.
> neither provide an easily parse-able feed of information and I havent looked
> but I guess that it wouldnt be within the terms of service. You would have
> to strip the information out of the HTML on the website (scraping) which is
> probably not with the TOS as mentioned and each time they changed their site
> slightly the code would need tweaking.
>
> after that include all the regional variations, numbering, especially in
> combination with requirements with selective channel inclusion, Freeview,
> Sky and Virgin Media and you get an endless number of variations...
>
> Feel free to roll up your sleeves; but this is not as easy as it sounds.

I've been working on a solution for this for a while and am almost
ready to push the code/lineups to XMLTV CVS for testing. I will also
make available a third-party tool for MythTV to handle
updating/maintaining video sources and channel configuration for this
exact situation. Enthusiastic testers will be required in due course
to both test the grabber and the MythTV update tool.

In testing I have lineups (this is what the working title of this new
feature/capability in XMLTV is called) for the following UK/Irish TV
platforms:

freesat
freesatfromsky
freesathd
freeview
freeviewhd
saorview
sky
skyhd
upcireland
upcirelandhd
virgin
virginhd


These lineups capture the EPG numbering, XMLTV IDs (where available)
and DVB onid/sid information (for digital lineups) for each platform
and should ensure that it is a straightforward process to reconfigure
a video source after a rescan. It also means that configuring a video
source for an STB-based input (like Sky or Virgin) using XMLTV will
take a couple of seconds to create from scratch.

Note that for DVB-T (Freeview), I only have access to the Sutton
Coldfield transmitter so would welcome volunteers to provide me with
up-to-date channels.conf output from (dvb)scan for other areas of the
country. This should allow for the matching of regionalised channels
such as BBC1/2 and ITV1 and S4C by onid/sid rather than just the
transmitted DVB name (which can be used as a fallback). If anyone
knows of a resource that lists all regional sids around the country
for Freeview, please let me know. Freesat does not suffer from the
same problem as everyone receives all regional channels.

Because these lineups will be used internally by the tv_grab_uk_rt
grabber I will want to keep them in sync with what's available on each
service's EPG. This should mean that once configured to use a lineup*,
the uk_rt grabber will always provide data for channels available on
the platform, rather than just the list of channels configured
initially. This will also mean that a user does not need to keep
adding/removing channels from their XMLTV configuration whenever a new
channel launches or an old one is turned off. Lineups do not include
full tuning information, so an app using the information (such as
MythTV) will need to (re-)scan digital channels before the lineups can
be applied. Additionally, whilst these lineups will be used by the
uk_rt grabber, they could equally be used by third-party tools.

I also have support to allow a user to select which subscription
packages/channels are received in addition to FTA/FTV channels on
platforms such as Virgin and Sky. During configuration the grabber
also asks for country/postcode location info to determine which
regional channels to include. The end result of this process is a
filtered list of channels that can either be used by the grabber for
listings retrieval or output as a region-specific XML lineup (a subset
of the complete "master" lineup) for use outside the grabber.

(*) the option to manually configure channels will still be there


Cheers,
Nick

-- 
Nick Morrott

MythTV Official wiki: http://mythtv.org/wiki/
MythTV users list archive: http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users

"An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest." - Benjamin Franklin


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