[mythtv-users] EPG Accuracy (Was: record at any time on channel <CHANNEL> is missing in master soon to be .27)

[Stephen Worthington]

On Thu, 25 Jul 2013 19:45:55 +0100, you wrote:

>Jean-Yves Avenard wrote:
>>Now, if you can't see the advantage of getting around a crappy EPG by
>>using the appropriate rules vs fighting your local elected
>>representative who won't give a toss.. I guess there's no point
>>arguing further, and you can go back living in lala-land
>
>I'd go further and suggest that it isn't really any business of our elected representatives. As long as the descriptions are not misleading, then why should a commercial operation (or anyone for that matter) have to use a proscribed form of words ? I can see cases for some critical things (eg drugs), but not for TV.
>
>So the matter of EPG accuracy comes down to a contractual thing between supplier and customer. Now <some offical body> might be interested if an EPG has just outright misleading stuff - for example designed to persuade people to watch a particular channel when they wouldn't otherwise by falsely claiming to have something popular - but otherwise, not their business.
>The only sort of example I cna think of might be if they advertised to be showing (say) Premier League Football - but are actually showing a Third Division match between "Who Atheletic" and "Never Heard of Them Rangers". Can't see any channel getting away with that for long before people cotton on.
>
>
>I'm with the others. Over here (UK Freeview) there are two classes of repeat that fit into this :
>
>1) Same broadcaster.
>Eg, BBC shows repeats of popular stuff on BBC3 and BBC4. So for example, Top Gear is originally transmitted on BBC2, but repeats of old series are shown on BBC3. ITV does similar with ITV3 being near enough dedicated to "classic" stuff.
>There isn't really much excuse for the EPG to differe, but it does. I suspect that rather than making and storing the EPG data, it's regenerated for the "old repeats". It's not uncommon for the first showing (and short term repeats) to have a reviewers comments, while later showings just have a generic description.
>
>2) Different broadcaster.
>The classic case here is Dave - a channel almost exlcusively dedicated to showing old material. They'll most likely have licenced the material from the original copyright holder - not neccessarily the original broadcaster. They'll take the generic EPG data that I assume is provided by the copyright holder and use that.
>So say a program was originally shown on BBC1 - the BBC will probably have used their own description (often including a mini review). So when Dave show it a few years later, the EPG data will be completely different.
>
>In both cases, the chances of getting anything fixed is on the low side of nil. In the first case there could be grounds for complaint as it's the same boradcaster, but in the second then it's not Dave's fault, and the BBC won't give a toss about something they broadcast several years ago.
>
>So yes, I use extensive channel filtering.
>Ofen it's "this channel", but also fairly often I write a power rule of the general form "title like 'Something%' and callsign in ('BBC1', 'BBC2')". But then it's not a problem for me as I used to write SQL regularly as part of the day job - I can see it's not going to have a high WAF though !
>
>Any suggestion that there are better ways is "a bit wide of the mark". Yes it would be great if the EPG never changed, but that's isn't going to happen no matter how many of us who understand why it should improve complain. We don't count - we don't even show up in the noise threshold of viewing figures.

Actually, there is no need for matching to be done on the description
data at all if the EPG is done right.  Go to a program in the your EPG
or a recording and hit the I key twice and look for the Program(me) ID
field.  If the EPG is done correctly, it will be present and have a
value that can be kept unchanged whenever an episode is broadcast.  I
believe that if MytTV has a Program ID value, it ignores all the other
criteria in matching episodes.  Here in New Zealand, the channel that
does it best is ChoiceTV.  In their xmltv EPG most programs look like
this:

<programme channel="choice.freeviewnz.tv" start="20130726010000 +1200"
stop="20130726013000 +1200">
	<title>Yard Crashers</title>
        <desc>Yard Crashers catches shoppers in home improvement
stores looking for people who are clearly in need of help. These
surprised shoppers will have their yard completely transformed!</desc>
        <episode-num system="dd_progid">YCRA02_08</episode-num>
        <rating system="Freeview">
        	<value>G</value>
        </rating>
</programme>

Note the <episode-num system="dd_progid"> tag.  There are several
values for system= that provide the proper data for MythTV's ProgramID
field.  I rather like the way dd_progid works, as it is easy to
understand, but several other formats work well too.

So what I would like to see is that producers of programs provide a
value like this with all programs they send out for broadcast.