[mythtv-users] How to keep mythfilldatabase from creating channels

[Jan Ceuleers]

Dear fellow Mythizens,

I live in a place in which good-quality EPG data is hard to come by
(Belgium), which is further complicated by the fact that the household's
language (English) isn't one of the country's regular languages.
Furthermore, I have two video sources each with a different but
overlapping set of channels.

So I need to use multiple grabbers in order to obtain EPG data about all
of the channels that I care about, in English to the extent possible. I
use multiple mythfilldatabase --file --sourceid <number> --xmlfile
<filename> incantations: one per grabber and per video source. I
generally load the same files into both video sources.

The problem is that mythfilldatabase creates channels that it sees in
the XMLTV file if they don't already exist. I then have to clean this up
with another bunch of SQL incantations such as:

delete from channel where char_length(channum)=0;
delete from program where chanid not in (select chanid from channel);
delete from programrating where chanid not in (select chanid from channel);

I would feel happier if I didn't have to do that. That is: if I could
tell mythfilldatabase not to create channels and to ignore programmes
for non-existent channels. Is this possible?

I am aware that I could probably use tv_grep to create the appropriate
subsets of my XMLTV files for each of the video sources, but that seems
overly complicated.

Thanks, Jan