Linux tvheadend enhancements (I'm working on)

Hey Guys,

Sorry I've not been checking the XBMC forums for a few days, so I'll quickly respond to everyone's points.

datty: The opentv stuff is coming along nicely, there are still issues to be worked out but we're pushing ahead. The opentv support does now exist and supports all "known" opentv elements (i.e. those other people have figured out before me). It still has some minor stability issues that we're currently trying to resolve. If you want to help out just give it a go, but its probably worth popping along to #hts and/or monitoring my github feed as I'm constantly updating etc..

oneadvent: We've already spoken so don't think there is much I can add here.

TheGeMan: I'd strongly advise against using "make install". This is my personal opinion (others may contradict), based on the fact that most people's implementation of make install rarely provides an uninstall. And since this is a raw installation (no package management) its not very traceable. Personally I'd recommend either running locally (not daemon) for testing OR building the deb (or equiv) package and installing that (at least that's traceable).

Regards
Adam

Hi Adam i will have a play making some deb packages,

also thanks for your work on this, the new EPG seams to be working well, Slightly off topic what the best way to get the channel numbers updated etc

Regards

George

Hi George,

Currently I'm mostly ignoring the channel numbering issue and leaving it to users to do manually. However you can tick the Channel re-* options on the new EPGGrab tab.

That will allow the EPG grabbers, such as opentv, to update the channel numbers where they have such info. For example if you do this with the OpenTV code you will get the sky channel numbers.

At some point I'll look to make more use of the info provided by things like OpenTV to give better out of the box experience.

Adam

I am a Linux noob so can I please just ask, I am using Openelec Generic-PVR 1.95.5. When I go to addons, browse services to install TVHeadEnd, the version is always the same one(2.1.3). I would like to try out some of the new things that are being implemented, I know MHEG5 is a way off but a better functioning EPG would be great. So my question is will the work being done eventually end up on the Addons installer or do they have to be done manually?

To be honest at this stage I'm not that familiar with the XBMC addon package. Personally I don't run TVH on my XBMC machine, it runs on my server and I always compile my own code for that.

I'd guess that the XBMC add-on is quite a bit out of date. Dushmaniac maintains the TVH build that most XBMC users use, but no idea if he also maintains the addon package.

You should be able to compile the code for your openelec machine manually though, if your openelec machine is a significantly different architecture to your main machine it might be a little tricky (as you'll need a cross compiler), but if its the same I imagine you can just compile the code and overwrite the existing binary.

But I think dushmaniac is probably the guy to get to answer this question at the moment. But I'll try and look into it.

Adam

just have a query regarding the opentv epg, does series linking work for sports?

[/align] I'm using radiotimes xmltv and live sports show up in the titles, like "live european tour golf" etc. So i can just setup auto records for all programs that have live european tour golf in the title.

Moontan,

The series linking will work exactly how it does on a sky box, so as long as "sky" decide its a series it will record. However my code should (if no series info exists) simply create an autorec rule based on the title (but that's obviously subject to problems with variation in title etc...).

But a couple of points:

1. I need to improve the way the opentv series link info works at the expense of some episode equivalence info. This is unfortunately a side effect of the crap way in which opentv appears to structure its data. This I still need to do so if you have channels to which you map multiple services (say BBC One, BBC One HD, etc..) you may have some issues at the moment.

2. You can still setup autorec rules manually as you do now, so you won't lose any functionality. But hopefully things will be a little easier.

At this point its a bit of a suck it and see, because its difficult for me to validate all possible scenarios. But I really do appreciate any feedback I get from users about where its falling down and I will do my best to improve things. But unfortunately I'm ultimately limited by the upstream data.

If you do give it a try feel free to pop along to #hts, I'm usually about. If not pop something in my github issues, github.com/adamsutton/tvheadend. Oh and make sure you pick up the epg-rewrite branch my master is just used to track andoma at the moment.

Adam

thanks for the quick reply. I have sky but never use the box so never used series link. I just on their site that it wasnt clear whether sports were live as for example for a live soccer match it might just say barcelona v real madrid instead of saying live spanish football. I would love to try your build but i'm a noob when it comes to compiling things. I usually just use deb files but will check out what needs to be done to use your build.

Sorry to ask again but since the Add-on does not show the lastest versions being worked on is there some info/howto as to which ppa to use or source to compile it? I do have some understanding of compiling from source or installing from a PPA just need a gentle nudge where to go. Thanks

If you want a PPA then you'll need to use dushmaniac/opdenkamp's stuff. If you want to just compile the source, then its relatively straightforward.

Grab the branch/fork you want to try (there are a lot, so that's probably the biggest issue at the moment). For example if you wanted to try my new stuff you'd do :

git clone -b epg-rewrite git://github.com/adamsutton/tvheadend.git tvh-adamsutton
cd tvh-adamsutton
./configure OPTIONS
make
./build.linux/tvheadend OPTIONS

your OPTIONS for configure may vary depending on the available libs you have installed, do ./configure --help if you're not sure. But for many modern Ubuntu systems ./configure without options is ok.

This is the best way to test/debug a new build, before making it live. It will pick up config from ~/.hts, so if all your config is in ~hts you either need to copy it to your own home directory (I'd recommend this, again better for initial testing of stuff) or run tvheadend as hts.

If your happy with the way things work you can always build a deb, to do this I usually do:

AUTOBUILD_CONFIGURE_EXTRA= ./Autobuild.sh -t precise-amd64

The option past to -t will vary depending on which version of Ubuntu you're using. Note: currently TVH doesn't really include packaging for anything other than Ubuntu (Note: not strictly true, but I won't go into that).

I am trying to improve some of this, but for now hopefully this will be enough to get you going. If not feel free to message me for further help, or pop along to #hts where there are usually plenty of people who can offer advice.