Linux tvheadend enhancements (I'm working on)

Only came across your branch of TVH today and I'm pretty excited to find you are developing a feature I have been wanting for AGES. I used to have a similar setup to datty but couldn't work out how to get TVH to let go of the tuner without stopping it, so I gave up. I am currently using XMLTV being grabbed from the Digiguide app on my ubuntu server but I have a lot of examples of timers becoming updated which leads to double entries of the same programme in the EPG.

Anyhow...

I am testing out your epg-rewrite branch and have the OpenTV: Sky UK OTA Module selected. My question is, do I need to select anything under the Basic Module settings? It's currently set to Disabled as nothing in the drop down list matched the Open TV. I've scanned my Muxes and mapped my channels but no EPG as yet. Also, I am assuming that if I don't have EIT: DVB Grabber selected I can happily ignore the EIT selection under the individual tuner services?

Hi,

Yeah sorry the config section is a bit misleading, and still needs some work. I'll give a quick run down here for your benefit:

1. Basic Config, this is for primarily for configuring internal XMLTV grab ala the old version of TVH. But I think I added a few extra checkboxes to control channel updates.

2. External Interfaces. This set's up some unix domain sockets for XMLTV, it means you can externally manage when XMLTV runs and pump the data into TVH from the outside. This allows more complex XMLTV setups with cronjobs etc...

3. OTA interfaces. This is for the over the air systems, currently EIT and OpenTV. Just tick the box to enable which ones you need.

EIT and OpenTV should play nice(ish) together, but it's a work in progress (I'll be making some changes in this area shortly).

And yeah the EIT setting in the services currently has no effect if EIT is unchecked. That may change in the future though (it may become a more generic OTA enable setting, combined with some grabber prioritisation settings).

Now on to your specific issue, no EPG. That's obviously not right and I can't think of any immediate reason why that should be, but it might depend on how you've built the code. Try running tvh with debug on -d, to see what happens, on startup look for it mentioning installing opentv table handlers and see if it tunes to a mux (and says something about tuning for EPG).

If you still can't get it working, I'd recommend popping along to #hts (IRC), it'll be easier to help walk you through getting it up and running.

Adam

Kind of related to the epg but again only related to the opentv providers, I saw this last year when i was checking out mediaportal (which was way too slow for my liking) so I just thought i'd mention it. I'm sure that the channel and grouping synchronization was working when I tried it.

http://forum.team-mediaportal.com/thread...nts.87526/

"Future features / To do list (in development)

Channel and grouping synchronisation
Will automatically keep channel numbering, ordering and grouping (Entertainment, Sport etc) in sync with a Sky receiver based on your region. Will automatically add channels you dont have (or that launch) and delete channels that close down. Will be able to find channels that only broadcast at certain times of the day.

Channel tuning synchronisation
Will automatically update channel tuning information when Sky move channels around without having to perform a full satellite scan."

Yeah some of this already exists, but I don't normally advertise it as its had limited testing and its not fully functional yet.

So far only channel numbering based on the opentv information exists (and you have to manually enable it, on the EPGGrab tab). I've not done any regional handling, or addition of new channels etc. but I've looked at some of the info available.

But I can definitely say its on the list of things to do. I'm just trying to sort out some more general issues first.

Adam

Hi Adam - First off, AWESOME job with the opentv grabber and other enhancements! It's made tvheadend an even better solution for me.

I've been testing out another one of your great features, the series linking. We pretty much record everything we want to watch and view at our leisure with quite a lot of the series making it into the media library, so your series link addition is something I started to test right away. The autorecord feature in TVH is great but with the amount of show repeating that goes on I end up with so many extra episodes that I have to wade through to end up with a nice clean series.

I've been checking the 2 or 3 series I have linked on a daily basis to see if an EPG update has scheduled more recordings and to check they are genuine new episodes rather than repeats. The good news is so far, they are. But something I have been noticing is that a lot of shows do not have any description at all. In fact, where one day there are, for example, 10 programmes where 5 have descriptions and 5 don't, the following day I find that now all the descriptions have disappeared. I am guess that every EPG download overwrites the old contents? I'm not sure if there are some characters causing issues here but I am happy to help anyway I can to resolve this.

Iwan

Hi Iwan,

Glad that its "mostly" working Series linking is something I'd not really tested much myself, but I know a few people using it, so good to get positive feedback. It should work almost exactly like a sky box. Though it will "try" not to re-record the same episode. Unfortunately it won't always work as opentv has no unique ID for episodes, so I use a hash of the description, so if that changes it might re-record etc... There are better alternatives for this, but they have other issues so at the moment I'd stick with opentv if its working.

With regard to the descriptions, that's definitely odd. It's not entirely correct to say the EPG download overwrites the previous values, it only does these if they change. An interesting point is that I don't check the string is non empty, so an empty string would replace a previous non-empty one. That's a bug/omission on my part.

Though that being said, they shouldn't be empty in the first place. Can you just confirm something for me:

- Are these shows you speak of in the "recordings" list?
OR
- EPG entries?

I only ask because the data is handled slightly differently in these cases. So if we're talking about "recordings", then that possibly is a bug in my transfer/update of data from the EPG into the recordings log.

Adam

P.S.
I do have a slight confession to make, I'm not actually using TVH in anger yet. With all the dev work to get the EPG code actually working properly I've not been able to switch the house from skybox to TVH for fear of annoying the wife with all dev related disruptions However now things are more stable and TVH generally is moving in the right direction I'm hoping to switch over in the next week or so. So hopefully I'll start picking up some of these sort of issues myself.

It does look as though an 'empty' update is overwriting a previously populated one. These updates are in the EPG only. Where it has scheduled a recording based on it's description, checking the scheduled recordings shows that they are still active and have descriptions. If it's of any use, one of the programmes I am currently testing is 'I'm Alan Partridge' on Dave.

I haven't had the skybox plugged in for years now. I've been through so many trasitions over the years from WMC to mythTV to XBMC, which I've stuck with. I think the fact my wife watches recordings rather than live TV has helped. We both like the fact we were able to create groups to match how we saw channels (and order them how we like) as well as add a favourites group for the small handful of channels we actually watch regularly. Another great addition is the iPhone app which makes scheduling individual recordings so easy (for the wife). TVH seems very stable these days, with hardly any failures that I can recall. I run it on a central server with 4 tuners and have a number of XBMC boxes around the house conecting.

Unfortunately I was upgrading my NAS box last night, which runs TVH, had some issues with the f#*&@ing BIOS not doing what I wanted it to (it refuses to boot, automatically, from my USB pen drive which has the OS on it). That wasted lots of time so when I finally realised the TBS DVB drivers had failed to load I didn't have a chance to fix it. I fixed the drivers remotely this morning, but because I was a bit worried about the card (BIOS also warned about over current issues, among other things, and I already popped one PSU when I shorted the sat cable) I unplugged it all reseated it but forgot to re-attach the bloody sat cables.

So the short of it is I can't test anything at the moment and I'm unlikely to get any time tonight so I'll have to take a look tomorrow.

The overwriting with empty strings is in my opinion an omission from my code, it was something I simply overlooked. With hindsight it seems obvious that you wouldn't want it to do that. So I'll mod it. But it still begs the question why are the strings empty in the first place, could be a problem with the huffman decoder (but I don't think so).

My guess is there's something else going on that I can't quite get my head around at the moment. I'll have to have a think about what might be causing the problems.

Can you quickly remind me what your setup is?

You said 4 tuners, all DVB-S or mix of DVB-T/S?

Which EPGGrab modules have you currently got enabled?

opentv/eit? others?

Ta

Just to confirm that after taking your advice and upgrading to the latest version due to there being recent EPG related updates I'm now seeing the description being populated for all the programmes I checked. Much better!

Hi Adam, have something else for you to check out with regards your series link feature. This is more of a niggle than any sort of failure

I searched my EPG for Grimm and found that it was on at 7pm and 12pm. Due to me being less likely to need a tuner at midnight I selected a 12pm and hit 'Record Series' it went ahead ans scheduled them all at 7pm. I got around this by deleting the scheduled recordings and editing the auto record that was generated and specifying to find schedules at around 00:00.

Also, whilst I'm typing, with the UI debug switched off and the EIT: DVB Grabber enabled I am getting constant messages of the following:

Jul 17 19:30:02 eit: install table handlers
Jul 17 19:30:22 eit: processing cancelled

Is this a debug left switched on somewhere or is it pointing to an issue?

Iwan