[adamsutton]

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

[TheGeMan]

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

[adamsutton]

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

[the_mouse]

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?

[adamsutton]

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

[moontan77]

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.

[adamsutton]

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

[moontan77]

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.

[the_mouse]

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

[adamsutton]

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.

[behaviour]

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?

[adamsutton]

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

[moontan77]

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."

[adamsutton]

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

[behaviour]

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