[mmanzato]

Hello, this is my first post here.

I'm using XBMC with PVR and tvheadend back-end (the most recent ones from pulse-eight, actually) under Ubuntu. I've got one DVB card and, for TV watching, it's working fairly well.

Something that I am currently missing, however, is automated EPG updates when switching channel. Apparently, looking at PVR options in the settings menu, EPG is updated every 15 minutes or so and that means that I may wait up to a quarter of an hour in order to see the program name I'm watching. What I would expect, instead, is that PVR polls the back-end for new EPG information on the current channel or, the other way round, the back-end feeds the new EPG data to the front-end as soon as it is are available.

I hope that it has not been discussed before. I'm unable to find anything about this in the forum.

Bye
Michele

[adamsutton]

This has been discussed, though possibly not on here. I know because I added support to Tvheadend to enable asynchronous updates but found that XBMC lacks the ability to use them at this stage.

This is a fundamental problem with the current EPG design in XBMC. Unfortunately since PVR has now been merged to mainline and all focus is on stabilising for Frodo release this will not happen until after that.

Most people don't encounter the particular issue you're talking about since they use either over the air or XMLTV feeds that provide more than just now/next events and the only time this becomes a problem is if a last minute scheduling change occurs. Which is probably why it hasn't been raised that much.

But it will happen...

Adam

[mmanzato]

Hi, thanks for your answer. So bad that's not supported in XBMC at this stage. Is it already in the plans for 13.0 the XBMC's EPG enhancement/redesign?

In the - long and sorry - meantime, I wonder if there's a workaround (e.g. reload EPG for the current multiplex, or reload the whole EPG if that's not possible) every time one switches program.

As you guessed, here in Italy most EPG from DVB is only available for the current running program and (perhaps) the next one. And I am not talking about minor broadcasters - which in some cases do deliver one full day of EPG in advance! I really mean the "big" ones: RAI, Mediaset, La7, etc. The quality of the EPG is also poor (no categorization, poor info, etc). I wonder why, as program schedules are planned weeks in advance and you can find it quite easily on all newspapers.

Thanks for pointing me to XMLTV. I tried it ~1 year ago when I was fighting with MythTV, but I was totally dissatisfied with the complexity of the setup - of both of them. Then I gave up and moved to the FAR easier Tvheadend. I'll have a look and see if XMLTV has improved since then.

Thanks
Michele

[adamsutton]

If you have a really small amount of data you could simply make it request every minute or so and to do so even when streaming. It's not ideal but it would do the job.

Assuming this is DVB-S you might be able to use the opentv module in TVH (you'll need a git build) to get access to the Sky Italia EPG feed, that contains 7 days I think. But I'm not entirely sure how things work in Italy.

I'm not one to promote XMLTV, I'm far from a fan, but its what most people fall back to when they lack proper over the air EPG support.

Adam

[mmanzato]

Thank you Adam, I'll try lowering the update time.

Michele