Satellite scan cache contains hundreds of channels

[Haggis]

I had to do a rescan of the DVB-S channels recently, and then remembered why I don’t do this too often, the scan cache fills up with around 1300 tuning strings, which is a bit of a nightmare to sort out.

Having a look through the forums for anything to try to make a bit more sense of it didn’t turn up much, so I’ve written a utility to trim it down substantially. Apologies if someone has already done this and I missed it.

It uses two input files, the scan cache, and one to specify which channels are of interest.
The channel file contains a list of pattern strings to match the required channel names to, minus spaces, and all in lower case.
For example:

Code:

bbc1
cnn
news

It compares each pattern with every channel name, which has had spaces removed and converted to lower case, in the scan cache and picks out those which match. So the above would match “BBC1 NE & C”, “BBC 1 London”, “CNN International”, “BBC News”, “Sky News”, and so on. It does mean that you may get unwanted tuning strings, for example I have the channel pattern e4 for the channel name E4, but this also matches “Cartoon Network Game 4”. It discards all strings which contain an alternate audio stream such as (Audio #1).

It removes any duplicates if the whole tuning string is the same, so this means you can combine scans from different satellites, in my case Astra and Eurobird.

The output is given in channel name alphabetical order.

Usage:
sctrim –c channelfile –s scancache –o outputfile

If the output file is omitted it creates one based on the scan cache file name.

Its zipped up below, which also includes a sample channel pattern file.