Germany mixed analog & DVB EPG dilemma

[daneo]

Okay, so I've now got my Hauppauge HVR-1300 card working, and doing some manual recordings on 1 or 2 channels I don't get over DVB-T. I've only configured the analog bit of the tuner so far, and most likely will NOT use the DVB tuner as I've already got two of 'em

My biggest problem is to next setup the channels (Germany UnityMedia cable) and try to get an EPG for some of them.

As I already get EPG data for about 20 of the 35 channels over DVB-T, is there any way I can setup the analog portion of the card to use this data? I need a way to overlap the channel IDs in the database so that I can say that channel x (say RTL) is available on either of my DVB-T tuners, or on the analog Hauppauge.

For the rest of the channels, I will need to get data from an external source. I've got NextView working from the German Kabel 1 feed, and get coverage for most of the rest. I assume I will need to somehow "merge" this data into the database so that I get EPG coverage for the rest of the channels. I assume I can automate NextView harvesting through command line, let it run for an hour or so at night, and then import in the morning into GBPVR somehow.

My question is thus -- can I configure GBPVR so that some of the channels on the tuner share the DVB EPG pool, and other channels are fed from XMLTV?

I have also sent a request to tvtv to see if they offer an EPG download service that I would have to subscribe to -- not much hope here, but it's worth a try.

[sub]

My question is thus -- can I configure GBPVR so that some of the channels on the tuner share the DVB EPG pool, and other channels are fed from XMLTV?

No, not really.

There is a utility called dvb2xmltv I posted here that can be used to extract the DVB EPG to an xmltv file, which can be configured as the source for both analog and digital capture devices, but I'm not sure if it works for DVB-T. I've only tested it with DVB-S.

[martint123]

Here in the UK, I get one large xmltv file and point my dvb-t, analogue RF and satellite STB to the same xmltv file and just use the tick boxes to show which channels are available on which tuner. Now how you get a bit xmltv file with them all in - sorry can't help you with that one.

[daneo]

Dear Sub & Martin,

I am warming up to the idea of using XMLTV from the Kabel 1 Nextview feed to solve my problems. I think that one channel is missing "ZDF Infokanal" but it's pretty much not a big problem.

Now for the tricky part -- how do I configure everything? Being new to analog, I've complete the channel scan and mapped one or two, but not all of them. From what I can tell, GBPVR stores these channel mappings in the database and not the XP registry.

However the freq2xml and freq2reg utilites are designed to push data into the XP registry for use by Microsoft's MCE -- will GBPVR also use the registry designations and tuning instructions?

Or do I import the XMLTV file from Kabel 1 and manually correct the tuning channel numbers in the GBPVR config?

Is the procedure similar for forcing DVB-T to use XMLTV? The DVB EPG is insanely simple to use (great for dummies like me) but converging it all on XMLTV seems to be a bit tricky -- if you don't get it right the first time it could be a mess.

[martint123]

For analogue, I imported the large EPG and manally set the channel/frequency information and the tick boxes of which channels existed on analogue.
I did the same for the satellite channels from the STB, but here put the STB channel code in.
For dvb-t, I used the mapping method where the xmltv channel name may be slghtly different to the broadcast name.

It gets a little messy as there are many channels for each source that may not be available and they need unticking - but once it is done the EPG updates work well and need no further tweaking.

Martin