epg guide for ATSC ota, no internet?

[sub]

i think ATSC EPG inclusion should be re-evaluated, especially in the coming months: after the analog shutoff and the power increases to ATSC transmitters, there may be more demand for this. For those who don't have the two week schedules that I do, they should contact their broadcasters and ask for longer and better EPG data.

Sorry, but at this stage its definitely not worth doing. The ATSC epg is optional on digital cable, and near zero percent of cable operators provide it. The leaves over the air ATSC, and unfortunately most of those only provde a few hours of listing, which is next to useless for a PVR where its scheduling season recordings etc.

If that situation changes in future and it becomes a lot more common to get several days of listings, then I look into that decision again.

[majortom999]

"Poor man's ATSC EPG import"

Sorry, but at this stage its definitely not worth doing. The ATSC epg is optional on digital cable, and near zero percent of cable operators provide it. The leaves over the air ATSC, and unfortunately most of those only provde a few hours of listing, which is next to useless for a PVR where its scheduling season recordings etc.

If that situation changes in future and it becomes a lot more common to get several days of listings, then I look into that decision again.

Saw this post while googlin for the same issue. Figured I would share what I came up with just playin around, using TsReader, to export
the individual xmltv files, append them to one, then manually
using a text editor, like Notepad++ (which has some fairly useful xml plugins)
to strip out the excess headers, etc to make it compatible to import in to
gb-pvr...
Cheezy and a little tedious, but works for me.
Depending on the amount of ETT/EIT Pid's in your local station's streams, ya might get a couple days out of it...
e.g. - one station here (an NBC Affilliate) only streams like 12 hours, but others stream up to 10 days (a CBS affiliate). In addition I've found a canadian station which streams nearly two weeks worth of epg...

Need to have a working install of TsReader available for this to work.

a.) edit for your local station callsigns, frequencies, to match your gb-pvr config, etc.
b.) save it as xmltv.bat in your TsReader Directory
c.) run in a dos command shell
d.) edit the TsReader output/ format the appended epg.xml
so it's compatible with the xmltv import of gbpvr, i.e eliminate all the excess
tags, etc..


Hope it's useful to someone...

mt

ps - strictly using this with OTA here...

There is more info avail in TsReader docs to explain the cmd line syntax,
used below, but a few key notes...

-y 30 delay 30 seconds before exporting
-y 120 delay 120 seconds before exporting (for stations with longer timeframe epg)

014
021
etc
those are ur physical freqs for each station. pretty straight forward

xmltv.bat

Code:

del epg.xml

tsreader -y 30 -X station1.xml -D 014
tsreader -y 30 -X station2.xml -D 021
tsreader -y 30 -X station3.xml -D 027
tsreader -y 120 -X station4.xml -D 032
tsreader -y 30 -X station5.xml -D 035
tsreader -y 30 -X station6.xml -D 038
tsreader -y 120 -X station7.xml -D 039
tsreader -y 30 -X station8.xml -D 042
tsreader -y 30 -X station9.xml -D 051

copy *.xml epg.xml

[majortom999]

Took the above a lil further using perl...created a couple perl scripts to:

a.) connect to tsreader's control server via localhost / Telnet,
tune, wait for tsreader's parse to complete, export the ett/eit info to
xmltv format. Cycles thru each OTA station one by one until a seperate
xmltv export is complete for each station. (eliminates the dos batch file
nonsense).

b.) 2nd perl script just parses each previously dumped .xml file serially to
combine them in to a single .xml file suitable for import in to gb-pvr (and other
HT apps I suppose).

Set both these scripts to run in windows scheduler automatically,
so an updated OTA epg is always available. GB-PVR should update automatically
on it's own schedule, once pointed to the location of the updated epg.xml file
in CONFIG.

If anyone is interested, lemme know, and I'll post the perl scripts in this thread or sumthin...

mt

ps - locally, 3 stations are only providing 12 hrs of epg OTA.
Another 6 are at least 3 days.
And saw one which provides 2 weeks.

[re-Barr]

I would be interested in those scripts.

Most of the stations in my market have multiple channels and cable does not carry the extra channels (I haven't found them in the listings to be able to download the epg.) so I would like to be able to get the additional epg data for those channels.

[majortom999]

Here u go. Keep in mind I'm certainly not a programmer at all...
A lot of googlin around to put it together....but it works.

Manually edit the Channels in the TUNE command, "channel1.xml", etc in each script to match
the Frequencies / callsigns of your local stations.

[whurlston]

Keep in mind that the control server and xmltv export functions are only available with TSReader Standard ($99) and Professional ($399). The free Lite version does not support those features.

[mvallevand]

My personal experience with the local OTA ATSC guide in TSReader is that the info is pretty much for the current evening with limited descriptions which makes this pretty useless as EPG data.

Martin

[majortom999]

ya, mileage varies for sure, all depends what ur local stations carry in their stream....
still better than nothing, better than paying money for a schedulesdirect or similar service,
for me at least. All I really wanted it do to was keep it up to date without me doing it manually.
Does that much.
Around here, I find 3 stations only cover "today".
While the rest, like 6 stations, cover around 3 days or more.

Full version of TSReader can be found, with a little searchin...

[whurlston]

Around here, I find 3 stations only cover "today".
While the rest, like 6 stations, cover around 3 days or more.

You are very lucky and in the minority. Most only cover 4-6 hours and that is OTA only. Cable usually has no EPG at all.

[majortom999]

You are very lucky and in the minority. Most only cover 4-6 hours and that is OTA only. Cable usually has no EPG at all.

Actually I read someplace, in the states the FCC requires a minimum of 8 hrs be broadcast OTA.
And most broadcasters seem to broadcast more.
What I have noticed though is that some of the end user devices, ie televisions
and/or convertor boxes may or may not support support that much.

In fact one convertor box I've seen only does a NOW & NEXT type guide.
So, the FCC must not be holding the manufacturers up to the same standards
as the broadcasters for some reason (like that makes a whole lot of sense).
Guessing, the MFRs probably whined enough as it was when they were required
to include an OTA ATSC tuner in every set few years ago prior to transition.

I've also seen a case where a station's PSIP generator epg feed suddenly appeared
to stop for a couple days. Sent a simple email to the attention of their engineering dept.
to give them a heads up. They were appreciative and had it fixed the next day.

So, if for some reason u notice hardly any epg in ur local OTA signal, it doesn't hurt to ask them
if it can be improved. Every station has a website, and almost all have some sort of "Contact Us"
type of link buried in the website.