DVB/S Over The Air EPG Update Speed & Issues

[imilne]

Yeah, that would be nice, although with these changes coming it sounds like it would be a waste of your time doing anything until the dust settles.

I just hope an option remains to be able to do such a quick scan in the future...

Iain

[sub]

Yeah, that would be nice, although with these changes coming it sounds like it would be a waste of your time doing anything until the dust settles

I'd definitely make the frequency configurable. That's not a problem.

The only thing that has stopped me doing something like this is in the past is that NextPVR doesn't know these channels are FreeSat channels. I'd need to come up with some rules to determine it's Freesat, ie whether it's an assumption based on the type being 'DVB-S' and having channels called 'BBC1' and 'ITV' in the channel list, or whether I try to look at the TSID (and hope they don't change), or whether I try to parse the provider name from the stream when I look at the first stream. Anyone thoughts? Ultimately I'd probably make some configurable rules in an xml file, providing the frequency to use etc. I'd want to find some rules that aren't going to need changing lots.

[johnsonx42]

as an interim, simple to implemet solution, how about just a config.xml setting <DVBEPGFrequency>Auto</DVBEPGFrequency>; the user can set a specific frequency to be scanned in place of "Auto".

[sub]

as an interim, simple to implemet solution, how about just a config.xml setting <DVBEPGFrequency>Auto</DVBEPGFrequency>; the user can set a specific frequency to be scanned in place of "Auto".

Yeah, I could do something like that as a first step.

DVB-S is pretty complicated though. Here in NZ a lot of people get a mixture of FreeView + a small number of Australian channels. These are like two different pools of EPG info. I imagine the UK is pretty similar - there is a lot of satellite channels over that part of the world, so I imagine a lot of users have FreeSat + some other European channels, with different EPG source. ie, FreeSat channels can provide EPG from one frequency, all others requiring generic DVB scan of each frequency.

[johnsonx42]

hehe, it's always much more complicated for the guy who actually has to implement it and deal with the complaints if it doesn't fix all problems for every user.

[imilne]

We can mix and match DVB-S with DVB-T too to further complicate matters

Iain

[sub]

We can mix and match DVB-S with DVB-T too to further complicate matters

That's not a biggy in this case - I'd probably only apply the logic to DVB-S channels. The main complication is determining which channels are FreeSat channels.

[imilne]

I'll see what I can dig out that might help over the weekend. There's an awful lot of debug output you can get from DVBGuide related to the broadcasts.

Iain

[JesusOnEez]

I see this thread has developed into something larger and way over my head! Anyhoo, back to the problem I was having. I said I was going to add FilmOn.TV back into my channel list, and run an update of the EPG to try and recreate the problem. Just to be safe, I removed all logs, and restarted NextPVR from fresh (rebooted machine...it's in startup). As it turns out, I DID have FilmOn.TV in the channel list...hmmmm. Started the scan and as is typical in this kind of siutation, it ran the scan, completed in about 45 minutes, and I had pretty much 90% full EPG across all channels (usual stuff like the BBCs, ITVs, Channel 4/5 stuff and some others.

So, no log that's going to help.

What I am going to do though (as I still had to restart the recording service this morning to watch telly via XBMC) is try the XML EPG route via this DVBGuide thing, and see if that helps stability, as I'm sure it's the 2:00am channel scan that's causing 'a problem' that requires the recording service restarted to get back to watching live telly. Hopefully I can get that going over today, and I'll know whether it worked tomorrow if I can get straight onto live TV without having to do anything.

I'll let you know.

Now...DVBGuide...

[Lao Pan]

OP

What does that actually mean? Reading all this makes it sound like it's impossible to get the full FreeSat EPG data from 28.2...is this the case? If I add FilmOn as a channel, will it simply give me the FilmOn EPG or the EPG for everything on FreeSat.

Am newbie.

As Iain says you can get the whole epg in 30 seconds if you point dvbguide at the correct frequency.
You run the program from a batch file called epgupdate.bat which calls the following

Code:

DVBGuide —as —cll427830 —ph —mQPSK —s275000O0 —y3002 —z3003 —o fsat.xml

That is roughly how it works - if you want to go ahead with this someone here will help with the batch file I am sure.

Sub

From what I have investigated the only thing that tells you about which channels are Freesat - is the proprietary Freesat box.

When you switch it on for the first time it asks for your Post Code and then consults the home frequency for a database of what channels you should be watching (Regional info - I hope) and then populates the epg accordingly.
The channels themselves actually could also be on the sky epg, using the same transponders. I don't think they flag up that they are Freesat.

Perhaps having Freesat epg as a choice in the same places as where you choose DVB-EPG, XMLTV, SchedulesDirect, etc. - would be the best way to do it. You could then assign non freesat channels their epg info from other sources, which would be one up on the Standalone boxes - they can only switch between Freesat / NonFreesat modes.