Repeat episodes not recognised in UK using OTA EPG

[silverblade]

Hi

I'm in the UK and new to NextPVR (and XMLTV stuff generally) and finding in general that it works great on My Windows 7 PC with my ClimaxDigital USB DVBT stick.

However when I use Record Season (new episodes on this channel) I get repeat episodes recorded as well - an example would be the Dragon's Den programme on BBC2 which shows on Sundays and is then repeated on Mondays (on the same channel). The series itself is not a repeat but the Monday show is.

When I look in the NextPVR EPG there is nothing to indicate that the Monday show is a repeat. I tried with other software (eg arcsoft totalmedia that came with the tuner) and that looks the same too. However my 10 year old Sony HD recorder does handle this correctly so I assume that somewhere in the EPG info that is broadcast in my area for this show there is something to denote it is a repeat. Am I correct in assuming all devices/tuners would use the same EPG data or could my HD recorder be getting it over the air from somewhere else?

I took a peek inside the npvr.db3 database using sqlite_export_cmd and exported the epg_event table into a libreoffice spreadsheet and saw that the "first_run" field is actually set to Y for absolutely every programme on every channel and that the "original_air_date" is 0001-01-01 for everything, so I guess from that there is no way these duplicates can be prevented (and so many series do repeat shows in the same week these days).

I did try searching first but didn't find anything to specificall address this.

cheers
SB

[sub]

This information isn't included in standard DVB EPG broadcasts so NextPVR can't tell one airing of a show is any different to any other airing.

Your set top box maybe getting this from the UK proprietary MHEG EPG data.

[silverblade]

Wow that was quick. OK, thanks for that, I guess it's a limitation I need to live with then rather than somethinbg I did wrong. I'll do some research into alternative EPG sources then such as XML feeds. Thanks again.

[BrettB]

Wow that was quick. OK, thanks for that, I guess it's a limitation I need to live with then rather than somethinbg I did wrong. I'll do some research into alternative EPG sources then such as XML feeds. Thanks again.

I would strongly suggest that you check out Schedules Direct. In the past they only provided data for the US (or North America?), but they have been adding many other countries in the past few months. The support for Schedules Direct is built-in with NextPVR, they provide great quality data (including unique episode IDs to prevent duplicates, new episode indicators, etc.), and they are extremely responsive to fixing any problems with missing channels, etc. Schedules Direct is not free, but is quite inexpensive and MANY NextPVR users consider the low cost quite worth the value.

[rkulagow]

Schedules Direct did start as a US / Canada entity, but as our upstream has added new regions, we've made them available through our JSON service. Since areas outside of the US/Canada are still fairly new, we offer 90-day trials (as opposed to 7-day in North America, because we strongly feel that our data is in the 99% accurate range in NA) If you send me your postal code (to mailto:rkulagow@gmail.com) and provider then I can send what we have, and you can determine if our data is better than what you're getting.

If lineups are incorrect then you open a ticket with us on our website, and we go through our B2B procedures (since we're licensed to provide data directly to users, as opposed to applications that scrape from websites - we have dedicated contacts within Gracenote) and escalate. If Gracenote and the provider are able to come to an agreement about whether the data is correct, then things get changed. If Gracenote and the provider can't come to an arrangement, where the provider sends lineup or schedule updates, then there's not much that we (Schedules Direct) can do. I know that there are gaps in the data, but I believe that most users of the service are getting value from the data that we're providing. There are users in the U.S. that have "bad" data, but that's mostly if the provider is unresponsive to Gracenote's staff when they call or email and try to confirm changes. Gracenote assumes that the provider knows what they're broadcasting, so if you open a ticket with us that a station is incorrect, and we verify and escalate to Gracenote, and then the provider says, "No, that's wrong, we're right" the assumption is that the provider is right. Sometimes what's being broadcast as a digital subchannel is wrong, but if the station insists that they're right, there's little recourse. It often comes down to taking pictures of an EPG to make someone realize that something at the transmitter was setup incorrectly.

One of the most important advantages we bring is the schema that's exposed to clients. I've been reading about all the various "EIT fixups" that MythTV users are constantly encountering, like "New:" being added to the program title or subtitle. That doesn't happen with Schedules Direct because there are separate metadata fields to encode that information. A title is a title, and an episode title is just that.

[Graham]

However when I use Record Season (new episodes on this channel) I get repeat episodes recorded as well -

The "new" episodes relies on a field in the database that may not be populated by your EPG source. In Settings --> Recordings you can tick on "Avoid duplicate recordings where possible" ... http://www.nextpvr.com/nwiki/pmwiki.php?....Recording

Set NextPVR to record "All" episodes (not "all new") and it will record all shows except those that it knows are duplicates based on, for example, the series and episode numbers.

This works well for me using Birtles xmltvgui grabber to obtain EPG data.

[jcjefferies]

In UK Freeview & Freesat broadcast "Unique Programme ID" and "Series ID" which PVRs use to Avoid duplicate Recordings and record a programme series. NextPVR dosnt use the Series ID to detect programmes in a series but relies on the title in the EPG. NextPVR can use the "Unique Programme ID" transmitted but is not able to extract the data from the broadcast data. I use EPG Collector to extract the EPG data into an XML file which NextPVR can read. Included in the file for each programme is a field called "episode-num" which contains the "Series_ID and "Programme_ID" used by PVRs. As NextPVR does not understand the "Series_ID" I process the XML file to remove it from the file before importing it.

I have used this for about three years and it works well. The only other method I know of is to use XMLTV GUIthe Radio Times EPG data.

Chris

[silverblade]

Hi thanks have sent you an email.

[silverblade]

The "new" episodes relies on a field in the database that may not be populated by your EPG source. In Settings --> Recordings you can tick on "Avoid duplicate recordings where possible" ... http://www.nextpvr.com/nwiki/pmwiki.php?....Recording

Set NextPVR to record "All" episodes (not "all new") and it will record all shows except those that it knows are duplicates based on, for example, the series and episode numbers.

This works well for me using Birtles xmltvgui grabber to obtain EPG data.

thanks for that. I do have "Avoid duplicate recordings where possible" but will try the other suggestions as I think it may fix a lot of the duplicate scenarios (probably not the Dragons Den example as they don't seem to use episode numbers and that series finishes today anyway).

[silverblade]

I would strongly suggest that you check out Schedules Direct. In the past they only provided data for the US (or North America?), but they have been adding many other countries in the past few months. The support for Schedules Direct is built-in with NextPVR, they provide great quality data (including unique episode IDs to prevent duplicates, new episode indicators, etc.), and they are extremely responsive to fixing any problems with missing channels, etc. Schedules Direct is not free, but is quite inexpensive and MANY NextPVR users consider the low cost quite worth the value.

thanks!