Ability to group channels

[Kevl]

Hi

Using the "you can never have enough tuner cards approach" one very quickly has to deal with the consequence of so many TV channels.

I have a DVBT card, DVB-S card and a dual composite input MCE500 card connected through an AV amplifier to a skybox, digital terrestrial box and further satellite box. Also have a motorised satellite dish which can see satellites all over europe and this gives me access to literally thousands of channels.

In GBPVR setting this up (using girder to control the dish) is possible but the GBPVR TV guide is troublesome in that it simply puts all the channels in a single long list.

Even without said multisatlleite system the problem would still exist (to a lesser degree).

It would be ideal if TV channels could be grouped into types like e.g. news, films, music etc.

I realise this would have to be a manual process since the xml data handling etc would be non algorithmic, but it ought to be fairly straightforward to implement.

Channels could be tagged (manually) as news, sport etc and then buttons would filter the TV channel list accordingly. Similarly a type could be defined such as favorites and this list could then be revealed at will.

Such a sytem might be easy to implement and there might even be space for a row of buttons at the top of the EPG screen.

Might be worth considering at least.

Kev

[sub]

I think you can already do something like this with the XGuide plugin.

[Kevl]

Many thanks.

Will have a look at it.

Kev

[Kevl]

Hi Sub,

Tried Xrecord/xguide etc. Very fine add-on. Does (as you say) allow multiple sub-guides.

Very difficult to set-up though. Given a list of 2000 channels (say) and no filter by card etc options it is very difficult to work out which channel to put into each group. Also channel list in GBPVR is no help. It filters (reasonably) by channel number so if I change channel numbers of channles on DVB-T card to 1001, 1002 etc then I get them grouped in a reasonably sensible order in GBPVR guide. But the Xguide just sorts all channels alphabetically and does not display any channel number so it is very hard to work out (maybe even impossible to work out) which channel to put where.

GBPVR and Xguide both use (apparently) standard spreadsheet/database type data grids. Adding a few extra columns to channel lists in both would simplify the setup process enormously and although I havent looked at the database I would expect the needed info is easily extractable.

Pls consider adding a column called "Card name" - or "capture source" etc. to the channel list in GBPVR and allow channel sorting by any column.


Kev